WHAT IS HINDUISM?
relationships on the other. Unable to integrate ‘Marxism’
and ‘Moksha’, Bhattacharya ended up retreating from
Marxism into Humanism whilst at the same time never
reaching for or attaining any feeling sense or experience of
Religious truth.
Nevertheless, the use of tantric religious symbols as
“weapons of insurgency or tools for revolutionary struggle”
(Urban) continued. For meanwhile in Europe, two central
figures – Mircea Eliade and Julius Evola – came to
represent extreme right-wing exponents of the new
Tantrism, held up as the sole tradition capable of providing
a liberating counter-force to the irreligious degeneracy of
Western ‘modernism’. According to Eliade “It is only in
modern societies of the West that non-religious man has
developed fully ... the sacred is the prime obstacle to his
freedom ... he will not be truly free until he has killed the
last god.” Yet like Battacharya – and indeed many other
scholars of Indology – Eliade related Tantra to a “pre-
Aryan popular strata” through which it “made its way into
Hinduism”. In contrast, Evola was no populist but an
aristocratic elitist and ‘conservative revolutionist’ in the
German sense, racist, but with a spiritual rather than Nazi-
biological concept of race:
“Tantrism may lead the way for a Western elite which does
not want to become the victim of ... experiences whereby
an entire civilization is on the verge of being submerged.”