WHAT IS HINDUISM?
beings, and between human beings and higher beings.
However in order to achieve a revolutionary religious
transformation of relations between human beings (as well
as between human beings, higher beings and God) I
emphasise the importance of recognising differences or
‘asymmetries’ in levels of human awareness – yet without
making the classic mistake of identifying these asymmetries
with differences of gender, race, caste, class or culture.
With such differences in mind however, the essay traces the
subversive, sex-political dimension of religious ‘Shaktism’
and ‘Tantrism’ in colonial India, drawing intensively on
Hugh Urban’s research into the relation between British
and Indian representations of their central symbol – the
feminine goddess Kali. This leads into a discussion of more
recent expressions of the sexual, political and sex-political
dimensions of so-called ‘left’ and ‘right-hand’ traditions of
Tantra in Europe.
Finally I draw on the work of Victor and Victoria
Trimundi to show the historically misogynistic character of
Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhist Tantrism in contrast to (a)
the primordial Indian religious traditions of Shaktism, and
(b) the synthesis of Tantrism in 'Kashmir Shaivism'.
In conclusion, I point to the future role allotted in the
Buddhist Kalachakra Tantra to a figure called the 'Rudra
Chakrin' – Rudra being, paradoxically, the Vedic god
equivalent to Shiva, both ‘Rudra’ (Sanskrit) and ‘Civa’