WHAT IS HINDUISM?
Political ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Tantra
Abhinavagupta wrote in the 10th century. In the
immediate periods before, during and since the 20th century
however, the terms ‘right and left traditions’, used in
connection with ‘the tantras’ attained a wholly new political
connotation – or rather revealed in new and explicit forms
many historically concealed political and social dimensions
of those ‘traditions’. Yet Abhinavagupta refers to ‘the
tantras’ and not to ‘Tantrism’. Though the tantras were
seen as possessing an inner unity, the terms ‘Tantrism’ and
‘Hinduism’ both only emerged after the British
colonization of India. ‘Tantrism’ was a word first coined
only in the last quarter of the 19th century by the Sanskritist
Monier-Willians, who identified it with ‘Shaktism alone’,
associated with ‘left-hand’ cults of the divine feminine –
and denigrated it as “Hinduism arrived at its last and worst
stage of medieval developments”. Yet as Hugh Urban so
effectively argues in his book on Tantra – Secrecy Politics and
Power in the Study of Religion, both ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Tantrism’
were not merely constructs imposed by a colonizing power
but rather dialectical co-constructs of coloniser and
colonised – both of whom sought to create unifying
categories for the rich and diverse currents of Indian
cultural religious history, indeed to ‘imagine’ India as such,
and as a ‘nation’. Tantra is for Urban an example of what
Max Mueller long ago described as “that world wide circle,