It has commonly been assumed that Hindu Tantra has been a marginal, "underground,” even subversive tradition. It is nonetheless untrue that es' otericism, mysticism, and secrecy — arguably hallmarks o f Tantra— need necessarily imply thar this body o f religious practice has at all times been outside o f the South Asian "mainstream.” In fact, when one looks at the secular literature and art historical data of rhe medieval period, as well as at the religious landscape o f Nepal, whose public and private religion have remained Tantric down to rhe present day, one finds that many if not most Tantric actors are not marginal, and that much Tantric practice is public. This is particularly true in cases where Tantra is the "religion of state” and the king the prime Tantric actor in the kingdom. Here, Tantra and Tantric practices become, in the words o f Robert Levy, "advertised secrets.”
i . Tantric Theories of Kingship: The Heart of the Mandala
Tantric actors in South A sia — who have included Virile Heroes, gurus, monks and nuns, yogins, sorcerers, witches, rulers, royal preceptors, royal chaplains, spmt-mediums, visionary bards, oracle priests, healers, and lay or householder practitioners— may be classified into three main groups: ( 1) Tantric specialists who have received initiation into a textual, teach ing lineage and their generally elite clients; (2) Tantric specialists lacking
formal initiation, whose training is effected through oral transmission (or divine possession) alone, and their generally nonelite clients; (3) house- hold or lay nonspecialists whose personal practice may be qualified as T an tric, but whose goal is liberation rather than supernatural enjoyments. W hile the third category is numerically the largest, lay or householder Tantric practice is generally Msoft core/’ 1 and will therefore not enter significantly into this discussion. O f course, there is overlap among these groups, with householder practitioners, for example, calling upon one or another type of specialist for teachings, guidance, and ritual expertise and mediation. T he purview of the Tantric actor par excellence, the Tantric sovereign, covers all three of these categories Himself a householder prac titioner, he interacts with both elite and popular, “ clerical*' and “sha- manic” 2 practitioners in his public life as a potentate and in his private life as his own person. Apart from the king of Nepal, there are no Hindu Tan tric sovereigns remaining in the world, and it is for this reason, 1 would maintain, that most modern-day scholarly and popular accounts o f Tantra have tended to view it either as little more than popular superstition or “sympathetic magic,” on the one hand, or as a sublime theoretical edifice, on the other, without seeking to describe the relationship between these two types of practice and their respective practitioners.
A central element o f Tantric theory and practice, the mandala is the mesocosmic template through which the Tantric practitioner transacts with and appropriates the myriad energies that course through every level of the cosmos. The K5makal5, Sarpvarta, and Sricakra, already mentioned, are but three among a galaxy of Tantric mandalas that are so many graphic representations of the universe as a clan (kula) of interrelated beings, as an "embodied cosmos.” Here, it is important to note that the mandala was, in its origins, directly related to royal power. Indeed, “ mandala” was simply a term for an administrative unit or county in ancient India3 and has con tinued to bear that meaning since at least the sixth century c.e. in the ex pression “Nepala-Maodala” for the Kathmandu Valley and its surrounding territory.1
The concept of the king as calcravorirn— as both he who turns (vorra- yati) the wheel (cakra) of his kingdom or empire from its center and he whose chariot wheel has rolled around its perimeter without obstruction — is one that goes back to the late Vedic period. Central to this construction of kingship is the notion that the king, standing at the center of his king dom (from which he also rules over the periphery), mirrors the godhead at the center of its realm, its divine or celestial kingdom. However, whereas the godhead's supermundane realm is unchanging and eternal, the terres- trial ruler's kingdom is made so through the “ utopia” of the mandala. As
such, the idealized “constructed kingdom” o f the mandala is the mesocos- mic template berween real landscapes, both geographical and political, and the heavenly kingdom of the godhead, with the person of the king as god on earth constituting the idealized microcosm. Ruling from his capital at the conceptual center of the universe, the king is strategically located at the pivot o f the prime channel o f communication between upper and lower worlds— between the human, the divine, and the demonic — which he keeps “open” through the mediation o f his religious specialists.5
In South Asia the practice of the mandala is tantamount to the mil- lenarian royal conquest of the four directions (djgvijaya), which, beginning with a fire sacrifice (homa), has the king process through the cardinal com- pass points, around the theoretical perimeter of his realm, before returning to his point of origin, which has now been transformed into his royal cap- ital and center of the universe.6 This last detail is an important one, be cause it highlights the king’s dual role as pivot between heaven and earth. On the one hand, he is the microcosmic godhead incarnate, ruling from the center; yet on the other, he is the mundane representative of Every man. struggling against a myriad o f hostile forces that threaten him from the periphery. This latter role is brought to the fore in the Tantric cere monial o f Nepal, in which the ritual performances that reenact the goddess Durga's victory over the enemies o f the gods mobilize every stratum o f so ciety, down to the lowly Pode Sweepers 7
