Desire, blood and power - Georges Bataille and the study of hindu Tantra in Northeast India

Автор: Hugh B. Urban

Журнал: Revista Científica Arbitrada de la Fundación MenteClara @fundacionmenteclara

Статья в выпуске: 3, Vol. 1, 2016 года.

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This article examines Hindu Tantra and goddess worship in northeastern India, by using but also critically rethinking several of Bataille’s insights into eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression. Specifically, the article examines the worship of the goddess Kamakhya and her temple in Assam, which is revered as one of the oldest “power centers” or seats of the goddess in South Asia and as the locus of the goddess’s sexual organ. In many ways, Bataille’s work is extremely useful for understanding the logic of transgression and the use of impurity in this tradition. At the same time, however, this example also highlights some tensions in Bataille’s work, particularly the question of female sexuality and women’s agency. In the case of Assamese Tantra, female sexuality plays a central and integral role in the larger phenomena of transgression, expenditure, and ecstatic religious experience. As such, it can be fruitfully put into dialogue with Bataille’s work for a critical “theory of religion” today.

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Batille, Sacrifice, Transgression, Eroticism, Sexuality, Gender, Women, Tantra

Короткий адрес: https://sciup.org/170163614

IDR: 170163614   |   DOI: 10.32351/rca.v1.3.22

Фрагмент статьи Desire, blood and power - Georges Bataille and the study of hindu Tantra in Northeast India

Although he described his own work as a kind of “atheology,” more concerned with God’s death than with God’s existence, Georges Bataille must be counted as one of the 20th century’s most important theorists of religion. From his own Theory of Religion to his work on mysticism, sacrifice and erotic spirituality, Bataille has influenced a wide range of theorists from philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to anthropologists and historians of religions such as Michael Taussig and Amy Hollywood.

To date, however, most of the work on Bataille and religion has focused on his implications for the study of Christianity, particularly Christian mysticism, a subject that interested Bataille himself intensely. With a few exceptions, there has been little effort to explore the implications of Bataille’s work for the study of Hinduism, Buddhism or any other Asian tradition. This is ironic and unfortunate, given Bataille’s own interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Hindu traditions such as yoga and Tantra.

As Andrew Hussey notes in his study of Bataille’s mysticism, “although Bataille disparaged any appropriation of Eastern methods which recognized any form of cephalic ‘sommet’ as the ‘point seul’ of meditation, and although the vocabulary he uses to describe the movement of inner experience belongs largely to the Western tradition, Bataille was well-read in Classical Hinduism and Buddhism.”

Bataille was quite familiar with the works of Alexandra David-Néel on Tibetan Buddhism, Mircea Eliade’s work on yoga, and Romain Roland’s biographies of the Hindu saints Shri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. He was particularly interested, for example, in the Hindu goddess Kali, dark mother of time and death, whom he described as the goddess of “terror, of destruction, of night and of chaos.”

Moreover, in late 1938 and 1939, Bataille also began to practice yoga and meditation himself, a practice that, he recalls, helped him realize the “fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism” and the “infinite capacity for reversal” that characterizes his own atheological form of mystical “inner experience.” In short, Bataille’s own work on religion was significantly influenced by his encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism; and in turn, his insights into religious experience have the potential to shed some useful light on non-Western traditions, as well.

In this chapter, I will focus on the tradition of Hindu Tantra and goddess worship in northeast India, employing but also critically rethinking several of Bataille’s key insights into the relations between eroticism, sacrifice and transgression. Specifically, I will examine the worship of the goddess Kamakhya and her temple in Assam, which is revered as one of the oldest, most important “power centers” or seats of the goddess in South Asia and, indeed, as the locus of the goddess' yoni or sexual organ. As the very embodiment of divine desire (kama), Kamakhya temple is also the site of the goddess' annual menstruation, which takes place for three days each summer and is the occasion of her most important festival. At the same time, Assam is also often identified as the original homeland of Hindu Tantra and particularly of Tantric sexual rituals, which involve explicit transgressions of conventional social boundaries and the oral consumption of menstrual and other sexual fluids as the ultimate source of spiritual power.

