profound ambivalence [about] the goddess’ blood and the power that it embodies, a power that is tied to impurity and to the dangerous potency of sexual fluids … The goddess’ menstrual blood is the very essence of this contaminating, chaotic but creative force [from which the world emerges].9
Some Tantrics sought extreme versions of this antinomian contact with the impure—the Kapalikas carried skulls as begging bowls, smeared themselves with the ashes from cremation grounds, offered blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids to their deities and consumed them as well; they were reputed to practice human sacrifice and ritual ingestion of human flesh. The discipline of the Kapalikas was intended to induce a purposeful derangement from all prescribed norms and notions of otherness and distinction; the Kapalika saw all creation as one.
Members of the orthodox mainstream were fascinated and horrified by such practitioners. Kapalikas were reputed to have fearsome magical powers, and they show up as sinister villains in many narratives. Tantrics of various hues also are depicted as dissemblers and charlatans. In a play by Rajashekhara, a late-ninth-century poet and critic, a Tantric gleefully proclaims:
I don’t know mantra from tantra,
Nor meditation or anything about a teacher’s grace.
Instead, I drink cheap booze and enjoy some woman.
But I sure am going on to liberation, since I got the [Tantric]
Kula path.
What’s more,
I took some horny slut and consecrated her my “holy wife.”
Sucking up booze and wolfing down red meat,
My “holy alms” are whatever I like to eat,
My bed is but a piece of human skin.
Say, who wouldn’t declare this Kaula Religion
Just about the most fun you can have?10
But there were also Tantric traditions more attractive to the householder, the person living within society. Abhinavagupta was the most famous and influential member of one such lineage, the Trika branch of a collection of philosophical doctrines and theologies that are sometimes referred to as “Kashmir Shaivism.” In his magnum opus Tantraloka (Light of the Tantras), Abhinavagupta provides a widespread survey and synthesis of all these strands, and an exposition of how all these traditions are subsumed into the “most excellent” form of Shaivism, the Trika (“Triad,” for the many triples in its cosmology, including its trio of iconic shaktis representing the transcendent; the transcendent within the material; and the material).11 In the Tantraloka and later works, Abhinavagupta marries the mystical rituals and esoteric sexual practices of an existing left-handed tradition, the Kaula (from kula, group or family), to the sophisticated metaphysical speculations of Pratyabhijna, “The Doctrine of Recognition.”
According to the Pratyabhijna philosophers, the absolute origin of all that exists, the anuttara—that beyond which there is nothing—is a singular infinite, primordial, undivided consciousness, Chiti, which exists before time and space. The first step or spanda—vibration—toward the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is the foregrounding of the prakasha of this consciousness, of its self-illumining fullness. The next state is a negation of this fullness, a void that is vimarsha, self-referential awareness, consciousness as energy. The spanda or vibration between prakasha and vimarsha, the throb of kama between fullness and void, between 1 and 0, overflows as a completely free, blissful creative energy, ananda shakti. This creative dynamism, which is totally free (svatantrya), sets in motion a complex series of further developments which result in the projections of subject and object, materiality, individuality—in other words, all that we know and experience. “Through her own will power, Citi unfolds the universe on a portion of herself.”12
So the entire universe is within Chiti, and is an abhasa—usually translated as “appearance,” but I think better understood here as something like “simulation.” We are inside a giant Holodeck of Consciousness, and what we think of as our own subjectivity is a wilfully contracted portion of Chiti herself. This does not mean we are “unreal,” or that the phenomenal world is somehow illusory or false; within the simulation, the laws of physics are very real and absolute. That brick over there does really exist outside of me, and if you throw it at my head, I will bleed, and my pain will be as real as the brick and you. The universe and you and I and the brick are all epistemically real. But what has been veiled from my mundane consciousness is that the brick, you, myself, and my qualia are all Chiti herself; my experience of my own subjectivity, my vimarsha, is a contraction of Chiti’s principle of self-reflexivity, her dynamic Shakti-tattva or idam, which “gives rise to self-awareness, will, knowledge, and action.”13 Pratyabhijna is therefore sometimes understood as a supreme monism that subsumes dualism; it is a “Transcendental Realism” that does not deny at all the reality of multiplicity, but locates under that multiplicity a substrate of Chiti, consciousness.
So, why does transcendent Chiti blossom into immanent reality? Because, as Harsha Dehejia puts it, “vimarśa acts spontaneously and with freedom, it possesses not an act of will but play, not the expression of a lack, but the display of fullness, its action termed kriyā or spanda or svāntantrya, meaning spontaneous and free action rather than karma or volitional action.”14 All creation is krida, the spontaneous play of delight, a game. For pleasure, Chiti hides herself and reveals herself.
