De-spiritualising tantra - chapter 8-part 2

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This kind of scholarship also reflects the U-Turn syndrome, wherein the scholarship facilitates appropriations while simultaneously denigrating the source traditions. Significantly, it provides theoretical legitimacy to the ongoing Christianization of meditation techniques in which Hindu and/or Buddhist mantras are removed and substituted with either meaningless words, as in Herb Benson’s ‘Relaxation Response’, or Christian words like ‘Christ’ or ‘Amen’.

Christian appropriators can rationalize that the Hindu mantras are made of meaningless sounds, and additionally, that their appropriation would ‘clean’ them from sounds of a woman having an orgasm. The White-Doniger thesis is among many that supply this kind of scurrilous ‘data’ to feed this appropriation.

The book’s political thesis seems to be that Tantra was a secret system used by Brahmins to dupe the lower castes and oppress them. White alleges that whitewashed or soft-core repackaging of Tantra “later came to be seized upon by high-caste Hindu householders throughout medieval South Asia as a window of opportunity to experiment with a double (or triple) religious identity”. White claims that this devious upper caste ploy was “a means to do what one said one was not doing...”. [Emphasis added]. In other words, the entire tradition was one big hypocrisy. Multiple identities, secret rituals and metaphysical hyperbole enabled Brahmins to exert political control via crafty mechanisms, which White compares with espionage:

A comparison with the world of espionage is a useful one: only those of the privileged inner circle (the heart of the Tantric mandala) have the highest security clearance (Tantric initiations) and access to the most secret codes (Tantric mantras) and classified documents (Tantric scriptures).

Lower castes emulated these pseudo-spiritual practices ‘as a means [of] social uplift’. Therefore, the tradition is not only not spiritual, it is also associated with trickery and social oppression across the vast subcontinent. These kinds of analyses are devastating to the Indic tradition’s progressive evolution and the self-concept of Hindus.

Abrahamic religions claim that they are the exclusive custodians of prophecies and canons documenting unique historical events. On the other hand, Indic adhyatmika spirituality, or inner science, tends to be non-history-centric and emanates from the enlightenment experiments of luminaries, of which Abhinavagupta is a very prominent example. Adhyatma-vidya methodology is similar to scientific empiricism, in that a legitimate spiritual tradition is the result of the actual experiences of spiritual masters and these experiences are reproducible by the rest of us in this very life. Therefore, White’s allegations of Abhinavagupta’s packaging of wild sex for the ‘soft-core High Hindu’ consumer market are as damaging as allegations would be against a Western empirical scientist that he fabricated laboratory data to substantiate a theory.

White’s and Doniger’s concepts of Tantra are implicated with ‘overcoding’, which is, according to the use of the word as found in White’s book, a euphemism for duplicity or whitewash. Doniger alleges that Hindus led a hypocritical double life.

Is a system of academic overcoding at work in such scholarship? Do certain scholars live double lives? According to Malhotra, they publicly position themselves as very Hindu-friendly in certain audiences, such as, (i) with pandits in India on whom they are dependent for translations; (ii) with gullible students from the diaspora to cleverly re-engineer them away from Hindu identities; and (iii) with diaspora parents/philanthropists for fund-raising. This overcoding is a mask to cover up their secretly building ‘ideological products’ to show patterns of Hindu decadence, violence, immorality and abuse.

Malhotra claims to remove the scholars’ pretence of being friends of India/Hinduism and exposes their Hinduphobia. He argues:

It is no coincidence that academic writings by David White, Sarah Caldwell, Jeffrey Kripal and many others apply the thesis of highcaste Hindu ‘double lives’ to a massive array of case studies which encompass Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Muktananda, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Hindu Goddess, among others. These case studies are filled with ‘data’ and convoluted logic. After winning awards their thesis is declared final and closed and those who dare criticize are attacked as being against intellectual freedom! (For expansion of this idea, please read page 83 and 84, chapter 8)

Hinduism, like all faiths, has its problematic aspects. Describing the religion multifariously from within an ecumenical orientation is not a problem for most Hindus. What is disturbing to them is that some high profile scholars allege that these abuses are the very essence of Hinduism, and not an aberration. In contrast, Abu Ghraib has not been framed by the media as a crime committed by Western culture caused by Biblical legends or original Biblical practices. An equivalent thesis would say that the original Biblical practices are essentially about hardcore sadomasochistic oppression and that a subsequent overcoding has been done to make the exploitation of non-Christian infidels and non-White peoples seem soft-core. Those who have dared to do such contrarian scholarship are from the margins—they are unlikely to win important awards and Ivy League chairs.

