Yoga, Bhoga and Ardhanariswara

Individuality, Wellbeing and Gender in Tantra

Prem Saran

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815380214
• eBook ISBN: 9781351333764
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a social–scientific interpretation of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Tantra dating back 15 centuries. It is a self-reflexive study approached with an insider's empathy and the perspective of an Indologist, anthropologist, mystic and practitioner of the cult.

The work includes a discussion of non-modern Indic themes: mandala as a trope and its manifestations in South Asian regions such as Nepal; yoga and Indic individuality; the concept of bhoga; disciplined wellbeing; gender; and Indic axiology. Using personal praxis to inform his research, the author examines three core themes within Tantra — a 'holonic'/ mandalic individuality that conduces to mystical experience; a positive valorisation of pleasure and play; and cultural attitudes of gender-mutuality and complementarity, as neatly encapsulated in the icon of Shiva as Ardhanariswara. This analysis, as captured by the Tantric mandalas of deities in intimate union, leads to his compelling metathesis that Tantra serves as a permanent counterculture within the Indic civilization.

This second edition, with a new Afterword, will greatly interest those in anthropology, South Asian studies, religious studies, gender studies, psychology and philosophy, as also the general reader.

1
Introduction: Three Non-modern Indic Themes

The Anthropologist and Her Audience

There are at least five ways in which I can write this ethnography of the Tantric traditions of Nepal, in the mid-1990s. In the first scenario, imagine that I am doing a Ph.D. at the University of Delhi and my committee consists of Professors Veena Das, T.N. Madan and B.N. Saraswati—all well-known Indian anthropologists with an impressive command over the literary template of the Indic civilisation.

In the second case, I am writing this as a book to be published by the reputed Indian publisher ‘X’, who had examined the manuscript of my first book (Saran 1994) for possible publication, but had to decline it because it was not based on field research. (It was actually a modified and expanded version of my M.A. thesis at the Department of South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania.)

In both these cases, I would not have to bother about any possible ‘Orientalist’ (Said 1978) biases in my audience; I would not have to worry about having to penetrate, say, the Judaeo–Christian and Eurocentric axioms of a Western audience. I would also be able to take for granted many cultural presuppositions that I shared with my audience.

In the third instance, I am writing this dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where I had, in fact been admitted to the Ph.D. programme at the Department of Anthropology in 1987, after completing my two-year M.A. there. (I had had to return to my job in the Government of India then, and so could not continue my Ph.D. there.) Penn has one of the best Departments of Indian/South Asian Studies in the Western world and my Ph.D. Committee would probably have included an Indologist, besides two anthropologists with a South Asia specialisation—Indian or Western. Thus, though they would still have some unavoidable ethnocentric or Occidental biases, these would be strongly offset by the depth of their philological and related knowledge.

The fourth scenario would involve considerable imaginative virtuosity on my part—being culturally rather alien from my experience: in it I would be a Euro-American anthropologist studying Nepalese Tantra. In the first egregious version, I am a brash young male of around 30 years of age, intellectually unencumbered by my minimal linguistic, religio-philosophical and other grounding in the Nepalese/South Asian culture/civilisation (Obeyesekere 1990). On my return home, I would present my anthropological reportage in the confident Eurocentric mode of what the feminist anthropologist Trinh T. Minh-ha calls the ‘conversation of “us” with “us” about “them”’ (Mohanty et al. 1991). In the second, anthropologically more fecund version, I am a more mellow person, around 50 years old; I have made three or four return visits to Nepal/South Asia and have interacted intensely with native anthropologists there and in the West, and have thus had some of my natural ethno-centrism and hubris abraded from me. I have also acquired some of that existential insight into the universal human condition that comes with age and the consequent recognition of one’s intellectual and other ‘human finitude’ (Linge in Gadamer, 1976).

My final situation is the one that I am actually in, writing for a committee of three Euro-American anthropologists with whom I am personally and intellectually comfortable, and of whom one is an Indianist. This present audience does, of course, share some of the inevitable biases that I have adumbrated above, but there is an experiential payoff for me here, including that of hopefully ridding myself of some of my ethnocentrism, (or Occidentalism), which is what anthropology ‘conversation of man with man’ is all about! For, after all, my M.A. at Penn and my Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) will avail me of precious little when I return to my career in the Indian civil service. My entire motivation in working for these two degrees, at considerable discomfort to my family and myself, has been the intellectual pleasure of learning about my native South Asian civilisation (and thus about myself) from the outside—warts, beauty spots and all.

