Perhaps the greatest distortions occur in the takeover of Tantra, which has become an Orientalist wet dream. The belief that the Tantras are in any way hedonistic or even pornographic, though a belief shared by many Hindus as well as by some Euro-Americans, is not justified; the Upanishads and Puranas – not to mention the Kamasutra – have far more respect for pleasure of all kinds, including sexual pleasure, than do the Tantras.



The ceremonial circumstances under which the Tantric sexual ritual took place make it the furthest thing imaginable from the exotic roll in the hay that it is so often, and so simplistically, assumed to be. Yet many people call the Kamasutra, or even The Joy of Sex, Tantric. Some (American) Tantric scholars feel that, like Brahmins, they will be polluted by the Dalit types who sensationalise Hinduism, and so, in order to make a sharp distinction between the two castes of Americans who write about Hindus, they censure the sensationalisers even more severely than the revisionist Hindus do.



Some have excoriated others who have “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of New Age ‘Tantric sex,’” who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition,” creating a “funhouse mirror world of modern-day Tantra” that is to Indian Tantra what finger-painting is to art.



Does it make it any better, or even worse, that this sort of Tantra is often marketed by Indian practitioners and gurus?



For many Indian gurus take their ideas from American scholars of Tantra and sell them to American disciples who thirst for initiation into the mysteries of the East. Here is what might be termed an inverted pizza effect, in which native categories are distorted by nonnative perceptions of them (as pizza, once merely a Neapolitan specialty, became popular throughout Italy in response to the American passion for pizza). The American misappropriation of Indian Tantra (and, to a lesser extent, yoga) has been reappropriated by India, adding insult to injury.



In an earlier age, the native sanitising tendency was exacerbated by the superimposition of a distorted European image of Tantra – namely, “the sensationalist productions of Christian missionaries and colonial administrators, who portrayed Tantra as little more than a congeries of sexual perversions and abominations.” In their attempts to defend Tantra from this sort of Orientalist attack, early-twentieth-century Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Hindu and non-Hindu, emphasised the metaphorical level of Tantra, which then became dominant both in Hindu self-perception and in the European appreciation of Tantra. This school was made famous, indeed notorious, by Arthur Avalon, aka Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936) and, later, by Agehananda Bharati, aka Leopold Fischer (1923–1991).



Today, too, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the literal level of Tantra (actually drinking the substances) never existed, that Tantra has always been a meditation technique.



Indeed we can take the repercussions back several generations and argue that the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition since the nineteenth century and prevails in India today began in eleventh century Kashmir, when a major dichotomy took place between the ritual and mythological aspects of Tantra.



For Abhinavagupta’s version of Tantra was pitched at a leisured Kashmiri class “arguably homologous to the demographics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century New Age seekers.” Moreover, the “no sex, we’re meditating” right-hand brand of Tantra that first caught the European eye turned upside down to become the new left-hand brand of Tantra: “No meditating, we’re having Tantric sex.” As this movement is centered in California (into which, as Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, everything on earth that is not nailed down eventually slides), we might call it the Californication of Tantra.



Thus a major conflict between Hindu and non-Hindu constructions of Hinduism in America operates along the very same fault line that has characterised the major tension within Hinduism for two and a half millennia: worldly versus non-worldly religion, reduced to Tantra versus Vedanta.



Excerpted with permission from The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger, Speaking Tiger Books.