The charge of Tantra as a system of social exploitation is used by Doniger to frame India’s internal conflicts between ‘tiers’ of society—such as Dalits vs. Brahmins, Dravidians vs. so-called Aryans, women vs. men, minority religions vs. Hindus, and other Indic-specific dyads and contrasts. Malhotra interpreted Doniger’s conclusions in the review of Kiss of the Yogini, as ‘the triumphant tone of the white woman rescuing the native from their culture’. Doniger writes that White hopes by “reconstructing the medieval South Asian Kaula and Tantric traditions that involved sexual practices, [he can] restore the dignity and autonomy of the people who invented them and continue to practice them”. This is the Tarzan-Saving-Natives-from-Danger-in-Jungle trope, also known as the Missionaries-Saving-Heathens-from-Blindness trope.

Malhotra was moved to ask:

1. By what authority are White, Doniger, et al ‘in charge’ of such ‘restoration’ of Indian traditions?

2. By what justification are they privileged to frame the subject in a particular manner as opposed to the many other alternative frames possible?

3. For whose sake is this ‘restoration’ being done?

4. What is the track record of their Judeo-Christian controlled intellectual institutions in achieving ‘restoration’ for other peoples in the past?

5. To whom are they accountable?

There is an obvious inconsistency when White and Doniger are promoting this ‘restoration’ to some ‘imagined original past’ in which ‘Tantra equals sexual magic’, and yet any attempts by Hindus to recover a positively ‘imagined past’ is severely condemned as being chauvinistic and disingenuous.

Malhotra argues:

The hypocrisy cries out for notice: Why is a return-to-the-past that is supervised by Western institutions a good thing, while on the other hand, internally generated perspectives [by Indians] ‘chauvinistic’? This question gives rise to another: Does the difference have to do with who exerts power and for what agenda? In this scenario, when the West controls the agenda, selects the topics and frames the issues, then it’s positioned as positive ‘restoration,’ but when Indians outside Western institutions do the same thing, it is condemned by those in the Western institutions as inauthentic or invalid.

Academic Transgressions Excused in the Name of Saving Civilization

In her review of Kiss of the Yogini, Doniger raises some issues concerning White’s findings, to wit—that they are based on assumptions that cannot be rigorously proven. She asks: “How do we know that the original, supposedly hard-core school was not also interpreting their texts metaphorically”? (For more on what Doniger said, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger acknowledges that a mere possibility of meaning does not imply certainty of meaning. She also points out that White adopts literal meanings inconsistently. (For more on this, please read page 86, chapter 8)

Doniger ends up with a George Bushism (as Witzel would put it) when she claims that White has proven a ‘definite maybe’. But then Doniger suddenly exonerates White’s intellectual transgressions and justifies his thesis on the basis that she finds it politically expedient, even after showing that his hypothesis is inconsistent and unproven. Doniger now argues that, regardless of its scholarly shortcomings, Kiss of the Yogini ‘has a political importance that eclipses reservations of this kind’. She writes:

In arguing for the sexual meaning of the texts, White is flying in the face of the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that began in the eleventh century, was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition from the nineteenth century onwards, and prevails in India today. The contemporary Indian view is complicated by a new political twist. Right-wing Hindu groups, in India and in the diaspora, have increasingly asserted their wish, indeed their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism.