Hermeneutics and South Asian Anthropology

The purpose of my quintiple juxtapositions above was to point out the interpretive complexities involved in the anthropological study of a culture that one is not native to. The problems become even more intractable when one is faced with a civilisation with a living, complex and sophisticated literate tradition, like the Chinese or the Indian. In cases like the latter, in addition to synchronic data (as in the study of the American Indian, which has provided the basic theoretical orientation of a lot of the anthropology done in the United States of America, one has also to manipulate a huge mass of diachronic, literary material that vitally affects the so-called ‘ethnographic present’.

Let us first consider the interpretive task of a native scholar studying a text from his own Western tradition, say Plato or Kant. The main problem here is what Gadamer (1978) has called the ‘hermeneutical situation’ of the interpreter—both he and the text that he is interpreting are ontologically finite, historical products of the living, ongoing Western tradition. What is therefore required is a ‘fusion of the horizons’ of the interpreter and his text, so that the tradition itself shines forth.

This hermeneutical task becomes infinitely more complicated when one is a Western anthropologist dealing with, for instance, the Hindu–Tantric tradition of Kashmira Shaivism. In that ethnographic situation, one needs not only a fusion, but also what Obeyesekere (1990) has aptly called an ‘expansion of horizons’. Fortunately, in these post-modernist times, we have a useful paradigm that can be used as a guideline to help us negotiate these hermeneutical shortcomings of both the outsider studying an alien culture and of the native studying her own: the ‘quadruple-text model’ (Bharati 1989).

In this strategy, the anthropologist concerned would manipulate four sets of texts. The first text would be say the tenth-century Tantraaloka of Abhinavagupta the great scholar of Kashmira Shaivism, and a practising Tantric. The second set would consist of commentaries on the first, both by native pandits and by translators into European languages. The third corpus comprises a study of the cult by anthropologists, for example T.N. Madan’s (1965) work on the Kashmiri Pandits. The study of all three sets of texts would include the analysis of the social and cultural situations and axioms of all the actors and authors concerned. The fourth and final text consists of the explicit statement by our anthropologist of her own axioms.

This model also helps to plug a serious loophole in the conventional emic–etic strategy—how does one bridge the cognitive gap between the emic viewpoint of the matrilineal Garo villager in northeastern India, and the so-called etic views of the modern intellectual-as-anthropologist? Is scholarly objectivity somehow magically ensured by his participation–observation endeavours in the field and his cogitations back home, i.e., merely by adopting an ‘attitude‘ (Linge 1978: p. xiv)? The matter is complicated enough when it is a patrifocal Indian Sikh or Brahman studying the religious practices of our Garos; when the ethnographer belongs to one of the Christian societies of the West, the issue becomes positively convoluted. For in the latter case, the monotheistic and misogynist presumptions of the Judaeo–Christian traditions of the Western world invidiously and willy-nilly enter the picture; this additional hermeneutical factor gets its force from the mere (or perhaps not-so-mere) fact of the anthropologist having been born and raised/enculturated in that Western society. In other words, this kind of ‘quadruple-text’ strategy allows one to dissect the presuppositions underlying all the relevant texts.

It also allows one to finally deal with the problem of Foucauldian discourse in anthropology, as it increasingly becomes an international discipline. This is the problem posed by what the feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty (1991) has characterised as the ‘hegemony of the Western scholarly establishment in the production and dissemination of texts’; which will be discussed further in this chapter.

Having thus pointed out the nature of the hermeneutic problematic vis-à-vis South Asia, let me use it as a convenient cue to make explicit my own anthropological axioms, as an initiated and practising Tantrika for the last 15 years. This is best done by a brief autobiographical excursus, which will help me carve out my own ethnographic niche and also serve the post-modernist hermeneutical purpose of announcing my reflexive, ‘dialogic voice’ (Bakhtin 1981).

To wit: since I am that rara avis, an anthropologist who is also a Tantrika and mystic (terms that I shall shortly rigorously define) and a native South Asian to boot, I shall follow the advice given to me by the Indologist, Professor Lee Siegel, in a letter dated 28 May 1990. When I had written to him at the University of Hawaii before joining UCSB, he had suggested that I should use my practical knowledge of the Tantric cult in my research. Quoting Paul Valery’s bons mots, Method is autobiography, he wrote, ‘an insider’s account … could contribute a good deal more to our understanding of tantric traditions than another textual, historical, or jargon-laden anthropological field study. [That would enable you to] understand it yourself and make it understandable to others, to explore its personal, psychological implications and meanings and the ways in which these meanings are amplified by and grounded in history and culture … [I believe] that scholarship is, first and foremost, a literary genre, and that literature begins when we begin to look at and comprehend ourselves’.