It is here that, in terms o f the practice o f the mandala and o f Tantric practice in general, the king constitutes the link that binds together elite and nonelite practitioners and traditions. In reality, the king's hold on the mandala o f his realm has often been more utopian than real. Conversely, given the intrinsically utopian (belonging to "n o p la ce” ) nature o f the mandala, Tantric practitioners have often flourished, or at least survived, in situations o f political anarchy or oppression; that is, in the absence o f a religiously sanctioned ruler. In this latter case, religious power, when forced to operate on a clandestine level, controls the invisible forces o f the uni verse from the hidden “ center” of the tdnmka’s “ peripheral” shrine, lodge, or forest. It is not for nothing that in India the abbot of a powerful monas tery or leader of a religious order continues to be addressed, down to the present day, as guru-rdja, “ preceptor-king." In this sense, the Tantric prac titioner is a crypto-potentate, transacting like a king with the boundless energy o f the godhead that flows from the elevated center o f his worship mandala. Here, then, we see that the utopia o f the Tantric mandala may serve both to ground legitimate royal authority and power when the king is a Tantric practitioner, as well as to subvert illegitimate power or create a covert nexus o f power when the wrong king or no king is on the throne
2. Kings and Goddesses
The widely advertised secret practices prescribed and described in sacred and secular literature need not necessarily have taken place far from po* litical centers of power or social centers of human activity. So, for ex^ ample, a nineteenth-century tract from Gujarat, likely the work of a mem- ber of the reformist Vai$nava Sw^mTnarSyao movement - a tract whose expressed purpose was to unmask the excesses of Tantric practice— asserts that “every city has one-fourth part o f its population as S§ktas (i.e., tdn- m/cos)— and the ceremonies are performed very secretly in the middle of the night; if a king be a supporter, they are also observed publicly.” 8 A s I will show in the final sections of this chapter, Tantric dissimulation may have played a part in public denials of not particularly secret practices that would have been observed by a broad swath of the population.
What happens when, as appears to have been the case in a number of South Asian kingdoms since the medieval period, a king becomes a Kaula practitioner? What impact does his Kaulism have on the nature of both public and secret ritual? What are the sociopolitical conditions that might foster or support a Kaula royal cultus —what one could call a “Kaula polity” ? In the opening chapter of this book, 1 suggested that “classical” WiaJcu in some way corresponded to the religious productions of what Har- aid Tambs-Lyche has termed “ urban society” 9 in South Asia — the brah- min intelligentsia, a certain Indian aristocracy, and the merchant classes. A — Tantric or Kaula — alternative appears to have emerged out of a seventh- to twelfth'Century “ realization of the ruling class,” during which the ruling aristocracy of north India severed or reduced its socioeconomic ties with “ urban society” in favor of more direct links with farmers and pas- toralists.10 As a means to reinforcing these socioeconomic links with agrar- ian society— to the land, their allies, and their subjects— these rulers em braced the cults of rural tutelary deities. For the Rajput society of western India that is Tam hs'Lyche’s focus, this meant an eschewing of the Sanskri' tized cult of the high Hindu god Siva in favor of close tics with the feu-
lade vis, the clan goddesses of the land, considered to be the source of all life
in an agrarian society.11 This trend enters into the political theory of the 113 1 c.e. Mdnaso/iasa— an encyclopedia attributed to the C5|ukyan ruler Someivara III, whose kingdom comprised much of the Deccan plateau — which adds &dcri, as the eighth element comprising a kingdom, to the stan dard list of seven found in the Arihaiteira of Kauplya. According to this source, a king’s which takes the form of his “command" (d/rid), con- trols the seven other elements.12
1 believe it can be shown that the central Indian kingdoms that were the settings for the documented origins of the Kaula, as well as the post
fifteenth-century Kathmandu Valley kingdoms that revived Kaula prac tice,1 y display the same ruralization pattern as that found in Tambs-Lyches Rajput contexts. It is not my intention here to make the reductionist argument that South Asian agrarian political economies that disfavor ur ban elites have stood at the origin of the various “ Kaula polities”; yet I would suggest that there may be an elective affinity between these socio economic, political, and religious formations, just as there appears to have been between urban society and classical Hindu devotionalism.