Doniger seems to be suggesting, that evidence or no evidence, we should accept White’s thesis because it shows the devious revisionism practised by Hindus for a long time and because it is useful in deflating and denigrating dangerous Hindus today. Bapat criticizes Doniger severely on this point as well, calling her position vitandavada or argumentation that ignores reason in favor of establishing pet theories by repetition. (For more on what Prof. Bapat had to say, please read page 87, chapter 8)

The Dalit Card and Other Expediencies

Tantra practitioners and scholars know that one ancient movement within the tradition sought embodied enlightenment through sexual means. It had two parallel strands, one focusing primarily on consciousness and the other utilizing bodily techniques. (For Rajiv Malhotra’s elaboration on both strands, please read page 88, chapter 8)

White alleges that all this (Abhinavagupta’s reformulation of tantra in the 11^th century) was simply a political tool for the upper castes to control the masses. While the upper castes made spiritual claims to cover up their ‘sexcapades’ behind the mask of spiritual language, the lower castes dumbly practised Tantra as wild sexual orgies. The spiritual claims were a mechanism by which high-caste people duped and oppressed the Dalits. By invoking the subaltern tribal or Dalit identity, White and Doniger can claim to be exposing aspects of the Tantric tradition that have been used to exploit the oppressed.

Doniger has insulated herself from valid critiques, written by people such as those featured in section II, who possess modern, well-educated and liberal voices. She claims that the contemporary Hindus who are critical of her are ‘of the Hindutva persuasion’. She carefully identifies her tormentors, as “followers of the recently ousted Hindu Nationalist BJP, with its repressive and purity-obsessed policies”. In short, she dismisses her critics as repressed and obsessed puritans.

She expresses concern about the negative impact on Religious Studies from ‘Hindu fundamentalist attacks on Freudian interpretations’. The Hindu attackers, she writes: “argue that none of these [psychoanalytical] characterizations has any scriptural validity according to Hindu tenets or eminent Hindu scholars”. Doniger notes:

“This position finds some support in Western scholarly traditions [such as] Cantwell Smith [who] argued that no historian of religions should ever make a statement about any religion that some members of that religion would not recognize and accept”. She mentions, mockingly that, “This view is still honored by many conscientious scholars who follow the take-a-Hindu-to-dinner, Parliament-of-world-religions approach.” She adds, emphatically, “It is not, however, the only approach.”

Highlighting the comments used to endorse Kiss of the Yogini is revealing. The first endorsement on the back cover is written by Lee Siegel, who invites the reader to look at the book in terms of ‘magic and sorcery’—words suggestive of inferior cognition and irrationality in the modern Western context. Jeffrey Kripal also applauded the reductionist bias in Kiss of the Yogini for reminding us ‘once again that South Asian Tantra really is about sex, bodily fluids and all’.

White confidently presumes that “much of the Tantric terminology makes sense only if it is read literally”. Malhotra asks a crucial question: “It makes sense to whom?” To contemporary scholars, who reject the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions in the first place? Or to contemporary practitioners, who inherently accept the spiritual legitimacy of Indian traditions? An equivalent methodology in the reverse direction, as often asserted by critics of Christianity, is one in which Christian rituals and the doctrine of the Eucharist is reduced to a cannibalistic feast of eating flesh and drinking blood. However, Malhotra notes:

White quickly and assertively rejects doing this to Christianity by using the argumentation strategy of reductio ad absurdum—he rejects this because he says that it would make Christians cannibals. But when it comes to Tantra, he not only accepts what to a contemporary Hindu would be an absurdity, but insists that this is the only way to make sense of it.

He then asks a perplexing question, articulated over and over again within the Hindu-American community: “Why are such unsympathetic academicians, conditioned within biblical traditions, in a position to decide which portions of a text on Hinduism are literal and which ones are not”?