Overlooking Siegel’s characteristic American-academic style potshot at anthropology, I shall therefore use in this oeuvre my own personal interpretive vantage point as a Tantrika/mystic and native Indologist-cum-anthropologist for the exegesis of my ethnographic data. I shall employ this in conjunction with my considerable knowledge, linguistic and other, of the Western natives and their culture/civilisation—a knowledge much greater, be it said, than the Indological equipment of many Western anthropologists working in South Asia (Hsu 1973), and acquired both through my experience as a Westernised Indian, and my stay in the USA for about five years, over the last decade and over three visits. With this solidly bicultural scholarly equipment, I am in a position to critique much of the Western scholarship on South Asian culture and civilisation, particularly in the area of Tantra and mysticism. That is to say, I shall provide the ‘reflexive, dialogic’ voice (Clifford and Marcus 1986) of the South Asian intellectual interpreting his own secret/esoteric religious traditions. This will involve me in a hermeneutical dialogue both with my own South Asian cultural tradition (Gadamer 1978), as well as with the Western through an expansion of my horizons (Obeyesekere 1990).

Entrée for the Anthropologist as Tantrika

By birth and self-identification, I am a 43 year old member of the anthropologically storied matrifocal (in the recent past, matrineal) Nayar community of Kerala. This is a small, verdant south-western Indian state on the Arabian Sea, with large, centuries-old populations of Christians and Muslims living amicably with the majority Hindus.

Except for two years of my early college life, however, I have lived outside my native state, only making shorter or longer, near-annual visits to my grandparents, and later my parents after I went away to study engineering. I do read and write my native Malayalam and speak it with members of my extended family. Still, English is the language I know best, which is the case with many middle-class and upper-middle class people in major towns and cities, especially the Westernised elites who largely hold positions of power in contemporary India. I also happen to know Assamese (in which, along with English, I converse with my wife and seven-year-old daughter), Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, French (which I studied for four years in school), and Sanskrit. And I know a smattering of Tamil, Kannada and Bengali, which I could conceivably parlay into fluency.

The first 16 years of my life were spent in Bombay, which is the commercial hub of India. Of these, the first 10 were in a middle-class suburb, or ‘colony’ as we say in Indian English. Here, I spoke Hindi outside the home, and Malayalam with my parents and two younger sisters. When I was 10, my father was promoted as a senior engineer in the then American-owned (Esso) oil refinery in Bombay. We then shifted to the exclusive residential area for the senior executives of the company; it was only a few miles away from my earlier home, but it was a world away in another sense. English was the only language spoken there and I soon lost my fluency in Hindi, even though it was taught along with Marathi in my school. (It was only later that I again became fluent in Hindi, by conversing with Hindi-speakers and watching Hindi films).

A few of my playmates were American kids, the children of company employees. I began to learn to play new games like Cowboys and Indians. Every week, English movies were screened, mostly Hollywood cultural artifacts. Through these, I was also initiated into the vaunted American dream, Western-style romance and other desiderata of a civilised existence!

To cut to my school life: I went to kindergarten at a girls’ school run by Catholic nuns, most of whom were Indians. When I was six, I was enrolled in the adjoining boys’ school, also run by Catholic priests, of whom a few were European; I studied there until I matriculated at 16. It was a good school, and the good Fathers made no conscious attempt to indoctrinate their non-Christian wards; in fact, I have fond memories of the late Father McGrath, our jolly Irish principal, who taught us English in high school and encouraged my facility with that language.

Still, I could not help imbibing some core elements of the Judaeo–Christian weltanschaung, especially in its Western form as channelled in Whorf–Sapirian fashion through a European tongue such as English; South Asian modes of that religious ideology are linguistically (and hence) conceptually more Indic, for instance, in their conception of the godhead (Bharati 1981). I learnt about the shame of nudity, linked as it was with the irrevocable Fall of humanity; the iniquity of man’s Original Sin; the essential and fatal moral weakness of Eve; the Serpent and the dangers of unsupervised and thus illicit knowledge, sensual and other; the awful goodness of God and the incorrigible wickedness of Satan; the total ‘otherness’ of deity and of the sacred; the need to confess one’s transgressions and succumbed temptations to authority figures, as per the Lord’s Prayer. I also learned about Jesus and his Immaculate conception by an all-good Virgin; how He suffered the most painful torture to save us for our sins; how He resurrected in the flesh, and has promised us the same on the Day of Last Judgement, provided we are good; the need to believe and repent for our sins; the need to open ourselves to God’s grace, or face the torments of the damned in Hell….

