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Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship, and

Sacrifice in the Worship of Mother
Goddess Kāmākhyā
a
Hugh B. Urban
a
Ohio State University ,
Published online: 22 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Hugh B. Urban (2008) Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship, and Sacrifice in the
Worship of Mother Goddess Kāmākhyā, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31:3, 500-534,
DOI: 10.1080/00856400802441946

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 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
n.s., Vol.XXXI, no.3, December 2008

Matrix of Power: Tantra, Kingship, and Sacrifice

in the Worship of Mother Goddess Ka ma
khya 

Hugh B. Urban

Ohio State University

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Because the Goddess has come to the great mountain Nılak uta to
have sexual enjoyment with me [Śiva], she is called Kamakhya, _who
resides there in secret. Because she gives love, is a loving woman, is
the embodiment of love, is the beloved, she restores the limbs of
Kama and also destroys the limbs of Kama, she is called Kamakhya.
Now hear of the great glory of Kamakhya, who, as primordial
nature, sets the entire world in motion. K alik
a Purana (KP 62.1–3).
_
One should worship the Supreme Goddess with blood, meat and
wine. Yoginı Tantra (YogT 2.8).

Seated on top of Assam’s Nilachala hill beside the Brahmaputra River, the
Kamakhy a temple has long been revered as one of the most powerful centres of
goddess worship in South Asia. As one of the oldest of the 51 s´ akta pıthas or
places of power that dot the Hindu mythological landscape, Kamakhy _ a is
believed to be the location where the goddess’ own yoni or sexual organ lies. As
such, it is literally the ‘mother of all places of power’, with a history that can be
traced back at least 1200 years, and it remains one of the most vibrant centres
of goddess worship in India.1

Yet despite the importance of Kamakhya and her worship, she has been given
remarkably little attention by modern scholarship. Apart from a few outdated
studies and passing discussions, Kamakhya has rarely been the subject of a

1
This article is based on research in Assam and Bangla in 2000–1, 2003–4, 2006, and 2008. I am grateful to
the Fulbright foundation and the American Academy of Religion for funding this research. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations from Sanskrit, Assamese and Bangla are my own.

ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/08/030500-35 Ó 2008 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/00856400802441946
 MATRIX OF POWER 501

detailed critical analysis.2 The reasons for this neglect, however, are not far to seek.
In addition to its geographic remoteness, Assam has long had a rather sinister
reputation in both the Hindu and the Western imaginations, infamous as a place of
occult power, human sacrifice and tribal superstition. In Indian literature itself,
‘the whole country is famed as a land of magic and witchcraft’.3 According to a
Tibetan author of the seventeenth century, ‘there are so many witches and various
demons . . . that even a person who has fully mastered the tantras can hardly stay
there’.4 Meanwhile, most British colonial authors and European Orientalists
typically dismissed the worship of K am akhya as a thin veneer of Hinduism laid
over a darker current of tribal worship and ‘primitive magic’.5
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The symbolism and worship of K amakhya does in fact contain a certain

amount of explicitly sexual and violent themes. As the embodiment of desire
(k
ama) itself, Kamakhya is closely tied to the forces of sexuality, passion and
creative energy. As one contemporary priest put it, she is simply ‘the goddess of
sex’.6 According to the K alika Purana, the oldest and most important sacred
text from Assam, K amakhy a came to_ Nilachala hill secretly in order to enjoy
sexual union with her lover, Lord Śiva (KP 62.1). The goddess herself is
believed to menstruate, an event that takes place for three days each summer,
during which the goddess is ‘impure’ and cannot be seen until she re-emerges on
a fourth day of celebration. At the same time, Kamakhya is associated not only
with the creative blood of menstruation but also with the blood of sacrifice and
death. From the earliest known texts, sacrifice has been a central part of her
worship, and regular offerings of goats, pigeons and buffaloes continue to this
day. Prior to British colonial rule, human sacrifice was also said to be
performed regularly at K am akhya, and there are still periodic rumours of
human sacrifice occurring secretly today.7