Another critic, the philosopher Sitanshu Chakravarti, has raised questions about several of David White’s ‘literal’ translations. For instance he points out that White reduces the Sanskrit word dravya (meaning material, object or thing) as fluids, particularly sexual fluids. All Hindus, not just Tantrikas, use dravyas ranging from flowers to sweets to clothes, wood and ghee and sandal paste in their pujas and havans—these are all homogenized by White into ‘fluids’. Chakravarti cites a few such suspect translations and their page numbers in White’s book: (For more on this, please read page 90, chapter 8)

Madhu Khanna’s Critique

Malhotra had conversations with a bold critic of such abusive scholarship, Madhu Khanna, a renowned scholar-practitioner of Tantra based in India, and she extensively quoted from her paper, ‘Paradigms of Female Sexuality in the Hindu World.’ She describes four different representations of female sexuality in Hinduism and emphasizes that these cannot be reduced to any one category to the exclusion of the rest. In describing the Tantric paradigm, she explains the ‘non-dual unity of life’ as follows, “Tantra concerns itself with the series of relationships between the transcendent and real, the macrocosm and the microcosm, the sacred and the profane, the outer and the inner, and weaves them within the framework of its values.”

She explains that each pair of opposites is to be held in mutual tension and neither side of the pair may be collapsed into the other, as that would be a dualistic reduction. This is why both radical realism and pure idealism are considered incorrect ways of understanding Tantra.

Criticizing the reductionist tendency of those stuck in Abrahamic dualities (into which White appears to have slipped), Khanna remarked:

The Western approach that splits the erotic from the sacred appears short sighted and deficient . . . White uses his profane-only lens to collapse the sacred-profane pair into profanity, with the spiritual aspect of the pair getting postured as a deceptive cover for hedonism by corrupt Brahmins. His core theory is that [Hindu] spirituality is a derivative from profanity and was intended for ulterior motives from the beginning. [Emphasis added] (For more on Madhu Khanna’s explanation, please read page 91, chapter 8)

White asserts, “I am a historian of South Asian religions and not a Tantric practitioner . . .” This calls into question his qualifications as a reliable restorer of the tradition. “Would a person who is deaf to certain tones be qualified to restore music played in the past based on simply reading the music scores, and to reject the music as played by maestros as invalid?”

Conclusions

According to many members of the Hindu diaspora, the implication of the White-Doniger thesis for the study of India and Indic traditions has been disastrous. Malhotra summarizes the impact:

1. White gives ammunition to those who attack Hinduism as being a collection of barbaric practices.

2. He reinforces the reduction of Hinduism as fodder for anthropological and psychopathological studies.

3. He tries to undermine Hinduism’s spiritual claims and renders its philosophical texts as fake or hypocritical.

4. He feeds Hinduphobia in the minds of mainstream Americans who see everyday Hindu symbols as weird and/or as representing immoral practices.

5. He provides a template with which to legitimize further data hunting-gathering about Hindus’ alleged violations of human rights, by claiming to have proven that such violations were the original intent and very purpose behind Hindu practices.

6. He plays into India’s caste conflicts by theorizing that Tantric spirituality was a ploy by upper castes to control the masses.

7. He tries to de-legitimize Tantra as a means for Dalit spiritual empowerment.

8. He tries to de-legitimize women’s empowerment through Tantra, a unique and major claim in contrast with the Abrahamic religions, and, hence, a perceived threat to male-dominated

Abrahamic religions.

One of the more interesting asides about Kiss of the Yogini is the fact that Doniger uses the book as an opportunity to discredit any attempts at Hindu constructive theology by attacking it as a project of Hindu nationalists who have “increasingly asserted . . . their right, to control scholarship about Hinduism”; and who think theirs is “the only acceptable view”. Her basic view of her opponents is false. Doniger’s critics neither insist that the spiritual-only view is the only acceptable one, nor that Indians should be the only ones doing Indic Studies. What they do criticize is the attempt to reduce Hinduism to pornography and to wish away the profound spiritual component in Hinduism. As Bapat and Malhotra have noted, Hindu insiders do have the right to constructive theology, as do people of all faiths. Terming this a ‘cover up’ or ‘fascism’ based on speculative findings is clearly intended to delegitimize Hindus’ rightful access to such processes.