In my analysis, I will by no means attempt to simplistically apply Bataille’s work to this South Asian example. Instead, I want to use but also critically modify some of Bataille's basic ideas of erotism, the link between sensuality, death and mystical experience, and his analysis of sexual and religious transgression. Bataille, I will suggest, is extremely useful for understanding the logic of transgression and the systematic use of impurity in Hindu Tantra. Whereas the Tantric traditions have long been misunderstood by modern scholars – both Indian and Western—Bataille gives us some key insights into the role of ritual transgression in Tantric practice. Drawing on Bataille, I will suggest that Tantric practice involves a kind of “unlimited transgression” that aims to shatter not just conventional social norms but the very boundaries of the finite self in intense union with the divine. However, as various feminist authors have pointed out, Bataille’s work reflects a consistent masculine and phallic bias, with a general lack of attention to female sexuality or to women as active agents. In the case of Hindu Tantra in Assam, I will argue, female sexuality holds a central place and plays an integral role in the larger phenomena of transgression, expenditure and ecstatic religious experience. As such, we can also use this South Asian example and Hindu concepts of desire and power to critically re-imagine Bataille’s work for the contemporary study of religion, as well.

Matrix of Power: Kamakhya and The Shakta Pithas in South Asian History

Since at the least the 8th century, the temple of the mother goddess Kamakhya has been revered as one of the oldest, most important and most powerful seats of goddess worship and Hindu Tantra in South Asia. As the locus of the goddess own sexual organ (yoni) Kamakhya temple is literally the “mother of all seats of power.” In this sense, Kamakhya temple is can be called the ”matrix of power,” as both the maternal womb (matr, etymologically related to Latin mater and English matrix) that gives birth to the universe and all its elements (matrkas).

From its origins, however, this temple is intimately tied to the dual themes of sacrificial violence and sexual transgression. Indeed, it is a stunning illustration of what Bataille calls the “similarity between the act of love and sacrifice” and the ways in which the petit mort of sexual union often mirrors the larger death of ritual killing. According to a widespread series of myths that appears in the Hindu epics and mythological literature, the origin of Kamakhya goes as follows: Once upon a time Lord Shiva (the cosmic destroyer in the Hindu pantheon) was married to the goddess Sati. However, Sati’s father, Daksha, very much disliked Shiva, who is a frightening, wild, outsider deity; so when Daksha threw a huge sacrificial feast and invited all the other gods, he intentionally did not invite Shiva. This dis-invitation was such a profound insult that Sati threw herself onto the sacrificial fire, making herself the tragic victim of the ritual. Shiva then went into a rage, destroyed the entire ritual, and beheaded Daksha, thus making his father-in-law the ironic victim of his own sacrifice. Shiva then carried the corpse of Sati away on his shoulder, and his anger was so intense that it threatened to destroy the entire universe. To defuse the situation, the other gods dismembered Sati’s body, and the various pieces of her corpse fell in different holy places of India, which then became the “seats of power” or shakta pithas. Among the holiest of these became the seat of her yoni, which fell in Assam, and it is here that Shiva and Sati eternally reside in secret sexual union. As Lord Shiva declares in one 11th century text from Assam, “in this most sacred pitha…the goddess is secretly joined with Me. Sati’s sexual organ, which was severed and fell there, became a stone; and there Kamakhya is present.”

Since at least the 11th or 12th century, Kamakhya temple has been famous not simply as the primary seat of the goddess’ sexual organ but also as the locus of her annual menstruation. To this day, the most important festival here is Ambuvaci Mela, which celebrates the goddess’ menstruation during the summer month of Asadha (June-July). Occurring at the beginning of the monsoon season, with the coming of the rains after the heat of summer, Ambuvaci marks the flow of the goddess’ life-giving blood to the earth. But it is also a celebration that reflects the profound ambivalence of the goddess’ blood and the power it embodies, a power that is tied to impurity and to the dangerous potency of sexual fluids.

In order to understand the deeper significance of this festival, therefore, we need to understand the place of menstruation and menstrual blood in the Hindu imagination. Like all bodily fluids, and particularly sexual fluids, menstrual blood is considered to be an extremely powerful but ambivalent substance. It is, on the one hand, the sacred power of life and procreation itself. But it is also, on the other hand, extremely impure and polluting. As David Gordon White observes, "Indian traditions have always viewed sexual fluids, and most particularly menstrual blood, as polluting, powerful and therefore dangerous substances." And the act of menstruation is likewise regarded as a powerful and creative, but also dangerous and polluting event. As Madhu Khanha notes, “A woman during menstruation is compared to a fallen woman…[The] temporary untouchability attributed to women and the overwhelming number of menstrual taboos imposed on them go to show that the first three days of menstruation were looked upon as dangerous and threatening.”