O f greater moment for our concerns is the wealth o f empirical histori cal data pointing to the clear emergence o f a public cultus o f powerful mar tial goddesses among the ruling houses o f South Asia in the early medieval period. These tutelary goddesses, which were often identified with the great Goddess Durga or with a group o f Mother goddesses— the Seven Mothers, the Nine Durgas,14 and so o n — were at bottom royal JcuLuiem, goddesses of land and clan that cemented alliances between ruling families (fig. 5*a).15 This is not to say that the high gods of Hinduism disappeared from the royal cultus in this period: it is in the seventh and eighth centu ries precisely that, with the appearance of the first great monumental temples in India, we see the great male gods of Hinduism being sculpturally depicted with the features o f the kings who were their devotees.16 But this identification of king with high god had a limited place in the royal cultus. Vi$nu (as Kf$na, Narasimha, JagannZtha, and later
Rama)
as well as Siva remained at the sacred center precisely in order to afford the king who identified with these high gods a modicum o f transcendence over the al liances and ties to the land that his tutelary goddesses provided.17 But it was the latter group that ratified and energized the pragmatic religious life o f the kingdom as a whole, both as the great family o f the king and his people, and as an embodied cosmos o f people, ancestors, animals, and land. This pattern has been repeated since Malta times in Nepal, where Vi$nu and Siva are the gods o f state (r&$tradevatA) and the goddess Tale ju, the per sonal, tutelary, and lineage goddess (JtukufeitftA) of the rulers o f that king dom .18 T he intimate, even sexual, nature o f the king's relationship to his goddess is underscored by their living arrangement: under the Mallas, Ta- leju, in distinction to the great male gods, resided within the royal palaces, which were at once princely dwellings and goddess temples.19Perhaps the earliest mythic account of a king worshiping a group of 'Tantric** goddesses is that found in certain manuscript traditions of the MBh, in which Arjuna calls upon Durga and a host o f other great G o d desses on the eve of a definitive battle in the great Epic war.20 Slightly ear lier, a classical Tamil poem, the circa 10 0 -3 0 0 c.e. Neiunaivdjai, depicts the relationship between warrior king and warrior goddess by describing the royal bedroom situated at the symbolic heart of the P^odya kingdom.
Figure 5 a R.ii.isrli.ini luUiiif, and popular goddesses portrayed as emanations of Durga Poly chrome, ca 1995.
In this bedroom is a round bed, symbolizing the round Vedic fire altar and the earth, and on this bed is the queen, who lies naked, awaiting the obla tion of soma-semen from her husband. Known as “T h e Clan-founding Goddess'* (fcuia-mutaltfvO, she embodies the Mother goddess to whom her maidservant prays for victory, as well as rhe orvzh/cu (a Tamil term whose semantic field corresponds to that of iakti in Sanskrit) that pervades the
royal capital-fortress. That ananku, transmitted by her to the king each time they have sexual intercourse (kutai), is earned inside of him as the en ergy that wins him victory in battle.21 Nearly all o f the elements of the later
kuladevicults appear to be present in this early Tamil poem.