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De-spiritualising tantra-chapter 8-part 1

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This chapter concerns a scholarly book, Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context. Its author, Prof. David Gordon White, a protégé of Wendy Doniger, received his PhD in the History of Religion from the University of Chicago in 1988. In an online discussion with Professor Jeffrey Lidke (a former student of White), Malhotra identified the book’s purpose as an effort to undermine the deep roots of Tantra’s inherent spirituality. This chapter is based on that online discussion that took place in May 2004.

White had previously authored The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, a well-received book that helped him achieve the stature of a highly acclaimed scholar of Tantra and Hinduism Studies. His earlier book was based on original sources and his interpretations were broadly accepted by Tantric practitioners. This authenticity provided political and professional credibility for the author in the academy and the Hindu community. His new book caught many Indian scholars and practitioners of Tantra, and Hindus in general, by surprise. This is a good example of Malhotra’s U-Turn Theory, which describes how some Western scholars study Indic traditions respectfully, and then later repackage the subject to suit their own personal agendas or the needs of institutions, peer groups or the marketplace.

Malhotra’s review of the Kiss of the Yogini can be summarized as follows:

1. The book positions Tantra as a system of decadent South Asian sexuality. Furthermore, this decadence was seen as the result of the social suffering of Indian subaltern (lower caste) people in classical times.

2. Eminent Tantra scholars, such as Abhinavagupta, Kashmir Shaivism’s towering eleventh century figure, evidently did not know or did not want to know the ‘real’ Tantra the book purports to have uncovered. This is yet another example of how the natives, native scholars and actual practitioners are not trusted for their own interpretations, even including eminent thinkers whose works have been studied by Westerners and others, for centuries.

3. The bottom line, according to the Kiss of the Yogini, is that Tantra is not a legitimate spiritual process.

4. Doniger wrote a glowing review of the book, further extending its political import. She not only gives it the benefit of doubt without seriously challenging many of its presuppositions, but explicitly blames ‘Hindu chauvinists’ for repackaging Tantra as spirituality. She alleges that this was done to make Hinduism look good in the face of the British colonialists’ Victorian values. Hence, her thesis is designed to help postcolonial Indian scholars to undo colonialism by rejecting the spiritual purpose of Tantra.

5. Those who dare deny this thesis are assumed to be ‘Hindu nationalists’, ‘fascists’, ‘right-winger’ and so forth.

6. Doniger then cites Schweder’s popular new theory that native societies do not own their culture—a theory that Doniger asserts as true even though it is simply one point of view in an ongoing and controversial debate. Thus she accuses the Hindu diaspora and ‘Hindu right-wing chauvinists’ of claiming the right to interpret their culture and says that they have no such rights.

7. The implication is clear: No one can dare challenge the White-Wendy scholarship for fear of being branded a BJP chauvinist. And Indians have no special standing as insiders in their culture. What a tragedy for the academy that such a ploy works!

A long-time scholar of Kashmir Shaivism and a Tantra practitioner confided that he finds the book ‘disgusting’—in methodology, conclusion and its demeaning tone.

Ziauddin Sardar has attacked similar positions by illustrating how non-Western cultures are ‘for sale in the supermarket of postmodern nihilism’. Malhotra asserts that White is similarly introducing a ‘new product’ in the postmodern ‘bazaar of realities’. Doniger does a followup to reconfigure it into yet another derivative intellectual product:

Displaying her manipulative prowess, she claims that those who profess Tantra to be a spiritual process are somehow associated with a hardline right-wing political party in India. Thus the choice before Indians is between abandoning Tantra and facing disgrace as fascists—a pretty bleak either/or situation. The middle ground of spirituality without a political agenda is made unavailable as an option. Ironically, this apolitical middle ground has been the hallmark of Hinduism and is a distinguishing feature of considerable relevance in today’s world of exclusivist dogmas.

Doniger evades the implications of her political thesis when it’s applied to Tibetan Buddhism. The heart of Tibetan Buddhism is Tantra and there is a very intimate relationship and sharing of Tantra between Buddhism and Hinduism.

