The Modern Frame

In 1817, replying in print to a pandit from Madras, Ram Mohan Roy wrote this about the worship of the goddess:

“In the worship of Kali, human sacrifices, the use of wine, criminal intercourse, and licentious songs are included: the first of these practices has become generally extinct; but it is believed that there are parts of the country where human victims are still offered. Debauchery, however universally forms the principal part of the worship of her followers. Nigam and other Tantras may satisfy every reader of the horrible tenets of the worshippers of the two latter deities.”

He was forty-four. Eleven years later he founded the Brahmo Sabha, on 20 August 1828, in a house in north Calcutta, and the conventional histories make that the opening of the modern period in Hindu religion.

In the same collected volume, in a passage on the Gayatri, Roy quotes the Mahanirvana Tantra as scriptural authority, approvingly, and his own translation of it ends: “Any one, whether a householder or not, whether a Brahmun or not, all have equal right to the use of these texts as found in the Tuntru.”

The denunciation is his own prose. The endorsement is his own translation of a text he treated as scripture, and it is the same text the next section of this chapter has to call a probable eighteenth-century fabrication. The modern period begins, for this tradition, in that contradiction.

The reformer who cited the Tantras

Roy’s nineteenth-century biographers said so plainly, which is more than most of his twentieth-century admirers have. Sitanath Tattvabhushan wrote that Roy held the law books, Puranas and Tantras to be of minor importance and acceptable only where they agreed with the Vedas, and then added that “as regards the higher Puranas and Tantras, he seems to have penetrated the gorgeous imagery that clothes their thoughts and reached the fundamental principles underlying their teachings.” Brajendranath Seal put it with no hedging at all: “not only the Vedas, but also the Smritis, Puranas and Tantras are employed as sacred authorities by the Raja quite in accordance with the Hindu canons of scriptural interpretation.”

The text he leaned on hardest is itself a puzzle of exactly this period. The Mahanirvana Tantra, which Roy quoted repeatedly and which his religious guide Hariharananda Bharati is sometimes said to have written, has not been traced in any tantric source before the eighteenth century. J. D. M. Derrett dated it to around 1773 to 1780 and called it a juridical fabrication with reformist motives. The Adi Brahmo Samaj published it in 1876.

So the first thing to say about the modern frame is that the reformers were inside the material they were reforming. The Brahmo attack on goddess worship was also contested in print at the time: Brian Pennington has used the Bengali biweekly Samachar Chandrika of the 1830s as the counter-archive, an anti-reformist paper that opposed Roy, opposed the proposed ban on sati, and defended Kali puja.

The movement that actually went after Tantra

If the chapter wants a clean case of a modern Hindu reform movement attacking Tantra, it is not the Brahmos.

Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in Bombay on 10 April 1875 and published the Satyarth Prakash the same year, revised in 1882. Its eleventh chapter is a demolition of the Indian sects, and the section on the Vama Margis is unmistakable. He quotes the five Ms and gives their source. He quotes a verse he attributes to the Mahanirvana Tantra on drinking until one falls down. He names the Kularnava, the Rudrayamala, the Uddisa Tantra. Elsewhere in the same book, in the third chapter’s list of works a student should not read, he puts “all Tantras”. And he closes the Vama Margi passage: “Very few people indeed are there in this world who are so insane and [so] idiotic as these Vaama Margis !!!” The bracket is this chapter’s; the edition cited reads “do idiotic”, which is plainly a misprint.

That is the polemic. It came from inside the tradition, in Hindi, from a Gujarati sannyasi, and it has nothing to do with any Englishman.

What the law actually did

The received picture has a colonial state suppressing Tantra. The legal record does not support it, and saying so costs this chapter nothing.

This chapter looked for a colonial statute naming Tantra, Shakta worship or any tantric rite, and found none. The Obscene Publications Act of 1925, which rewrote sections 292 and 293 of the Indian Penal Code, carried an express exception for any book, drawing or painting “kept or used bona fide for religious purposes” and for representations “on or in any temple, or on any car used for the conveyance of idols.” The obscenity law of colonial India wrote temple imagery out of its own scope.

The Thuggee and Dacoity Suppression Acts of 1836 to 1848 are the campaign usually cited, because the British described the thugs as fanatical worshippers of Kali. The statutes themselves mention neither Kali nor religion nor religious practice; they are gang-membership and jurisdiction statutes. Kim Wagner’s study treats thuggee as a form of banditry arising in a particular economic and geographic setting, and argues its history need no longer be confined to the study of how the British represented it.