2
The few studies of Kamakhya include: Banikanta Kakati, The Mother Goddess K amakhya (Guwahati:
Publication Board, Assam, 1989); K.R. van Kooij, The Worship of the Goddess According to the K
alik
apur
ana
_
(Leiden: Brill, 1971); Nihar Ranjan Mishra, Kamakhya: A Socio-Cultural Study (Delhi: D.K. Printwood,
2004); Hugh B. Urban, ‘The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra’, in Journal
of the American Academy of Religion, Vol.69, no.4 (2001), pp.269–308; and Loriliai Biernacki, Renowned
Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
3
Chandra Kanta Sarma, An Early History of Kamarup Kamakhya (Guwahati; Kalita Art Press, 1998), p.i.
4
van Kooij, The Worship of the Goddess, p.35.
5
Edward Albert Gait, A History of Assam (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1963), p.58; and H.H. Wilson
(trans.), The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1972),
p.lxi.
6
Ganga Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya (Guwahati: Bishnu Prakashan, 2002), p.6.
7
See Rahul Karmakar, ‘Indian Temple Revives Human Sacrifice’, BBC News (2 April 2002) [http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1908706.stm].
 502 SOUTH ASIA
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Figure 1
Ka ma
 khya
 Temple today
Source: Photo by author, 2006.

In this article I critically examine the symbolism and worship of Kamakhya,

focusing specifically on her role in pre-colonial Assamese history.8 Specifically I
argue that the case of K amakhy
a can help us rethink the nature of power—as
both a religious and a political category. As one of the oldest s´ akta pıthas,
K amakhy _ in
a has played a key role not only in religion and mythology, but also
Assam’s political history from roughly the tenth to eighteenth centuries. Closely
tied as she is to bloodshed and violence, Kamakhya was also intimately linked to
political power and was long patronised by Assam’s various kings—from the
mythical Naraka down to the last of the Ahom rulers. A synthetic goddess who
brings together the imagery of many different deities from both Sanskritic Hindu

8
The primary texts I will be using all date from roughly the 10th to the 17th centuries and either originate in
Assam or cite K amakhya as a primary source of inspiration; these include: K alik
a Purana (KP),
_
ananirnaya (KJñN), Yoni Tantra (YT), Yoginı Tantra (YogT), Brhannıla Tantra (BNT), and
Kaulajñ
_ _
udamani Tantra (KCT). See the list of abbreviations at the end of the article for bibliographic information.
Kulac
_ _
 MATRIX OF POWER 503

traditions and the indigenous religions of Assam, Kamakhya became a powerful

symbol to unite various factions under a single rule.9 It is in this sense that we
might call K amakhy a the ‘matrix of power’, as both the generative mother
(Sanskrit matr, matrk a, etymologically related to Latin mater, matrix) of the
universe, and _the vital
_ energy that pervades all its elements (m atra).

Thus, as an embodiment of s´akti—divine female power—Kamakhya is a

striking reminder that the categories of religion, politics, and sexuality can be,
and usually are, entwined in complex and inextricable ways. Using some
insights from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and others, I will argue that
power is best understood not so much as an oppressive force that emanates
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from the top down in a given social hierarchy, but rather as a kind of
circulating, capillary network of relations that pervades all levels of society,
flowing between all social agents in the religious and political domains alike. In
the case of K am akhy
a, this circulation of power is symbolised above all by
blood: the blood that flows from the menstruating goddess, giving life to the
earth; the blood that flows from animals offered in sacrifice; the blood that
flows from the female body worshipped in esoteric ritual; and the blood that
flows from war and the violence of kingship.

 kta Pı has and the Capillary Nature of Power

I. Places Of Power: The Śa

[Power is] something which circulates . . . Power is employed

through a net-like organization . . . [I]ndividuals . . . are always in a
position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.10

According to a widespread series of myths that appear throughout the

Brahmanas, the Epics and the Pur anas,11 the origin of Kamakhya goes as
_
follows. Once upon a time Lord Śiva _ was married to Satı, the daughter of
Daksa. However, Daksa very much disliked his son-in-law, who is a
_
frightening, long-haired, _ outsider sort of god; so when Daksa arranged for a
_
large sacrificial ritual, he intentionally did not invite Śiva. This dis-invitation
was such a profound insult that Satı committed suicide by throwing herself
onto the sacrificial fire. Śiva then went into a blind rage and destroyed the

