Session Name: Tantric Futures II: Gendered Bodies in Old and New Spiritualities
1 - Tantric Childlessness and Non-normative Womanhood
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper addresses Tantric discourses and practices around non-reproduction. Techniques of the fertile body transmitted by Tantric esoteric performer-preachers for the conception of healthy children, or for contraception and voluntary childlessness, provide a resilient thread connecting Middle Bengali literature with present day lineages, across the Indo-Bangladesh border and on many shores of the Bay of Bengal. In this paper, I will focus on bodily technologies that result in contraception and birth control, either as a desired outcome or as a side- effect. The context is provided by popular religious movements and ritual communities known as Baul, Fakir and Vaishnava Sahajiya. I will highlight that consorted pairs of male-female practitioners who take vows of joint renunciation (bhek-dhāri, yukta-sannyās, kilāphat) live as a sexually active couple but cannot bear children: they renounce productive and reproductive labour, and while they might take care of other people’s children as their own, they commit to not produce progeny, or biological children. I will discuss the Tantric ideology and the techniques of the sexual, reproductive body within these esoteric and heterodox lineages. These practices, I argue, have tremendous implications in the social sphere of family planning, reproductive health, and sexuality. Tracing the contours of the doctrinal as well as social implications of such control over life (giving birth) and death (immortality, understood as cessation of the production and loss of semen), Tantric childlessness will emerge as a site where non-normative womanhood can be performed.
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