Using Credibility as Defense

Prof. Jeffrey S. Lidke, a former student of David White, and hence someone whom Doniger regards as a grandchild of her lineage, posted a response attempting to dismiss the critique by claiming that Malhotra ‘did not know the purva-paksha (i.e. opponent’s position)’, and that he had ‘misrepresented the White-Doniger position’. Lidke approached the debate as a knowledgeable scholar of Tantra who had spent several years reading White’s writings. Therefore, ‘with no small amount of confidence’ he could claim that the above synopsis of White’s thesis made two inaccurate claims: (For more on Lidke’s argument, please read page 76, chapter 8)

Lidke then resorted to a tired old comeback that RISA scholars often use, by claiming that criticism by outsiders is spurious because ‘obviously’ they didn’t read the book. The only defenses that Lidke offered were based on acclaim and association, not content and substance. Besides he claimed that White and Doniger had benign intentions even though their quotes may suggest otherwise. This line of argumentation denies the lay reader the same rights that the scholars themselves claim, i.e. freedom to interpret Indic texts according to contemporary sensibilities and theories, in whatever worlds of meaning they wish, and without reference to the author’s intent or vivaksha.

Analysis of White’s Position

Malhotra posted a three-part response online to argue that his assertions about White were well-founded. His posts are summarized below, followed by a brief criticism of White’s work by an Australia-based scholar of Tantra.

Tantra’s history, according to the White-Doniger thesis, went through two stages. In its early history, Tantra was a system of sexual magical acts that were not spiritual. Doniger explains, “In David Gordon White’s account, the distinguishing characteristic of South Asian Tantra in its earliest documented stage is a ritual in which bodily fluids—sexual or menstrual discharge—were swallowed as transformative ‘power substances’.” So Tantra was a system of practices to achieve magical powers by swallowing sexual fluids.

Then came stage two, according to White-Doniger, when, Abhinavagupta, the leading proponent of Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism, reconstructed Tantra into a spiritually contextualized system that was more suitable for Brahmin appropriation. Doniger says, “A significant reform took place in the eleventh century, when certain elite Brahmin Tantric practitioners, led by the great theologian Abhinavagupta in Kashmir, marginalized the ritual of fluid exchange and sublimated it into a wider body of ritual and meditative techniques.”

Doniger refers to Abhinavagupta’s system as ‘soft-core, or High Hindu’, whose purpose was to allow double-standards among Brahmins so that they could indulge in forbidden sexual acts and yet publicly not “threaten the purity regulations that were required for high-caste social constructions of the self in India”. Thus, Doniger maintains that hypocritical Brahmins allowed themselves to indulge in the ‘drinking of female menstrual discharge’ because they could depict it in philosophical language as ‘a programme of meditation mantras’.

Doniger explains that this ‘soft-core’ became a mask to cover up the ‘hard-core’ real Tantra which remained underground: “In this way the earlier, unreconstructed form of Tantra, the hard-core, persisted as a kind of underground river, flowing beneath the new, bowdlerized, dominant form”. Doniger’s and White’s terminology is meant to evoke a certain image which equates Tantra with current pathologies in America—hard core and soft core pornography that are a significant part of American society today. We find that Doniger and White equate esoteric techniques of Tantra with something familiar to most Americans in an anti-social sense. Thus it is not to be seen as a powerful and valid cultural and religious alternative to American norms, but something familiar, something dismissible as ‘been there, done that’, and, moreover, something that is ‘sexy, seedy and strange’.

White-Doniger claim that the transition from hard-core to softcore was a discontinuity—a ‘reform’ by ‘elite Brahmins’ that ‘sublimated’ the past practice of ‘sexual fluid exchange’. Obviously, this point-of-view is found not only in Doniger’s review and analysis, but it is the central thesis cited in White’s book:

In about the eleventh century, a scholasticizing trend in Kashmirian Hindu circles, led by the great systematic theologian Abhinavagupta, sought to aestheticize the sexual rituals of the Kaula. These theoreticians, whose intended audience was likely composed of conformist householder practitioners, sublimated the end and raison d’être of Kaula sexual practice—the production of powerful, transformative sexual fluids—into simple by-products of a higher goal: the cultivation of a divine state of higher consciousness . . . (p.xii.)