Thus, when Kamakhya menstruates for three days each year, she is considered to be in a state of "impurity, just like the impurity of woman due to her menstruation," and her temple must be closed to all visitors during these days. But it is this very same impure, dangerous and potentially destructive blood of the goddess that is believed to bring life and creative energy to the earth and to her devotees. Thus on the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple doors are opened up again, and red cloths representing the bloody menstrual flow are distributed to the thousands of pilgrims who thereby receive the power and grace of the goddess.

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Список литературы Desire, blood and power - Georges Bataille and the study of hindu Tantra in Northeast India

  • Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume II (New York: Zone Books, 1993), p.119.
  • J.A. Schoterman, ed., The Yoni Tantra (Delhi: Manohar, 1980), 3.16-17.
  • In addition to Bataille’s own various writings on religion, such as Theory of Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), see also Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Michael Taussig, “Transgression,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp.349-364; Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Andrew Hussey, The Inner Scar: The Mysticism of Georges Bataille (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000).
  • See Hugh B. Urban, “The Power of the Impure: Transgression, Violence and Secrecy in Bengali Shakta Tantra and Modern Western Magic,” Numen 50, no.3 (2003): 269-308; Hugh B. Urban, The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp.68-9, 118-121.
  • Hussey, Inner Scar, p.65. See Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p.78.
  • Bataille, ed., Ecyclopaedia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p.55.
  • Bataille, Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), p.206. See also Jean Bruno, “Les techniques d'illumination chez Georges Bataille,” Critique 195/196 (1963): 706-721. Bruno draws many parallels between Bataille’s own unique method of meditation and Tantric practice. He suggests that Bataille achieved a “lucide somnolence” in 1938 and advanced states of samadhi like those described in the Vijnana Bhairava, a tantra from the Kashmir region, in which exterior and interior states are interchangeable (p.716). Hussey likewise argues that there is an “Oriental basis” to Bataille’s method in works from this period such as “La pratique de la joie devant la mort:” “Bataille here draws upon the cosmology of Tantric literature and in particular borrows from tantric meditative practice which aims at the annihilation of perceived chronological realizes” (Inner Scar, p.69).
  • Tantra is notoriously difficult to define and often misunderstood. In simplest terms, Tantra is a complex body of texts and traditions that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions of Asia since the 4th or 5th century. As Madeleine Biardeau suggests, perhaps the most unique feature of Tantra as a religious path is that it attempts to transform desire or kama – which is normally a source of bondage – into the supreme path to spiritual liberation. Tantra could thus be defined as a “means of harnessing kama – desire (in every sense of the word) – and all of its related values to the service of deliverance” (quoted in André Padoux, Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990-, p.40). See also David Gordon White, ed., Tantra in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) p.9.
  • Various scholars have identified Assam as the “principal center” and “birthplace” of goddess worship in South Asia and as the “tantric country par excellence;” see Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1921), p.278; Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p.305; D.C. Sircar, The Sakta Pithas (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1973).
  • Material for this chapter is drawn from research in northeast India between 2000 and 2008, using sources in Sanskrit, Assamese and Bengali. Some of this material has been published in my book The Power of Tantra. For other discussions of Tantra in Assam, see Loriliai Biernacki, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); K.R. van Kooij, Worship of the Goddess according to the Kalikapurana (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972).
  • See Ladelle McWhorter, “Is there Sexual Difference in the Work of Georges Bataille?” International Studies in Philosophy 27, no.1 (1995): 33-41: “Despite his emphasis on radical, orgiastic sexuality, Bataille pays little if any attention to the presence, the activity and the desire of anyone who is not phallic” (p.35). See also Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Bataille in the Street: The Search for Virility in the 1930s,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 61-79. Suleiman argues that Bataille had an obsession with “virility” conceived in masculine terms that “locked him into values and into a sexual politics that can only be called conformist in his time and ours” (p.79).
