- 388 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be.
Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.
Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.
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Yes, you can access Tantra by Hugh B. Urban in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Comparative Religion. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Diagnosing the “Disease” of Tantra
- 1. The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kālī: Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance
- 2. Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess: Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India
- 3. India’s Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination
- 4. Deodorized Tantra: Sex, Scandal, Secrecy, and Censorship in the Works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda
- 5. Religion for the Age of Darkness: Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century
- 6. The Cult of Ecstasy: Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra
- Conclusion: Reimagining Tantra in Contemporary Discourse
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index