The Shape of the Modern

Seven chapters, and a pattern none of them was looking for.

This volume set out to describe a tradition becoming visible. What it found, chapter by chapter, is that the visibility stopped at the texts, and that the claims made about everything else get strongest exactly where the record gets thinnest.

What the press actually did

The hard, dated, checkable thing that happened to the Tantric literature in the modern period is that it was printed.

Bhaskararaya’s Setubandha came out at Pune in 1908, as number 56 of the Anandashrama Sanskrit Series. The Parasurama Kalpasutra with Ramesvara’s commentary, and the Nityotsava as its supplement, came out at Baroda in 1923 as numbers 22 and 23 of Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, a state-funded programme under the Gaekwads. The Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies began at Srinagar in 1911 and ran to at least eighty-nine numbers, printing the Kamakalavilasa in 1918 and the Vamakesvarimata with Jayaratha’s commentary in 1945. John Woodroffe’s Tantrik Texts began at Calcutta in 1913.

None of this was suppression. No colonial statute naming Tantra could be found; the 1925 obscenity law wrote temple imagery and religious books out of its own scope; the Thuggee Acts mention neither Kali nor religion; the human-sacrifice campaign was aimed at the meriah rite of the Khonds in the Orissa hills, and the contemporary account of Khond religion published in 1852 by the officer who ran the suppression does not name Kali once. The sharpest modern Hindu attack on Tantra in print is Dayananda Saraswati’s, in Hindi, in 1875, from inside the tradition.

And the printing kept going. The six scholars this volume’s seventh chapter surveys put Dyczkowski’s fourteen volumes of the Manthanabhairavatantra, eleven of the Tantraloka with its commentary, the Pratyabhijna texts and the history of the Saiva canon into print and into English, most of it from inside universities where the material had no place in the curriculum when Woodroffe was alive.

What it did not do

A printed sutra does not tell you how to say a syllable, where in the rite it falls, or whether you are allowed to say it at all.

Amritananda of Devipuram, in what his biographer calls a rare public defence of his practice against traditionalists who attacked it, gave the answer this whole volume turns on: “The main problem with books was that the soundtracks were not there.” And then: “Interactivity was not there.”

So the scarce thing was never the text, and the modern period did not make Sri Vidya available. It made the printed corpus available and left initiation exactly where it had been. Every institution in this volume stands somewhere on that gap, and every one of them is harder to see on the near side of it than on the far.

Where the record thins

Lay the chapters side by side and the same shape appears in five of them.

The mathas are named everywhere as the home of Sri Vidya in the South. Kanchi expounds it at length in print. Sringeri will sell a layman a Sri Chakra worship for a fee and names Sri Vidya nowhere in its catalogue. Neither house is recorded conferring Sri Vidya initiation on a lay disciple. Elaine Fisher reads the practice as the personal cult of the Shankaracharyas themselves, and the fourth chapter sets her beside three other witnesses who disagree with her and with each other, and declines to settle between them.

Devipuram says it wants Sri Vidya accessible without limits of gender, caste, creed or faith. On gender there is outside corroboration, and it carries a condition: it comes from an ethnographer who anonymised her site, and it counts only if the fifth chapter’s own identification of that site as Devipuram holds. On caste nobody has counted: no survey, no itemised observation, no named non-Brahmin practitioner at the site in any source this treatise could reach. After four decades the half of the claim that carries the weight rests on the institution’s word and one ethnographer’s unmeasured impression.

Kashmir is called a recovery. Alexis Sanderson, who studied there for six years, records that the Trika had died out in all but its doctrinal superstructure, that no Kashmirian manuscript preserves a Trika manual of worship or initiation, and that the initiated Saiva ritual of Abhinavagupta’s kind, as against that of non-initiated devotees of Siva following Smarta models, had ceased in the valley at about the time his teacher was born. What came back is a library and a way of reading it.

The diaspora is usually described as a global network. On the documented record it is one substantial institution in upstate New York, and two academic treatments of it, one of which takes its biography of the founder from the other. Searching for Sri Vidya bodies in Britain, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the Gulf turned up nothing, which is a limit of the search.

Ramakrishna’s worship of his wife is called the founding scene of the modern tradition. The account of it contains a prayer to Tripurasundari, a seat, sixteen services and a surrender. It contains no Sri Chakra, no nine-enclosure worship, no Srividya mantra and no Srividya lineage. The identification of the rite as Sri Vidya is a later theological reading made inside the Order, set out in an uncited article by one swami writing for the Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi, and it is not the Order’s uniform position. It is interesting as exactly that. How early the reading attached to the night, the second chapter was not able to establish.

Five chapters, one shape. Where the practice is claimed, the documentation stops.

What the institutions do not write down

There is a second silence in this volume, and it is not about doctrine.

Swami Lakshman Joo died in September 1991. In January 1990 the Kashmiri Pandits left the valley, somewhere between about ninety thousand and a hundred and sixty thousand of them on the academic figures, with higher estimates reported inside the literature as well as outside it, and the causes still disputed. The trust that carries his teaching is headquartered in New Delhi and describes itself as existing to spread Kashmir Shaivism outside the Kashmir valley. Its branches are named for a winter capital and a national capital, though the Jammu presence predates the exodus, since he had wintered there since 1970. And on every page of its own account of his life that this treatise could read, and on every page of the Lakshmanjoo Academy’s, and in Sanderson’s essay too, 1990 goes unmentioned.

The geography of the institution testifies to what its prose leaves out. That is worth noticing as a habit and not only as an instance, because the same habit runs through the volume. Devipuram’s pages describe an open door and not a congregation. The mathas publish lectures and not lists of initiates. The Ramakrishna Order observes an annual Shodashi Puja and its flagship page on Sarada Devi does not use the word.