One of the ways in which we know Chiti every day is in our recognition of the reality of other people’s individual subjectivities. Because we are aware of our own freedom (svatantrya) as subjects, because we are aware of our own self-awareness, we make a guess (uha) about the freedom inherent in other subjects, outside of one’s own individuality.15 And this theory of mind, this “awareness of the others’ existence is already a partial recognition of the universal Self.” The reality of Chiti also accounts for intersubjectivity: “If several subjects appear to share a single object of perception,” Isabelle Ratié explains,
it is not because this object would have an independent existence outside of consciousness, as the externalists contend; nor is it because of a perpetual accidental correspondence between various particular illusions belonging to each cognitive series, as [the Buddhist] Dharmakīrti explains … rather, it is due to the absolute freedom of the single infinite consciousness, which is able both to present itself as scattered into a multiplicity of limited subjects, and to manifest its fundamental unity in these various subjects by making them one with respect to one particular object.16
The task of the seeker after truth, then, is merely one of recognition: recognition of the nature of the limited self and of that universal self, and recognition that the individual self is Chiti, the macrocosm. You already know you are Chiti, but you have forgotten: “I am free because I remember.” All aesthetic and ritual practices move toward this recognition, which is not merely conceptual but deeply experiential. Rasa is a recognition, a recognition of what you have forgotten, that you are blissful consciousness itself.
The Trika-Kaula lineage is infamous for its chakra puja, the circle rite in which a group of male and female initiates engaged in sex with non-spousal partners. Ritualized sex can move one past the limited self, but what is desired is very different than an “intimacy” with a specific other person. Abhinavagupta says in the Tantraloka:
Consciousness, which is composed of all things, enters into a state of contraction due to the differences generated by separate bodies, but it returns to a state of oneness, to a state of expansion, when all of its components are able to reflect back on each other. The totality of our own rays of consciousness are reflected back one on the other when, overflowing in the individual consciousness of all present as if in so many mirrors, and without any effort whatsoever in an intense fashion, it becomes universal. For this reason, when a group of people gather together during the performance of a dance or of song, etc., there will be true enjoyment when they are concentrated and immersed in the spectacle all together and not one by one … but if even one of those present is not concent
rated and absorbed, then consciousness remains offended as at the touch of a surface full of depressions and protuberances because he stands out there as a heterogeneous element. This is the reason why during the rites of adoration of the circle (cakra) one must remain attentive and not allow anyone to enter whose consciousness is in a dispersed state and not concentrated and absorbed, because he will be a source of contraction. In the practice of the circle (cakra) one must adore all the bodies of all those present … since they have all penetrated [into] the fullness of consciousness … they are in reality as if they were our own body.17
The paradox is that once this recognition of self as the vast, primal creative consciousness takes place, nothing changes materially. Multiplicity does not disappear: the universe is not an illusion, it is the manifest form of Chiti, and it is as it is. There is no other better place to go to, no heaven. There is nothing to attain that is not already yours. There is nothing to avoid. In liberation, nothing has been gained and nothing has been lost. You have just remembered something, recognized what you have always been. The only thing that has changed is your awareness of your own fullness, your bliss. In Pratyabhijna, “the primal existential fact is not that of suffering, but that of bliss.” And, as Ratié remarks:
compassion is not primarily the acknowledgement of the others’ pain—which is to say, according to an equivalence drawn by these [Pratyabhijñā] philosophers themselves, the acknowledgement of the others’ incompleteness (apūrṇatva)—as it is in Buddhism; on the contrary, it is primarily the awareness of one’s own completeness or fullness—of one’s own bliss. Helping the others is no longer an attempt to fill whatever incompleteness afflicts the others: it is a joyful activity that is not determined by any lack or need and has no other cause besides one’s own fullness, because there can be no selfless activity without the blissful consciousness of one’s own completeness, and because this blissful consciousness necessarily results in an action aiming at the others’ interest.18
The person who has realized an identity with the Absolute, Abhinavagupta says, “by virtue of which he is full and perfect, has clearly only this left to do, namely—attend to the well-being of the world.”
In Abhinavagupta’s cosmology, the one supreme consciousness is a “She.” As Anuttara, she is figured as the Solitary Heroine; as Kali, she absorbs and transcends time.19 And during the chakra puja, within the circle, there was supposed to be no caste or social differentiation, and the women were worshipped as goddesses. Tantric knowledge and ritual—unlike the Vedic texts and practices—were available to all, regardless of status.
How much actual freedom or equality these philosophical systems brought to the underclasses and women is a matter of debate. One reading of the history suggests that low-caste and female Tantrics merely became instruments through which upper- and middle-caste men, now organized into yet another secretive elite, indulged in narcissistic self-exploration and hedonism; all the other participants were mere objects. It has even been alleged that all the women involved in the rituals were prostitutes. And there is a palpable machismo in some of the Tantric texts; the male hero practices Extreme Tantra, he fears nothing, he seeks out powerful and terrifying feminine forces and subjugates them with the power of his mantras, all human women are attracted to him and are susceptible to his charms. His tantric practice gives him tremendous magical force, and he is feared and revered.
