The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal.

• Author: McDermott, Rachel Fell
• Position: W - Book Review

The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal. By HUGH B. URBAN. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. 286 + xvii. $55.00.

Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal. By HUGH B. URBAN. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. 187 + xi. $19.95.

These two works represent a significant three-fold contribution to the fields of religion and Bengal studies: they survey, for the first time, in English or Bengali, an important but understudied sect in colonial Bengal, the Kartabhajas; they analyze the Kartabhajas in light of several methodological perspectives, particularly theories of secrecy and esotericism; and the translations in Songs of Ecstasy provide, in essence, a "Kartabhaja Reader." Since I do not have access to the original Bengali poetry and since the introduction to Songs of Ecstasy is mostly a condensed version of the points made in The Economics of Ecstasy, much of this review is concentrated on the monograph.

The Kartabhajas (Worshippers of the Master), the most important later branch of the Vaisnava Sahajiya tradition, were founded by Aulcand (ca. 1686-1779), who claimed to be Caitanya reincarnated as a poor crazy fakir, a spiritual leader for downtrodden Vaisnavas. Most of Aulcand's disciples at the end of the eighteenth century hailed from the lower classes--landless laborers, peasants, and traditional craftsmen disadvantaged both by colonial economic controls and by exclusionary practices of orthodox Gaudiya Vaisnavism. Urban characterizes them as a sort of "counter-Bengal-Renaissance," whose reliance on magic and occultism ran "often in direct opposition to the sober rationalism of Calcutta's upper classes" (Economics, 208). Before his death, Aulcand had attracted twenty-two main disciples, one of whom, Ramsaran Pal, married a zamindar's daughter in Ghoshpara, a town north of Calcutta. He and his wife were believed to be the ultimate principles of the universe: the divine master, Karta, and his female consort, the Karta-Ma or Sati Ma. It is this lineage that made Ghoshpara the center of the Kartabhaja sect; the annual Ghoshpara Mela--what Urban charmingly calls "a chaotic fusion of a Grateful Dead Concert and a Russian Easter Mass" (Economics, 189)--is still their largest public festival. Nevertheless, because of succession disputes, many Kartabhajas revere other leaders, often more Tantric and esoteric than the Ghoshpara Pals, scattered in rural Bengal. That Urban...