White claims that until the eleventh century the heart of Tantra practice had been the ‘oral consumption of sexual fluids as power substances’, and that it was never practiced for the spiritual expansion of consciousness. He alleges that Abhinavagupta re-packaged it as a ‘consumer  product’ for sale to Kashmiris whose ‘bobo profile’ could be compared to modern New Age seekers.

If such a thesis were true, there would be no spiritual legitimacy in the systems that flowed from Abhinavagupta onwards. Their origin would be merely the repackaging of superstition and sexual magic for a consumer market of ‘wily Brahmins’ who wanted to indulge secretly in wild sex while pretending it was a spiritual practice. This is quite a bombshell dropped on any serious spiritual practitioner of Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra and many other Hindu-Buddhist systems.

The following counter arguments by Malhotra challenge the primary thesis of White and Doniger:

1. Hinduism was never enforced by centralized institutional authorities—very different from the Abrahamic religions. There is no historical evidence of any such political movement across all of South Asia that dramatically imposed a ‘soft-core’ system upon the previous ‘hard-core’ system. The mere emergence of scholarly texts does not necessarily bring any social revolution in the case of Hinduism given the absence of a centralized and authoritarian Church in the mode of the Christian one.

2. Tantra was exported from India to other parts of Asia (such as Tibet) where it was seen by the receiving Asian cultures as a spiritual tradition. Therefore, the Indian Brahmins’ sociopolitical exploitation that White-Doniger allege would also have to be proven in the case of all other Asian societies that imported Tantra. Since the domicile of Tantra practice has extended well beyond the geography of India, and especially since it has extended into territories where Brahmin social influence was not operative—such as Tibet, among others—the thesis of White-Doniger remains unproven until they examine Tantra outside of India and outside

the scope of Hinduism.

3. Such scholarship arbitrarily classifies as ‘Hindu’ certain ‘secular’ practices and some obscure texts cited may even have never been practised (and certainly not ‘enforced’). There may also have been many entirely unrelated multiple spiritual traditions from which the scholar indulges in a cut-and-paste exercise to fit his thesis.

One of the readers of this online debate was Prof. Jayant Bapat, (incidentally, also a Tantra practitioner) at Monash University, Australia. He found White’s arguments both unconvincing and reductionist: (For more on Prof. Bapat’s views, please read page 79 and 80, chapter 8)

Malhotra cited four specific examples from Doniger’s School that could be seen as assault on a whole spiritual tradition:

1. Assault on mantras: Because the Tantrics were not elitist Brahmins and lacked access to complex Sanskrit mantras, Doniger notes that they “derived their mantras of nonsense syllables from the inarticulate moans that the Goddess made during intercourse . . .” (For more on this please read page 81, chapter 8)

2. Assault on bindi: White’s explanation of the meaning of the bindi (the sacred mark worn by most Hindu women today) is that “the image of a drop (bindu) that recurs, across the entire gamut of Tantric theory and practice” was originally referring to a physical drop of menstrual blood, but was later explained using the language of mantras and yantras so as to be seen as abstract symbolism about speech and divine consciousness.

3. Assault on mudra: Doniger explains the meaning of the word mudra in the texts: “White argues that mudra . . . refers to ‘the technique of urethral suction by means of which the Tantric yogin, having ejaculated into his partner, draws his semen together with her sexual emission back into his penis’ (the so-called fountain-pen effect)”. In this interpretation mudra signifies the practitioner’s/consort’s vulva, and, by extension, the fluids from the vulva.

4. Assault on Srividya: White culminates his arguments showing that many popular contemporary Hindu systems of symbolism emerged out of this ‘intellectual whitewash’ done by Abhinavagupta. The Srividya tradition as practised widely today was just that—whitewashed pornography and wild sex practices. It gave a spiritual gloss to hard-core practices by making them seem intellectual and spiritual.

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