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The word Tantra to an average Indian will probably visualize a dishevelled person with bloodshot eyes, smoking ganja, a skull in his hand, sitting in a shaman ghat and performing some distasteful ritual. Foreigners and the more elite Westernized English-educated city folks will immediately think of sex and depravity. If you do a search for Tantra on the internet, you will come across a lot of “Eastern type” images of people in various sexual positions and so on. This instant association between Tantra and all things ‘immoral’, depraved and wicked has become ingrained in the Hindu as well as non-Hindu psyche, and Tantra has come to be associated with black-magic, animal sacrifices, and other objectionable practices.
In addition to this, a cottage industry of “Tantra Sex” and “Tantra Massage” has grown in Western countries, especially in the USA, which tries to equate Tantra to soft pornography and sells products and services around this gross and deliberate misrepresentation. This perverted definition of Tantra has spread globally and thus we even have an Australian School of Tantra (Love Works), whose top-selling program is “Melbourne Couples Coaching,” which claims to provide “Tantric skills for him for longer-lasting sex and Tantric skills for her for more pleasure”!
This is a very serious matter. Most of these notions about Tantra are, of course, grossly incorrect and are demeaning to Hinduism. In this series of essays, I will deal with what Tantra is, what it is not, its relationship to Vedic theology and metaphysics, various myths and misconceptions about Tantra and finally its relevance in modern Hinduism. I will show how tantra pervades almost all aspects of the life of an average Hindu, many times, in ways he or she cannot even comprehend.