Tantra and “folk”/“tribal” traditions in South and Southeast Asia often highlight intersections, stratifications, and superimpositions of liminal and transgressive practices, as well as a tension between the “margins” and the “centre(s)”. Transgression and danger have been part of the ritual praxis at the social and geographical “margins”, although they were often appropriated by kingship to spread and legitimate cultural and political ideas.
Liminal ritual praxis led the adept to a worldly self-realisation also through magic-shamanic performances, which often induced ecstasy, possession, trance, religious hysteria, shapeshifting, healing capacities, “white” and “black” magic powers, etc. Evidence of these performances is attested in myths, folk and oral traditions, visual and performative arts, rituals, and festivals in the Tantra-influenced “marginal” cultures of South and Southeast Asia.
Tantric traditions challenge the dualistic view of the cosmos as an opposition between purity and impurity. They violate and subvert what is perceived as orthopraxy by the mainstream Indic religiosity, thereby emerging as an inestimable source of power. Transgressive and dangerous performances mirror the resilience and the memory of a cross-cultural negotiation between indigenous people and mainstream traditions that culminated in the rise of various regional and supra-regional/cross-cultural cults across South and Southeast Asia.
Through a multidisciplinary approach, this panel aims to shed light on experiences, practices and practitioners that have been frequently alienated and marginalised in the mainstream Indic religious discourse across South and Southeast Asia, and also insufficiently studied by modern scholarship. Particular attention will be paid to the cross-cultural dialectic between mainstream and intersecting magic-shamanic “marginal” phenomena across history and geography, and their instantiations in textual corpora, myths, folk and oral traditions, visual and performative arts, rituals, and festivals.
This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with tantric practitioners in rural West Bengal and Sikkim, India, including Nepali traditional healers known as jhākris and mātās. The uniquely situated cultural contexts of Nepali traditional healers who live in the Indo-Nepali borderland areas of the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim encourage distinctly localized forms of healing praxis. Similar to other tantric practitioners throughout South Asia, traditional healers in the Indo-Nepali borderland region are ambivalently viewed by local residents as having the ability to heal as well as the ability to curse or to inflict harm, due to their association with what are perceived as questionable tantric methods.
Drawing from oral narratives and ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the dialectical intersection of indigenous magical-shamanic orientations with the syncretic Vajrayāna Buddhist and Śākta-tantra systems adopted by Nepali traditional healers. This paper thus presents reflections on South Asian village-based forms of folk tantric healing, which intersects with indigenous Himalayan shamanic healing modalities.
This paper is part of the panel RESILIENCE OF TANTRIC, MAGIC, AND SHAMANIC PRACTICES AT THE 'MARGINS' OF SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS, SESSION
This paper discusses how Tantric conceptions of sound, and sonic manifestations of Tantric ideology, are embodied and performed in contemporary Bengali lineages.
Tantric traditions have been predominantly studied through the analysis of (primarily Sanskrit) texts. Indological scholarship has the pervasive tendency to locate ‘authentic’ Tantra in a lost, premodern past.
Music and dance, songs and sung stories, in a variety of languages, represent an important component of lived religion in Tantric communities. Attempting to understand Tantric traditions solely through philology and iconography, will miss out on those sensory media and technologies of communication that are often most central to the practitioners themselves: the aural fields of Tantric expression.
Singing features ubiquitously in the history of Tantric communities as well as in the living practices of contemporary lineages, urging us to take aural media into serious consideration for a global anthro-history of Tantra. This is especially relevant when dealing with Bengali esoteric lineages. Esoteric lyrics, in the form of dohās, padas, and gān, have accompanied the development of Bengali literature (Cakrabarti 1990, 13). These songs are often studied as ‘poems’, i.e. as objects rather than events, although they are frequently preceded by musical indicators (rāga, sur, tāl).
Sounds have been often treated as ornamental or secondary in the study of religions. However, citing Ruth Illman (2019): “We need to realize that music, and the arts in general, are not just ornaments or illustrations of something more profoundly important to religion, but they are aspects of religious engagement in their own right”. Religion scholars interested in sound studies are giving a new emphasis on aural media, encouraging a “sonic turn” in the study of religions (Hackett 2012, 2018). This paper is theoretically embedded in this debate in the academic fields of religion and multisensory research (Van Ede 2009).
In modern Bengal, aural media, oral literature, and Tantric religiosity are inseparably interwoven. Primarily studied by ethnomusicologists and by area specialists, aural-oral aspects of Tantric ideologies in Bengal rarely enter wider debates in the field of Tantric studies, remaining at the margins of Tantra scholarship.
In this paper, (1) I propose some reasons why aural media have covered a marginal role in the study of Tantric traditions; and (2) I address aural media as practices of sonic liberation that are embedded in Tantric ideology. I suggest that embodied techniques of the voice, dancing body and percussion instruments, produce ecstatic states referred to as samādhi. A complex religious acoustemology rooted in Tantric conceptions of the body and cosmic vibration (nād) will emerge through Bengali sources as well as from ethnographic material drawn from extensive multi-site fieldwork (2011-2019) among singers-practitioners in West Bengal, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands.
Around the Tenth century, the Kaula Tantra praxis switched from blood sacrifice to a mystic-erotic ritual centred on the yoni pūjā (worship of the vulva). This esoteric sexual path emerged as a homologation of the blood-centred path. Both had their roots in the Purāṇic myth of Satī’s sacrifice, which also provides the narrative for the origins of the śakti pīṭhas (seats of power) across the Indian Subcontinent. In Assam these two Tantric paths aimed to gratify the goddess Kāmākhyā, whose symbol is the yoni preserved inside her shrine on Nīlācala—a mountain famous for its connection with death, magic, and the alchemical tradition.
Blood offerings and erotic rituals focus on the human body as a source of sexual fluids necessary to obtain siddhis (accomplishments). In this paper, the connection between Tantra and the alchemical tradition of Nīlācala will be discussed in order to explain the encounter between Brahmanism and magic. Firstly, the concept of siddhi as ‘magical power’ will be examined in the light of studies on witchcraft and magic (e.g., Ronald Hutton 2017); then, the intersection of ‘folk’ magic and Brahmanical ritual praxis in Assam will be considered as the source of the peculiar cult of the yoni of Kāmākhyā. From this discussion, Assamese Tantra will emerge as a religious phenomenon that crosses socio-cultural boundaries and encompasses apparently irreconcilable categories.