An institution’s records are made to carry what the institution wants carried forward. This is not a complaint; it is a description of what the sources are. It means that a history of this tradition built only from the tradition’s own publications will reproduce the tradition’s own shape, including its gaps, and will mistake those gaps for the absence of anything to say.

Two models, and what neither can show

The volume’s middle chapters set up a contrast that is usually drawn as a choice between discipline and access.

On one side the mathas, where the teaching stays inside initiation and the discipline of restricted access is held to preserve what is transmitted. On the other Devipuram, whose trust says it wants Sri Vidya accessible to all without limitations of gender, caste, creed or faith, and whose founder put the mantras online because, in his words, books had no soundtracks.

The honest finding is that the record cannot show either model doing what it says. The mathas are not documented initiating laymen, which is consistent with their own account of what the discipline requires. Devipuram is not documented on caste at all. Each side’s strongest evidence is its own description of itself.

What can be shown is narrower and more interesting. Devipuram has a priesthood, and women are in it. Rush has an open sanctum, a non-Brahmin founder, and women chanting the thousand names that the Smarta tradition reserves to men. At Rush what is documented as removed is caste and gender. At Devipuram what is documented is gender. In both, what was kept is diksha, the initiation that makes a person a member of a tradition rather than a reader of it. The gate stayed; the queue outside it changed.

The word for the people in between

The term everyone reaches for, for the figures in the last two chapters, is scholar-practitioner. It is worth knowing where it comes from before leaning on it.

This treatise has not traced its origin. It is said to be used in education studies and in Buddhist studies, which this treatise has not verified and does not rely on, and in the scholarship on Hindu Tantra this treatise found it almost nowhere. The one prominent appearance located is critical. In his introduction to Tantra in Practice, David Gordon White catalogues three reactions to the colonial caricature of Tantra, all of which he faults for inheriting its essentialism: those who deny such a thing ever existed, the for-profit purveyors of Tantric sex, and in between them “Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Asian and Western,” who rehabilitated the image by emphasising the refined philosophical speculation that grew out of the practices they were playing down.

The term is also, now, a self-description: Christopher Wallis’s own site opens by calling him a Sanskritist and scholar-practitioner of Classical Tantra.

And White’s objection is narrower than it is usually made to sound. Elsewhere in the same introduction he writes that the insider’s view must of necessity also be incorporated into our description. What he is against is sanitising a tradition in order to defend it.

That is the knife edge this whole volume walks along. The people who did most to put the literature into print were, several of them, initiates. Dyczkowski wrote that he went to Kashmir to study at the feet of the last living master and was blessed with initiation. Baumer’s study deepened after an initiation which she dates to 1987 and a reviewer to 1986. Corinne Dempsey took a mantra from the teacher she spent five years studying, and said so. P. Pratap Kumar discloses no initiation anywhere in his article, its notes or its acknowledgements, and writes that he did not go to Rush to experience Aiya’s authority. Both kinds of scholarship are in this volume, and the difference between them is not that one is compromised and the other clean. It is that one has access to things the other cannot see, and the other can say things the first will not.

Who did the work

If the modern period has a plain achievement, it is a shelf.

The Kashmir Series from 1911. The Baroda and Pune editions. Woodroffe and Atal Bihari Ghose, whose name did not go on the books. Jaideva Singh, who on Sanderson’s account went through every sentence of those texts with Lakshman Joo. Mark Dyczkowski’s fourteen volumes of the Kubjika scripture and his eleven of the Tantraloka. Alexis Sanderson’s reconstruction of how the canon came together. Bettina Baumer in Varanasi, Paul Muller-Ortega at Rochester, Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s three hundred and forty-nine recordings in an open repository.

And Sarada Devi, who held no office in the order that grew around her husband, who gave initiation for thirty-four years, and whose disciples a list compiled in 1953 by Brahmachari Akshaychaitanya numbers at 1,176, which Jeffery Long, reporting it at second hand, reads as probably more direct disciples than Ramakrishna had.

What this volume had to unlearn

A word about the chapters themselves, because the reader is owed it.

Every chapter in this volume has been rebuilt, and the rebuilding found errors of fact that had been standing in print. Amritananda’s death was given as 28 August 2015, a date for which no source could be found. Dyczkowski’s great edition was called twelve volumes, following an error that circulates under the correct catalogue number. Ramakrishna was credited with sixty-four Tantric disciplines, when the sixty-four are texts and not rites. Devipuram was said to worship without priests, and a scholar who lived at the site the fifth chapter argues is Devipuram describes a priestess conducting the daily rite. Its sensuous images were said to have drawn external protest, and the documented pressure on them came from inside.

None of those were inventions of malice. Each was a thing everybody says, repeated without being checked. That is how a tradition’s received account gets built, and a treatise that wants to be read in fifty years has to say so when it finds itself inside the process.

The shape

So here is what the modern period looks like, laid flat.

A literature that was never secret in the way the story says went into print between 1908 and 1945, and into English across the century that followed. The institutions that hold the practice did not open in step with it, and most of them cannot be shown doing what they say they do, in either direction. A reform movement attacked the tradition in Hindi and a colonial state mostly left it alone. The sharpest documented openings happened at the edges: a physicist’s temple outside Visakhapatnam, and a Sri Lankan architect’s barn in New York.

And the thing that makes a practitioner is still a thing that happens between two people in a room, which no press has ever printed and no census has ever counted.

Volume VII asks what happens next.

The shelf is full. The question the modern period has not answered is who is allowed to take anything off it, and the tradition’s own records are the last place to look for a straight answer.