  • Urban, “Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship and Sacrifice in the Worship of Mother Goddess Kamakhya,” South Asia 31, no.3 (2008): 500-34.
  • Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), p.92.
  • B.N. Shastri, ed., The Kalika Purana (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1991), 39.73.
  • See Urban, “Matrix of Power.”
  • White, Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.67.
  • Khanna, “The Goddess-Woman Equation in the Tantras,” in Gendering the Spirit: Women, Religion and the Post-Colonial Response, ed. Durre S. Ahmed (New York: Zen Books, 2002), p.49. There is a vast literature on menstruation in India; see for example Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, Indian Puberty Rites (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1980); Susan S. Wadley, The Powers of Tamil Women (New York: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1980), p.164; Frédérique Apffel Marglin, "Female Sexuality in the Hindu World," in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred and Social Reality, ed. C. Atkinson et al (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 39-60; Sarah Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kali (New York: Oxford University Pres, 1999).
  • Ganga Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya (Guwahati: Visnu Prakasan, 2002), p.23.
  • Ganga Sarma, Kamarupa Kamakhya: Itihasa o Dharmmamulaka (Guwahati: Visnu Prakasan, 2001), p.108
  • Bataille, Erotism, p.121.
  • Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in South India Saiva Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p.29.
  • See Urban, The Power of Tantra, chapters 1-3.
  • On human sacrifice in Assam, see Urban, The Power of Tantra chapter 3.
  • B.N. Shastri, ed., The Kalika Purana (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1991), 55.3-6, 67.3-5; See Urban, “Matrix of Power;” Bani Kanta Kakati, Mother Goddess Kamakhya (Guwahati: Lawyer’s Book Stall, 1952), p.65.
  • See Urban, The Power of Tantra, chapters 2 and 3.
  • Madeleine Biardeau and Charles Malamoud, Le sacrifice dans l’Inde ancienne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976), p.146-47.
  • Bataille, The Accursed Share, volume I, p.59.
  • See Alexis Sanderson, “Purity and Power among the Brahmins of Kashmir,” in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, eds. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.190-216; Urban, “The Power of the Impure.”
  • P.C. Bagchi, ed., The Kaulajnananirnaya and Some Minor Texts of the School of Matsyendranatha (Calcutta: Metropolitan Printing and Publishing House, 1934), 16.7-8, 22.9-11. See White, Kiss of the Yogini, pp.213-15.
  • White, Kiss of the Yogini, p.17; see Bataille, Erotism, p.115
  • The metaphor of sexual union as a sacrifice can be found as early as the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, where the female body is likened to the sacrificial altar with the yoni as the blazing fire; and this metaphor recurs throughout Tantric literature. See Urban, The Power of Tantra, chapter 4.
  • Kaulajnananirnaya, 18.7-9. See Urban, The Power, chapters 4-5.
  • Hindu law books warn repeatedly of the dangers of sexual intercourse during the menstrual period; and Hindu mythological texts contain many examples of the monstrous, demonic and criminal offspring of such unions (Urban, The Power of Tantra, chapters 2-3).
  • Yoni Tantra, 2.16-26.
  • Schoterman, Introduction to Yoni Tantra, p.30.
  • Bataille, Erotism, 65.
  • Bataille, Erotism, pp.65, 116.
  • Sanderson, “Purity and Power,” pp.201, 199.
  • See among other texts Yoni Tantra, 4.28, 1.8, 4.7, 6.6-7.
  • Bataille, Erotism, p.115
  • Bataille, The Accursed Share, volume II, p.119. As McWhorter notes, transgression represents for Bataille “moments wherein the self is torn open and exposed to what is other to it. These movements may occur, for example, during religious ecstasy, extreme physical suffering, or erotic release. In these moments, individuation and identity are threatened and on some sense overcome; the boundaries between self and other tear apart or liquefy, melt away, and communication…occurs (McWhorter, “Is there Sexual Difference,” pp.37-8).
  • Bataille, The Accursed Share, volume II, p.183-4. See Hussey, The Inner Scar, p.67
  • Sanderson, “Purity and Power,” pp.201, 199.
  • See Dandisvami Damodara Asrama, ed., Jnanarnava Tantra (Calcutta: Navabharata, 1982), 22.30-32: “How can there be any impurity in excrement or urine? Undoubtedly, that is a false opinion. The body is born from a woman’s menstrual blood. So how can that be impure, when by means of it one attains the highest state?”
  • Kaulajnananirnaya, 11.27-9.
  • Akulavira Tantra, in Bagchi, ed., Kaulajnananirnaya 24-26.
  • McWhorter, “Is there Sexual Difference,” p.34. See also McWhorter, “Bataille’s Erotic Displacement of Vision: Attempts at a Feminist Reading,” in Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible, ed. Wilhelm S. Wurzer (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp.117-127.
  • Bataille, Erotism, p.17
  • Bataille, Erotism, p.18.
  • McWhorter, “Is there Sexual Difference,” p.40.
  • Yoni Tantra, 7.27.
  • Yoni Tantra, 1.6.
  • See Urban, The Power of Tantra, chapter 5.
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