Desire, blood and power - Georges Bataille and the study of hindu Tantra in Northeast India

Although he described his own work as a kind of “atheology,” more concerned with God’s death than with God’s existence, Georges Bataille must be counted as one of the 20th century’s most important theorists of religion. From his own Theory of Religion to his work on mysticism, sacrifice and erotic spirituality, Bataille has influenced a wide range of theorists from philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to anthropologists and historians of religions such as Michael Taussig and Amy Hollywood.

To date, however, most of the work on Bataille and religion has focused on his implications for the study of Christianity, particularly Christian mysticism, a subject that interested Bataille himself intensely. With a few exceptions, there has been little effort to explore the implications of Bataille’s work for the study of Hinduism, Buddhism or any other Asian tradition. This is ironic and unfortunate, given Bataille’s own interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Hindu traditions such as yoga and Tantra.

As Andrew Hussey notes in his study of Bataille’s mysticism, “although Bataille disparaged any appropriation of Eastern methods which recognized any form of cephalic ‘sommet’ as the ‘point seul’ of meditation, and although the vocabulary he uses to describe the movement of inner experience belongs largely to the Western tradition, Bataille was well-read in Classical Hinduism and Buddhism.”

Bataille was quite familiar with the works of Alexandra David-Néel on Tibetan Buddhism, Mircea Eliade’s work on yoga, and Romain Roland’s biographies of the Hindu saints Shri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. He was particularly interested, for example, in the Hindu goddess Kali, dark mother of time and death, whom he described as the goddess of “terror, of destruction, of night and of chaos.”

Moreover, in late 1938 and 1939, Bataille also began to practice yoga and meditation himself, a practice that, he recalls, helped him realize the “fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism” and the “infinite capacity for reversal” that characterizes his own atheological form of mystical “inner experience.” In short, Bataille’s own work on religion was significantly influenced by his encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism; and in turn, his insights into religious experience have the potential to shed some useful light on non-Western traditions, as well.

In this chapter, I will focus on the tradition of Hindu Tantra and goddess worship in northeast India, employing but also critically rethinking several of Bataille’s key insights into the relations between eroticism, sacrifice and transgression. Specifically, I will examine the worship of the goddess Kamakhya and her temple in Assam, which is revered as one of the oldest, most important “power centers” or seats of the goddess in South Asia and, indeed, as the locus of the goddess' yoni or sexual organ. As the very embodiment of divine desire (kama), Kamakhya temple is also the site of the goddess' annual menstruation, which takes place for three days each summer and is the occasion of her most important festival. At the same time, Assam is also often identified as the original homeland of Hindu Tantra and particularly of Tantric sexual rituals, which involve explicit transgressions of conventional social boundaries and the oral consumption of menstrual and other sexual fluids as the ultimate source of spiritual power.

In my analysis, I will by no means attempt to simplistically apply Bataille’s work to this South Asian example. Instead, I want to use but also critically modify some of Bataille's basic ideas of erotism, the link between sensuality, death and mystical experience, and his analysis of sexual and religious transgression. Bataille, I will suggest, is extremely useful for understanding the logic of transgression and the systematic use of impurity in Hindu Tantra. Whereas the Tantric traditions have long been misunderstood by modern scholars – both Indian and Western—Bataille gives us some key insights into the role of ritual transgression in Tantric practice. Drawing on Bataille, I will suggest that Tantric practice involves a kind of “unlimited transgression” that aims to shatter not just conventional social norms but the very boundaries of the finite self in intense union with the divine. However, as various feminist authors have pointed out, Bataille’s work reflects a consistent masculine and phallic bias, with a general lack of attention to female sexuality or to women as active agents. In the case of Hindu Tantra in Assam, I will argue, female sexuality holds a central place and plays an integral role in the larger phenomena of transgression, expenditure and ecstatic religious experience. As such, we can also use this South Asian example and Hindu concepts of desire and power to critically re-imagine Bataille’s work for the contemporary study of religion, as well.

Matrix of Power: Kamakhya and The Shakta Pithas in South Asian History

Since at the least the 8th century, the temple of the mother goddess Kamakhya has been revered as one of the oldest, most important and most powerful seats of goddess worship and Hindu Tantra in South Asia. As the locus of the goddess own sexual organ (yoni) Kamakhya temple is literally the “mother of all seats of power.” In this sense, Kamakhya temple is can be called the ”matrix of power,” as both the maternal womb (matr, etymologically related to Latin mater and English matrix) that gives birth to the universe and all its elements (matrkas).

From its origins, however, this temple is intimately tied to the dual themes of sacrificial violence and sexual transgression. Indeed, it is a stunning illustration of what Bataille calls the “similarity between the act of love and sacrifice” and the ways in which the petit mort of sexual union often mirrors the larger death of ritual killing. According to a widespread series of myths that appears in the Hindu epics and mythological literature, the origin of Kamakhya goes as follows: Once upon a time Lord Shiva (the cosmic destroyer in the Hindu pantheon) was married to the goddess Sati. However, Sati’s father, Daksha, very much disliked Shiva, who is a frightening, wild, outsider deity; so when Daksha threw a huge sacrificial feast and invited all the other gods, he intentionally did not invite Shiva. This dis-invitation was such a profound insult that Sati threw herself onto the sacrificial fire, making herself the tragic victim of the ritual. Shiva then went into a rage, destroyed the entire ritual, and beheaded Daksha, thus making his father-in-law the ironic victim of his own sacrifice. Shiva then carried the corpse of Sati away on his shoulder, and his anger was so intense that it threatened to destroy the entire universe. To defuse the situation, the other gods dismembered Sati’s body, and the various pieces of her corpse fell in different holy places of India, which then became the “seats of power” or shakta pithas. Among the holiest of these became the seat of her yoni, which fell in Assam, and it is here that Shiva and Sati eternally reside in secret sexual union. As Lord Shiva declares in one 11th century text from Assam, “in this most sacred pitha…the goddess is secretly joined with Me. Sati’s sexual organ, which was severed and fell there, became a stone; and there Kamakhya is present.”

Since at least the 11th or 12th century, Kamakhya temple has been famous not simply as the primary seat of the goddess’ sexual organ but also as the locus of her annual menstruation. To this day, the most important festival here is Ambuvaci Mela, which celebrates the goddess’ menstruation during the summer month of Asadha (June-July). Occurring at the beginning of the monsoon season, with the coming of the rains after the heat of summer, Ambuvaci marks the flow of the goddess’ life-giving blood to the earth. But it is also a celebration that reflects the profound ambivalence of the goddess’ blood and the power it embodies, a power that is tied to impurity and to the dangerous potency of sexual fluids.

In order to understand the deeper significance of this festival, therefore, we need to understand the place of menstruation and menstrual blood in the Hindu imagination. Like all bodily fluids, and particularly sexual fluids, menstrual blood is considered to be an extremely powerful but ambivalent substance. It is, on the one hand, the sacred power of life and procreation itself. But it is also, on the other hand, extremely impure and polluting. As David Gordon White observes, "Indian traditions have always viewed sexual fluids, and most particularly menstrual blood, as polluting, powerful and therefore dangerous substances." And the act of menstruation is likewise regarded as a powerful and creative, but also dangerous and polluting event. As Madhu Khanha notes, “A woman during menstruation is compared to a fallen woman…[The] temporary untouchability attributed to women and the overwhelming number of menstrual taboos imposed on them go to show that the first three days of menstruation were looked upon as dangerous and threatening.”

Thus, when Kamakhya menstruates for three days each year, she is considered to be in a state of "impurity, just like the impurity of woman due to her menstruation," and her temple must be closed to all visitors during these days. But it is this very same impure, dangerous and potentially destructive blood of the goddess that is believed to bring life and creative energy to the earth and to her devotees. Thus on the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple doors are opened up again, and red cloths representing the bloody menstrual flow are distributed to the thousands of pilgrims who thereby receive the power and grace of the goddess.