
Contents
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“The Mingled Perfume of Love and Worship, Sex and Religion”: Tantra in the British Literary Imagination “The Mingled Perfume of Love and Worship, Sex and Religion”: Tantra in the British Literary Imagination
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Vampires, Villains, and Tantris: Sir Richard Burton and Tantra Vampires, Villains, and Tantris: Sir Richard Burton and Tantra
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Debauchery in the Search For God: Tantra and British Women Writers Debauchery in the Search For God: Tantra and British Women Writers
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The Law of the Threshold: Mindless Violence and Mysterious Sexuality in the Works of Flora Annie Steel The Law of the Threshold: Mindless Violence and Mysterious Sexuality in the Works of Flora Annie Steel
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The Lure of the Forbidden: Tantra in the Indian Literary Imagination The Lure of the Forbidden: Tantra in the Indian Literary Imagination
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Skull-bearers and Sannyāsī Rebels: Kāpālikas, Tāntrikas, and Other Nefarious Characters in the Works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee Skull-bearers and Sannyāsī Rebels: Kāpālikas, Tāntrikas, and Other Nefarious Characters in the Works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
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The Mother's Day is Past: The Failure of Revolutionary Nationalism in Tagore's Fiction The Mother's Day is Past: The Failure of Revolutionary Nationalism in Tagore's Fiction
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The “precariousness of Power”: Imagining and Subverting the Nation The “precariousness of Power”: Imagining and Subverting the Nation
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3 India's Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination
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Published:October 2003
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Abstract
This chapter explores the realm of the popular imagination, focusing on the often wildly exaggerated and exoticized image of Tantra in Victorian novels and Indian popular literature. It examines the rich confluence of Orientalist constructions, colonial paranoia, and poetic license that fed into the literary portrayals, both Eastern and Western, of the seedy Indian underworld in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tantra might be said to lie at the deepest core of this world, as “India's darkest heart.” The genre of the novel played a crucial role in the rise of nationalism, both in Europe and in the colonies, throughout the modern period. One of the most important figures in the construction of Tantra in the literary imagination—and in the modern imagining of Tantra in Western popular culture as a whole—was Sir Richard Francis Burton. This chapter also considers Tantra in the works of British women writers, as well as the works of the Bengali poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.
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