About the 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.