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The role of women and ideas of gender are fundamental components of all religious traditions. Tantric traditions in particular offer a unique perspective on women's participation in religious traditions since they frequently incorporate worship of Goddesses, along with ordinary women as participants in religious rites. This book examines the representations of women within Tantra using a case study of a selection of Hindu Tantric texts from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries in Northeast India. Arguing for a nuanced perspective of women in Tantra, this book presents evidence for women's enhanced status in some traditions of Tantra, with women in the roles of guru and initiate. This book also addresses images of women within the Tantric rite of sexual union, arguing for multiple versions and motivations for this notorious practice. Especially this book addresses issues of discourse and speech, women's speech and speech about women, suggesting the imbrication of women's bodies within ideas of women's speech. This book examines a number of Tantric texts that have so far not been translated into Western languages. One appendix delineates the historical context for fifteenth through eighteenth century in the Northeast region of India and also surveys images of women found across a wide range of Tantric texts. The second appendix gives a chapter by chapter synopsis of the primary text used for this study, the Bṭhannīla Tantra, “The Great Blue Tantra,” a long and so far untranslated Tantric text.

This book explores one of the most remarkable divinities the world has seen—the Hindu goddess Kālī. She is simultaneously understood as a blood-thirsty warrior, a goddess of ritual possession, a Tantric sexual partner, and an all-loving, compassionate Mother. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon, this book focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kālī in both her indigenous South Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnations. Using scriptural history, temple architecture, political violence, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, autobiographical reflection, and the goddess's recent guises on the Internet, the chapters pose questions relevant to our understanding of Kālī, as they illuminate the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross-cultural interpretation.

This book presents a new perspective on the making of Hinduism in Nepal with the first book-length study of Nepal’s goddess Svasthānī and the popular Svasthānīvratakathā textual tradition. In the centuries following its origin as a short local legend in the sixteenth century, the Svasthānīvratakathā developed into a comprehensive Purana text that is still widely celebrated today among Nepal’s Hindus with an annual month-long recitation. This book interrogates the ways in which the Svasthānīvratakathā can be viewed as a medium through which the effects of important shifts in the political and cultural landscape that occurred among Nepal’s ruling elite were taken up by the general public and are evidenced within one decidedly local, lay tradition. Drawing on both archival and ethnographic research, the book begins with a detailed examination of Svasthānī (“the Goddess of One’s Own Place”) and the Svasthānīvratakathā within the shifting literary, linguistic, religious, cultural, and political contexts of medieval and modern Nepal from the sixteenth century to the present. It then widens its scope to explore the complementary and contentious dynamics between Nepal’s heterogeneous Newar Hindu and high-caste hill Hindu communities and those of Nepal as a Hindu kingdom vis-à-vis Hindu India. The Svasthānī tradition serves as a case study for a broader discussion of the making of Hindu religious identity and practice in Nepal and South Asia, and the role of religion in historical political change. This book brings to the fore a neglected vantage point on the master narratives of Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent.

This first three chapters or first third of this book documents the ups and downs in the conflictual correspondence between Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose. They trace the relationship through three phases of their 1920–1937 correspondence, and also compare their correspondence with Freud’s contemporary correspondence with Romain Rolland, noting similar disaffections while documenting in both exchanges Freud’s evasions about India. Psychoanalytic topics covered in these chapters include maternal transference as it relates to Bose’s work, to Freud’s therapeutic work with the poet H. D., to Bose’s and Freud’s treatments of the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal, and to André Green’s “dead mother complex.” The middle three chapters each treat a concept by which Bose sought to challenge Freud, producing conflicts between tham that had a much richer content than either of them realized or cared to elaborate upon. New answers to two questions are posed: why Bose never wrote an article for Freud on his signature concept of “opposite wishes,” the topic of chapter 4; and why Bose chose an icon of Viṣṇu for Freud’s 75th birthday gift rather than a Bengali goddess, which is asked through the last three chapters.