"Tagore On Tantrism"

    

    At this juncture, let us take a more detailed look at Rabindranath Tagore's views about Tantrism. At the outset, we may point out here that his Shantiniketan complex is situated near Tarapitha in the Birbhum district of modem West Bengal; this whole area is one in which the ‘Tantric tradition is ancient and all-pervasive”, and where the Goddess is worshipped with Shakta ritual. 

    Tarapitha is also associated with the Shakta saint Vamacharana, popularly known as Vama-Kshepa. Further, the area is inhabited by a large population of Santhals, a tribal people who are more extroverted and less inhibited in their interpersonal relations than the surrounding Hindus.

    Tagore was influenced by both Vaishnava and Shakta traditions. It was he who made modern Bengalis see the Bauls as something other than “a laughing stock”. He praised their beautiful songs, and frankly acknowledged his literary debt to them. 

    Again, Tagore’s songs were also influenced by the poems of the Tantric Ramprasad. Further, Sibnarayan Ray points out that it is possible to detect the echoes of the early-medieval Charya-poems of the Tantric Siddhas in “the over-refined world of  Tagore’s Gitanjali. It is due to the influence of Tagore, and of the “aesthetic renascence” ushered in by him, that the Bengali intellectuals of this century are less puritanical than their counterparts in the rest of India.

    In reference to Tagore’s link with the Bauls, it may be mentioned that it is quite possible that the (Tantric) Sahajiya cult is still followed secretly by them. As Dimock puts it, “There is an eternal borrowing of ideas and doctrines that has always gone on among religious sects in India, until the lines of deviation become very blurred”; and the doctrines of the Bauls are very similar to those of the Sahajiyas, though the majority of Bauls cannot be called Sahajiyas. 

    Padoux is even more explicit, in this regard; he says that the Bauls represent a “modem form” of the Vaishnava-Sahajiyas, “with their peculiar erotic mysticism.” There are, in point of fact, many terms in the Baul songs that are specific to the Tantric tradition, and that refer to the chakras of the Tantric system of meditation.

    Before we leave the Sahajiyas, we may also notice the interesting fact that Mahatma Gandhi, who otherwise so exemplified the attitudes of the “Hindu Renaissance”, his attitude towards the erotic sculptures at khajuraho, practised an intriguing technique of brahmacharya or “celibacy”. He tried to carry his conception of brahmacharya to a logical conclusion by “becoming a woman”. He did this by sleeping nude with a naked young woman, without touching her sexually. 

    We may note that this is the same technique employed by the Sahajiyas in their sadhana; as the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, who was Gandhi’s secretary during that period, put it with scholarly understatement, this is rather “reminiscent of the Tantras”.