A Complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life-Tantra has played a central yet conflicted role in the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely other, Tantra has proved to be a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon came to be.

Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interply of popular and scholarly imaginations. tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West-a dialectical category born of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Embracing historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of factasies, fears, and wish fulfilment, at once native and other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.