The human-sacrifice campaign was real and it was elsewhere. It was directed at the meriah sacrifice of the Khonds in the Orissa hill tracts, through the Meriah Agency, and the contemporary account of Khond religion published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1852, by the officer who ran the suppression, does not mention Kali at all.

One colonial statute did criminalise a Hindu ritual: the Bengal Sati Regulation, passed on 4 December 1829. Roy campaigned for it.

The press, and the end of a convenient story

What the colonial period did to Tantra was not suppress it. It printed it.

The Anandashrama Sanskrit Series began at Pune in 1888 and ran to 144 books by 1942. The Chowkhamba series began at Benares in 1892. Gaekwad’s Oriental Series began at Baroda in 1916. The Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies began at Srinagar in 1911, under the Research Department of the Kashmir State, and the next volume of this treatise follows what it did. John Woodroffe’s Tantrik Texts began at Calcutta in 1913 and ran to twenty-two volumes, among them the Kularnava Tantra, the Tantraraja, the Kamakalavilasa and the Kaula and Other Upanisads with Bhaskararaya’s commentaries.

Two dates in that list matter more than the rest for this treatise.

Bhaskararaya’s Setubandha, the commentary on the Nityasodasikarnava, was printed as number 56 of the Anandashrama series at Pune in 1908. The Parasurama Kalpasutra with Ramesvara’s commentary, and the Nityotsava of Umanandanatha as its supplement, were edited by A. Mahadeva Sastri and published at Baroda in 1923 as numbers 22 and 23 of Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, a state-funded programme under the Gaekwads.

The core ritual literature of Srividya was therefore sitting in public research libraries, in Sanskrit, at state and university presses, for most of a century before the complaint of inaccessibility became common. Chapter 5 returns to what that does to the usual account of open access. The scarce thing was never the text.

Arthur Avalon was not one man

Sir John Woodroffe was born in Calcutta on 15 December 1865, read at University College, Oxford, was called to the Bar in 1889, and sat as a puisne judge of the Calcutta High Court from 1904 to 1922. He officiated briefly as Chief Justice of Bengal in November 1915 and was knighted that year for his services as a puisne judge. He published as Arthur Avalon from 1913, and under his own name alongside it from about 1918, dropping the pseudonym in the early 1920s.

Kathleen Taylor’s study of him argues that the Sanskrit expertise in the Avalon books came substantially from Atal Bihari Ghose, a Calcutta lawyer and a disciple of Sivacandra Vidyarnava, and that Woodroffe could not read the language fluently though he had studied it. Others worked on the books too: Sivacandra Vidyarnava himself, Jnanendralal Majumdar, Vimalananda Svami. Woodroffe’s “Preface to the First Edition” of Shakti and Shakta, as it stands in the third edition of 1929, speaks of “one of my friends who will not permit me to mention his name”, and says “I do not desire sole credit for what is as much their work as mine.” The preface was rewritten between printings: the 1918 first edition names the same man only by two initials, which the scans read differently, and by what it calls his Rishi name, adding that “his modesty will not permit me to mention any other.” Both printings are out of copyright and can be read directly.

No quantification of the split was found in the sources available to this chapter, and this chapter will not attempt one. What the episode shows is the shape of the whole period in miniature: an English judge and a Bengali lawyer producing, under a pseudonym, books that gave Indian readers their own tradition back through a Western mediator. Taylor’s own word for it is paradox.

Was there a Hinduism to have a modern period

Underneath all of this is an argument the chapter cannot duck, because the scholars who have spent their careers on it do not agree.

Romila Thapar holds that a unified Hinduism was assembled out of disparate groups, that the consciousness of it came from being the subordinate other, and that the reformers worked to a model whose subconscious template was Semitic religion. Richard King argues that Hinduism as a single world religion is a nineteenth-century creation shaped by Christian assumptions about what a religion must have, while insisting that Brahmin informants co-produced it and that the colonial subject was not merely passive.

David Lorenzen rejects the whole frame. The claim that Hinduism was invented by European colonisers after 1800, he writes, “is false.” A Hindu identity sharpened through rivalry with Muslims and was firmly established long before 1800, and his evidence is the vernacular poets: Kabir, Eknath, Vidyapati. Andrew Nicholson puts the unification earlier still and inside Indian philosophy, in the Vedanta doxographers of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, Vijnanabhiksu and Madhava and Madhusudana Sarasvati, who treated Vedanta and Samkhya and Yoga, and the worshippers of Vishnu and Shiva and Shakti, as separate rivers running to one ocean.