In the centuries that follow these two literary sources, royal inscriptions o f northern Indian warrior kings first begin to associate the Mothers with w ar— because war, too, is a cause of death— as well as with Skanda, the war god.22 This powerful, but also malevolent, aspect of the great Goddess emerges most prominently in a hymn to Vindhyavdsini, sung by King Ya$o- varman, in the ninth-century c.e. Gaudavaho of VSkpati, in which the
description of this goddess mirrors that o f Can<jik5 and her shrine in the seventh-century Kadambari o f Bdnabhatta 3S well as that of CSmuoda in the eighth-century MdJart-Mad/iava of Bhavabhuti.21 Down to the nine teenth century, the kings of Nepal worshiped the Nine Durgas at the end o f the autumnal festival of the Nine Nights (nawaratrf) precisely because this was the beginning of the season o f military campaigns, which lasted until the onset of the rainy season (fig. 5 b).24
In both Nepal and India, records o f royal’ patronage o f goddess cults and temples multiply during the early medieval period, as evidenced in inscriptions and numismatics,25 with mythologies of the adoption of clan goddesses proliferating. One such goddess is Kubjika, “She W ho Is
Hunched Over," whose medieval cult is richly attested in massive manu script traditions in Kathmandu, where, according to Mark Dyczkowski, the present-day royal cult of the goddess Taleju in fact masks that o f Kubjika. Kubjika's myth, which links her to the royal power of the Kadambas of Konkana (present-day coastal Maharashtra, G oa, and Karnataka), is brief but to the point. A sage named Siddhan5tha comes to the Kadamba capi tal o f Candrapura and initiates the king, named Candraprahha, into the cult o f Kubjika, admonishing him that he have his subjects do the same.26 Another such goddess is Khotilyar, “She W ho Limps/’ a goddess who is worshiped throughout modern-day Gujarat, and who, according to leg end, raised Naughan, the founder o f the Cudasama dynasty, to power in
1025 c.e. (fig. 5.c).Three elements of this goddess's myth are worthy of
note: First, she is a goddess bom in the household of a Charan, a gift o f the great Goddess Jagadamba, “ Mother of the Universe” ; second, she is one of seven sisters who are intimately related to the sixty-four YoginTs, and who
( 3 0 Chapter 5
Figure j.b. NavadurgS masks, NuvaJurgS temple, Theco village, Kathmandu Valiev- Photograph by David Gordon White.
demand and receive blood (buffalo) sacrifice; and third, she elevates Naughan to power after having been gratified by the sacrificial offering of a human child.27 Kubjika and Khodlyar are not the sole Tantric goddesses
marked by a physical deformity. There are also a number of goddesses whose names denote deformed eyes (Virup5k$I, Vikajak$f). It is tantalizing to see in these deformed goddesses the continuation of such earlier am biguous female figures as the Vedic Kunarpnama (“Unbowed"), KuvanpS ("She of Evil Color") of the Sri Lankan Ma/idvamsa, and the Epic Amba, who is transformed into a crooked (kutila) river.78
While South Asian mythology knows of a number of kings with physi cal deformities (the Epic Dhrtara$;ra, Pandu, and SiSupala being three well-known cases in point), none of their deformities appear to be “con genitally" inherited from goddesses. Yet there is a feature of the ritually constructed person of the king that intimately identifies his body, his very being, with that of the Goddess. In the Devi Mahatmya, the great Goddess is generated from the conjoined splendor (te;os) of the great male divini ties.29 According to Thomas Coburn, this image directly parallels—if it
does nor simply appropriate it—the ritual “construction" of a king, from “particles” of the eight divine regents of the directions, as described in the circa first-century b.c.e. Mdnatia Dharma ^dstra.30 This ontological identi
Figure 5 c. Khcxjlyif, kidodevf at the medieval Codiluml dynasty, now regional goddess of Gu- larat. Polychrome, ca 1990.
been a conscious one, even if, in both of these cases, king and goddess arc tributary to male deities.
The South j^sian king has played a dual role through history, both gen erating and revivifying his kingdom from within, and hurling himself out ward to the royal periphery to do battle against the demonic forces of his enemies, and, by extension, disease, famine, and pestilence. T he king’s dual role has mirrored that of the royal Goddess herself, both as symbolic progenetrix of the kingdom at its center and a fearsome female warrior at its periphery. In this latter role, she has long been called Durga, who was first and foremost a warrior goddess, embodied in the walls of the fortress (durga). The very name Durga, MShe W ho Is Difficult of Access"— one of the earliest names found in Hindu literature for the Goddess as a powerful, independent, martial deity— is very likely a derivate of terms for “ fortress," “ stronghold,” or distant, outer battlement. Asko Parpola has in fact argued that Tantric diagrams may have their origin in the ground plans of ancient Bactrian and Harappan palace-fortresses.31 Nowhere do we find such strong evidence for this dual role as in Nepal. The Mallas, the dynasty re