But to regard myriads upon myriads of Tantric practitioners as mere tools of the privileged would be—I think—an error.
Abhinavagupta insists that we become aware of others as independent subjects when they resist our attempts to objectify them, to read them inferentially as purely the product of deterministic systems—that is, we know they are subjects when we sense in them the same freedom (svatantrya) that we are aware of within ourselves. To say that “X is a subject” is finally
nothing but the assertion that X is a free, self-luminous entity, and although this entity is still associated with objective features such as its body, its recognition cannot be reduced to an objectification, for it does not consist in a mere identification of the other’s consciousness with the other’s body, but precisely in the realization that this entity transcends objective features such as its body insofar as it is self-luminous.20
The question, then, is—what was in it for the people who may have been objectified by some upper-class Tantrics, or who we read as objects across the gap of centuries? We are stumped, of course, by the famous silence of the subaltern. The Tantric texts are written from a male viewpoint, and no doubt by the well heeled and comfortable. Or at least this is partly true—some of the revealed Tantric texts are in a strange Sanskrit sprinkled with grammatical errors, archaic styles, and Prakrit derivations, which suggests they “may have been written by non-brāhmins or brāhmins far from the Sanskritic heartland.”21 Faced with this discomfiting problem, other scholastically inclined Tantrics engaged in exegesis argued that the gods are allowed to make grammatical mistakes, or indulge in linguistic crookedness for pleasure.
But we can be certain from history and the present that kings were not the only ones to practice Tantra. The great and mighty and rich of course loved Tantra—since the rites brought power and potency to the practitioner, allowed him or her to dominate and possess, the mediaeval royals built numerous temples for Tantric gods and goddesses, and either openly or in secret worshipped, sacrificed, and believed. Several dynasties built temples at Kamakhya, the most powerful Tantric site of all. But we know that then as now, the worshippers at Kamakhya, the practitioners who conduct their rituals inside and outside these imperial constructions, come from every caste, every class.
Similarly, Hugh Urban’s work on the Kartabhajas, a modern sect particularly active in the nineteenth century, shows how the poor can mobilize esoteric belief, secrecy, and rituals—inducting parakiya or extramarital sex—to find autonomy and self-respect. According to their own tradition, they were founded by a wandering fakir, Aulchand, who sometimes proclaimed himself a madman; their members came from the “lower orders, mainly from the depressed castes, untouchables, Muslim peasants and artisans.” According to a nineteenth-century report, “Very secretly this movement has become powerful … The majority [of the Kartabhajas] are lower class and female.”22 All of these people practiced a kind of equalizing meta-religion which appeared precisely at the onset of colonialism, as the East India Company began to impose land reforms that displaced millions of peasants to the cities. These new members of the urban proletariat hijacked the language of markets and mercantilism to construct a sandhabhasha, a cryptic “intentional language” in which they both mocked the powerful and celebrated themselves:
I will tell you a funny story,
some news about a king.
In his city,
rows and rows of merchants
crowd the roads.
In the Central Market,
in that great landmark,
they import, they export,
they buy, they sell,
all twelve months long.
And in the warehouse
they wheel and deal
over tares great and small.
…
[The king] takes no taxes,
no tariffs, no gifts,
and so the traders worship him.
The goods pile up from the sea-trade,
but he excuses all duties
and gathers respect instead.
Listen, listen,
I’ll tell you more—
Here there is no brokerage,
no greedy commission-mongering,
no forced labour.
The moon is his companion,
and this king is Kalki
the Avatar.23
The Kartabhajas disregarded caste and creed. A journalist attended one of their melas or fairs in 1848 and reported, “We were amazed. For Brahmins, Sudras, and non-Hindu classes make no distinctions regarding their own food, and eat and drink here together: nowhere
before had I seen or heard such a thing!”24
The upper classes of the time were engaged in their own movement to eradicate caste, to reform Indian culture according to Western notions of progress and rationality, and the Kartabhajas caused much debate among them. The Kartabhajas were sometimes admired, but as often they aroused shame and fear. Their insistence that the body was sacred and their practice of ritual sex outside of marriage provoked rage and disgust. There was a tendency to dismiss them as a degenerate Tantric cult—a famous upper-class poet described the Kartabhaja lineage as “a ghost in a field strewn with rotten carcasses; an ugly old whore in a place full of rubbish and dung.”25
But the Kartabhajas sang, “Tell the madman that people have become mad; tell the madman that they do not sell rice in the market … and tell the madman this is what the madman has said.”26
A considered madness, too, can be a form of autonomy, of svatantrya. Across the centuries in India, Tantra in its various guises has served as an alternative framework for self-understanding and self-construction, as a very visible counterpoint to the Vedic mainstream. In a culture obsessed with purity and correctness, the secrecy associated with Tantric practice offered a refuge. The dominant model of Brahmin masculinity demanded a constant self-policing and a guarding against pollution. Alexis Sanderson writes: