"Bengali Sub-culture"

    

    Tantrism, though spread over the whole of India, was especially popular in regions like Bengal. Bengal has long been especially receptive to the Tantric tradition. So much so that the Tantric Charyapadas are the earliest record of the Bengali language, dating to around a thousand years ago.

    In the early period the local, royal courts were often patrons of Tantric cults, as we have seen, and this is an indicator of the dominant position of the movement. Later on, even during the Vaishnavite revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tantrism continued to retain its vitality. The influences of Vaishnavism, however, moulded the attitudes of Shakta Tantrics, who used Vaishnava themes to express the tender emotions of devi-bhakti.

    In the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a great revival of Tantrism. This was partly due to the revolt, in eighteenth-century Bengal, from the rarefied spirituality of the Vaishnavas. There was, nevertheless, a harmony between the two sects, as Ramprasad and his followers emphasized the essential identity of Kali and Krishna. This attitude was especially maintained by the later Tantric poets and thinkers, particularly from the middle of the eighteenth-century, partly to mollify the Vaishnavas who were provoked by the new custom of worshipping Kali publicly with great pomp.

    In this connection, it may be noted that Kali, who is extremely popular in Bengal, may be worshipped by low-caste priests. As for Durga-puja, which has been the "national” festival of Bengal, it included, till late-medieval times, primitive elements like the celebration of Shabarotsava; this latter feast consisted of the performance of sexual songs and actions, in the presence of young women and also prostitutes.

    Given this pervasive nature of Tantrism in Bengal, it is not really surprising that even the Vaishnava movement inaugurated by Chaitanya was influenced by the (Tantric) Sahajiya tradition. We have seen that Chaitanya himself was quite possibly open to Sahajiya influences, partly because two of his early companions had links with that tradition; the wife of one of them, Jahnavi Devi, was herself a Sahajiya leader, and she was greatly respected as both the wife of Nityananda and as his spiritual successor.

    The distinction between orthodox Vaishnavas and the Sahajiya-Vaishnavas was thus not very important, even to people like the Gosvamis of Vrindavana, who were the theologians of Chaitanya’s movement. It is thus recorded that Jahnavi-Devi was treated with great respect by them. In point of fact, it is quite certain that the Gosvamis themselves were greatly influenced by the Tantras. Even though the Tantrism that influenced them was probably of the right-handed type, its "doctrinal and social position” had quite a lot in common with the left-handed Tantrism of the Sahajiyas. The latter were thus able, in fact, to use the Gosvamis as authorities to justify their own position.

    Of course, to the orthodox the Vaisnava-Sahajiyas were not, for obvious reasons, fully respectable. Orthodox Vaishnavas cannot accept, for example, that theories about the nature of their beloved Gauranga or Chaitanya (for instance, the theory of his dual incarnation as Radha and Krishna) may have been influenced by the Sahajiya viewpoint. The fact still remains, however, that pre-Chaitanya Sahajiya doctrine quite possibly influenced both Bengali Vaishnavite theology and thoughts about Chaitanya himself. Indeed, some Sahajiya texts go so far as to try to show that Chaitanya himself was a Sahajiya !

    The truth probably is that the two traditions influenced each other mutually. Some of the Vaishnava ideas, like the dual incarnation of Chaitanya, were probably derived from the long-existing Sahajiya tradition. On the other hand, Vaishnavism provided the Sahajiyas with a readymade theology, which they of course reinterpreted.

     In short, the Tantric tradition was very intimately interwoven into the texture of Bengali culture, through the centuries that preceded the period that concerns us here.