I also did learn somewhat later in life about the more attractive portions of this fire-and brimstone religious ideology: Psalm 23, the Sermon on the Mount, the Songs of Solomon, Gregorian chants, and so on. But the overall impression is of a world view that, at least in its unalloyed Western incarnations, inculcates extremely radical social–psychological splits between: man and woman; man and deity; man and animal; man and nature; body and mind; sensual and spiritual experience; good and evil; sacred and profane; conscious and unconscious; Western and non-Western man; and so on. I shall elaborate on these themes in the next section, so I shall content myself here by referring in this context to the anthropologist Allan Coult’s aphoristic summation of this guilt-imbued mentalite: ‘You must feel bad in order to feel good’!

In due course, I did a Bachelor’s degree in engineering at Mangalore in south India; and my M.B.A. from one of the top management schools, in Calcutta. Since I did not like what I would now consider the positivistic and manipulative nature of these two disciplines, I appeared for the civil service examinations, motivated by a youthful sense of idealism and public service. I was selected for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), which is India’s elite civil service and whose members man the top posts in the government. During my two-year training period, I travelled by bus, car and train over many parts of the pluralistic and diverse culture that is India, with its varied languages, religions, racial types, regional cultures and cuisines. I stayed for brief periods in the rural and tribal areas of northern India, saw the sublime erotic sculpture of the medieval Khajuraho temples, visited the Himalayan foothills in Himachal Pradesh and lived for a year in the Himalayan hill-town of Mussoorie. It was a revelation to realise that the urban and metropolitan culture that I had been used to was only the tip of the iceberg of the multifaceted civilisational reality that is India.

To backtrack a bit, I had by then begun to read about the Indic civil-isation’s complex and sophisticated religio–philosophical traditions and its cultural fascination with the mystical experience, and during my college days, I had begun to smoke ganja (cannabis indica), which, of course, is ingested by sadhus, rural people and other non-modern (Nandy 1983) types in India. In fact, it is also ingested in liquid form (as bhang, a kind of spiced milk-shake) during Hindu religious festivals like Shivaratri, the spring festival of Holi, and also during weddings in many parts of northern India. In short, I was being re-culturated into a very different, non-Western and non-modern world-view, and a totally different self- and body-image from what I had been used to, as an uptight, upper-middle class Westernised Indian. I was being enculturated into the traditional Indic orientation towards the self and the world.

While in Calcutta, I also learnt the neo-Hindu technique called Transcendental Meditation (a pleonastic Indian-English term), which uses a mantra (i.e., a set of syllables or sounds) that is to be repeated in the mind. This new experimentation, using as it did a sensory/physiological device (sounds) to affect the body, was of a piece with my earlier body–mind experiences with cannabis. That is, in fact, why sadhus and other religiously engaged people (including the Sufis) in South Asia use the latter: it putatively enables meditative (or alternatively, psychedelic, i.e., mind-manifesting) experience. This is not to say, of course, that a mystic needs this kind of chemical enabler— only a mere handful of my own countless mystical experiences have been as a result of using ganja—but it does indicate the close connections between these two types of experience (Weil 1980); its use in South Asia is also a commentary on the relative cultural attitudes towards this relaxant, and thus, towards the human body–mind system, in the Judaeo–Christian West and in non-modern India.

To describe my first mystical experience: shortly after completing my M.B.A., I was staying in Bangalore, to prepare for my IAS interview. I had begun to read J. Krishnamurti, the contemporary Indian mystic who lectured worldwide in a modern mode of the classical Vedantic philosophy. I also did some yoga exercises every morning, which I topped off with meditation. One particular morning, I was meditating on the lines suggested by reading Krishnamurti’s work. All of a sudden I had the stunning revelatory insight that my empirical ego was only the icing on the cake of my personal identity, so to speak. In other words, I had a mystical experience, which may be now defined in rigorous anthropological terms as the intuitive experience of the numerical oneness of the self with the ground of being (Bharati 1976). In this type of experience, the empirical self is totally abrogated for the duration: there was no entity named Prem Saran around, there was just the experience of union. Since then, I have had the experience countless times. This is not to be wondered at, given its salience in the Indic mindset, as well as its Indic interpretation in philosophically minimalist (intellectually sophisticated) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Three Non-modern Indic Themes
• Chapter 2 The Kathmandu Valley: The Mandala as Indic Trope
• Chapter 3 Yoga and Indic Individuality
• Chapter 4 Bhoga and Disciplined Eudaemonism
• Chapter 5 Ardhanariswara and Indic Gender
• Chapter 6 Tantra as Counter-culture: The Core Axiology of Indic Culture
• Afterword to the Second Edition: The Aesthetics of Tantra and the Re-enchantment of the World
• Bibliography
• Index