In the 10th century AD, a sandstone panel featuring eight figures was inserted into a temple in central India. The Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer of worlds, was placed on the far left of the scene, seated beside seven goddesses known as the Matrikas or mothers. Most are perched on the animals that acted as their vehicles, such as a swan, bull, and peacock, while three cradle infants on their laps. Any impression that this is a stock maternal scene, though, is dismissed by sight of the skeletal Matrika at the far right of the composition. This fearsome figure is known as Chamunda, and she was the mothers’ leader. The vehicle resting at her feet is no animal, but a human corpse, while Chamunda herself personifies battle-rage. This macabre appearance marks Chamunda apart from the other mothers, but they share her talent for war. When summoned to defeat demonic armies, the mothers perpetrated gruesome carnage, before drinking their victims’ blood and dancing ecstatically. It is all a far cry from earlier orthodox Hindu views of women as submissive and docile.
Celebrating feminine power lies at the heart of Tantra. Although the precise origins of this philosophy are unclear, its roots lie in Hinduism, and it probably emerged in the 6th century AD, with important early centres in eastern and north-west India. In many ways, Tantra can be seen as an anti-establishment response to orthodox Hindu teachings. These emphasised that the path to enlightenment took generations, and was advanced by shunning the trappings of material power and understanding that the world is an illusion. By contrast, Tantra offered a fast-track to enlightenment within a single lifetime, while also viewing the world as a divinely crafted reality, where it was desirable to gain physical or supernatural power.
Perhaps Tantra’s greatest transgression lay in its willingness to reject longstanding divisions between social classes, and even a distinction between pure and impure substances. Orthodox Hinduism ordered society from birth, with four classes divided into priests, rulers and warriors, farmers and traders, and labourers. Women were prevented from being initiated, while a fifth group was excluded from this class structure altogether, because jobs such as cleaning toilets and preparing corpses brought its members into contact with substances that were judged impure and therefore left them polluted. Although people needed to be initiated before receiving Tantric teachings, all of its practitioners were judged uniformly capable of achieving enlightenment. The movement’s far- reaching influence is currently the subject of a fascinating British Museum exhibition: Tantra: enlightenment to revolution (see ‘Further information’ box on p.41).