Will Sweetman attacks the question from a different side: generalisations about Orientalism drawn from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be projected backwards, and until the earlier European record is examined properly, nobody can establish the causal link between colonial power and European knowledge of Hinduism at all. Brian Pennington takes the middle: a key moment around 1780 to 1830, but an encounter including Indian resistance and agency, not a British invention.

One of these is directly about Srividya. Elaine Fisher studies sixteenth and seventeenth century south India and argues that sectarian communities worked as distinct public spheres, interacting through polemic and patronage, and that sectarianism was the vehicle of the earliest expressions of Hinduism as a unified religion rather than a fragmentation of an earlier unity. Among her sources is an unpublished ritual manual, the Saubhagyacandratapa of Nilakantha Diksita, an insider’s account of the esoteric Srividya tradition by a man who practised it.

This treatise does not adjudicate. What it takes from the argument is a caution: a volume that opens by saying the modern period began in 1828 should know that the date is a convention, that several serious historians would move it by four hundred years, and that the term Bengal Renaissance is itself contested.

After the princes

Independence changed the material conditions, and the mechanisms are specific enough to name.

The privy purses guaranteed to the former rulers by Articles 291 and 362 of the Constitution survived a first attempt at abolition: the bill passed the Lok Sabha on 2 September 1970 and failed in the Rajya Sabha three days later. A presidential order de-recognising every ruler was struck down by the Supreme Court on 15 December 1970. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which commenced on 28 December 1971, did the work: it deleted both articles, inserted Article 363A, and abolished the privy purses outright.

Temple administration moved to the state earlier and more slowly. In Madras the chain runs from the Hindu Religious Endowments Act of 1923, re-enacted in 1925 and replaced in 1927, to the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act of 1951, which turned the board into an executive department, to the Tamil Nadu Act of 1959 that still governs. Kerala’s Travancore-Cochin Act came in 1950.

The check on all this came in 1954, when a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court decided the Shirur Mutt case. It struck down the section requiring a trustee to follow the Commissioner’s instructions on surplus income, the section restricting what remained of that surplus, the sections reaching a mahant’s personal gifts and the appointment of a manager, and the whole chapter empowering the state to notify an institution into direct management. It held the annual contribution to be a tax and void for want of legislative competence. It upheld general supervision, budgeting and record-keeping. And it observed that a law taking the right of administration away from a religious denomination altogether and vesting it in another authority would violate Article 26.

What this looked like on the ground is best seen in one case. In January 1951 the Raja of Ettaiyapuram was simultaneously fighting a High Court challenge over the Madras Estates Abolition Act, which took effect on 3 January that year, a district court suit to stop the Endowments Board installing an executive officer over the temple he was hereditary trustee of, and suits over whether a whole town was temple property. Estate abolition, temple takeover and local government arrived together.

Where the people went

The last of the conditions is the one most often described loosely, so it is worth getting the shape right.

The United States abolished national-origin quotas in 1965, and the Indian-born population there roughly doubled each decade from 1960 to 1990 and rose fivefold between 1980 and 2000. Pew’s analysis of recent census data puts the Indian population of the United States at about 4.9 million in 2023, of whom two thirds were immigrants, down from 73 per cent in 2000. The 2021 census of England and Wales counted 1,864,318 people in the Indian ethnic group. Canada’s 2021 census counted nearly 2.6 million South Asians, with India the most common place of birth.

But the largest concentrations of Indian nationals are not in any of those places. On the Indian Ministry of External Affairs’ own tables, which carry no date and exist in two versions that do not agree, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia together account for around six million. That is labour migration, not settlement, and it does not build the same institutions. The distinction matters for a volume about how a tradition travels, and the diaspora chapter takes it up.

What actually changed

The tradition was not in darkness before any of this. The medieval lineages transmitted the practice for centuries, and the secrecy was a discipline rather than a defect.

What changed is narrower and harder. The texts went into print, which means the question of access stopped being about possession and started being about instruction. The state took over the temples and the land under them, which means the economics of transmission changed. A vocabulary for describing Hindu religion as one thing came into use, which the tradition has argued about ever since. And the argument about who may practise, which this treatise has followed from much earlier, acquired a new instrument: printing, which does not check anybody’s qualifications.

The seven chapters that follow take the pieces in turn. The next one goes to a temple on the Hooghly that no respectable Brahmin would serve, and to a night on which a priest worshipped his own wife.

Roy called the Tantras horrible and quoted them as scripture. The modern period has not finished with that argument.