9
Kakati, The Mother Goddess K am a, p.16; and Urban, ‘The Path of Power’, pp.269–308.
akhy
10
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York:
Pantheon, 1980), p.98.
11
The story appears in many texts, such as Gopatha Brahmana, 2.1.2, S´atapatha Br
ahmana, 1.7.4.1–4, and the
_ _
Mah abharata, 12.274.36–59. See Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp.274–90.
 504 SOUTH ASIA

sacrifice; he beheaded his father-in-law, replacing his head with that of a goat
(the original intended victim of the ritual) thereby making him the ironic victim
at his own sacrifice; and he then carried Satı’s corpse away on his shoulder.
So terrible was Śiva’s rage that it threatened to destroy the entire universe; and
so, in order to defuse the situation, Lord Visnu cut up Satı’s body with his
flying discus. The various parts of Satı’s body _then
_ fell in various sacred places
in India, which are now known as s´ akta-pıthas or places of power (KP 62.56–7).
_ ranging from four to 108, though
The number of pıthas varies in different lists,
_
it is usually fixed at 51, which together comprise a vast, interconnected, sacred
landscape suffused with the power of the goddess.12
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The Sanskrit word s´ akta comes from the noun s´akti (and in turn from the root
s´ak, ‘to be able’ or ‘to do’), which means ‘power’, ‘energy’ or ‘strength’ on all
levels of the universe. S´akti is the divine energy of the goddess, the power of
both life and death, creation and destruction, which flows through the cosmos,
the social order and the human body alike: ‘Śakti is the root of every finite
existence. The worlds are her manifestation. She supports them, and one day
they will be reabsorbed into her’.13 Yet as Sarah Caldwell notes, the concept of
s´akti does not really fit into most modern Western conceptions of power;
whereas most Western models tend to separate the religious, political and
sexual dimensions of power, s´akti is a productive yet violent energy that flows
through all levels of social, cosmic and corporeal existence: ‘This organic,
feminised conception of power appears to be at odds with European-language
concepts. The latter split power into political, ritual and psycho-erotic
components, which are not necessarily seen as related’.14

In this sense, the Indian concept of s´akti presents an important challenge to

most modern Western models of power. Whereas most Western theorists, at
least since the Enlightenment, have tended to separate the religious from the
political dimensions of power, such a distinction does not make much sense
when looking at a figure like K amakhya. Indeed, as David Chidester argues,
religion and politics are in most cultures so intimately connected that it is more
useful to talk about religio-political power, that is, a kind of power that
combines appeals to divine authority with the pursuit of political interests and

12
See D.C. Sircar, The S´akta Pıthas (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1973), pp.13–28; Sarah Caldwell, Oh
_
Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence and the Worship of the Goddess K alı (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p.104; and H. Brunner, G. Oberhammer and A. Padoux (eds), T antrik anakos´a II (Wien:
abhidh
Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004), pp.87–8.
13
John Woodroffe, Principles of Tantra: The Tantratattva of S´rıyukta S´iva Candra Vidy arnava Bhattac
arya
_ __
Mahodaya (Madras: Ganesh & Co.,1960), vol. 2, p.355.
14
Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother, p.188.
 MATRIX OF POWER 505

military force.15 In the case of Kam akhya and the concept of s´akti, we might
even speak of a kind of sexo-religio-political power, in which issues of gender,
spiritual authority and political legitimacy are inextricably entwined.

Here I would like to adapt and also critique some insights of Michel Foucault
and his influential work on sexuality and power. Contrary to most earlier
analyses of power, which begin from the top down, viewing power primarily as
an oppressive and dominating force wielded by the few, Foucault views power
from the ‘bottom up’, as it were. Rather than viewing power on the macro-
political level of nations and states, Foucault turns instead to the micro-politics
of power—that is, the ways in which power operates in the lives of all members
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of the social order, in the most mundane details of daily life such as dress,
bodily comportment, diet, etc. Power in this sense is not something possessed
by a small group at the top of the social hierarchy, but rather, a more diffuse,
decentralised and omnipresent phenomenon: ‘it is produced from one moment
to the next, at every point . . . . Power is everywhere; not because it embraces
everything, but because it comes from everywhere’.16 Power in this sense is not
a static entity, but a fluid series of relations that circulates through a net-like
organisation among all individuals in a social formation. ‘Power comes from
below. . . . Global and hierarchical structures of domination within a society
depend on and operate through more local low-level capillary circuits of power
relationships’.17 Above all, Foucault is interested in a specifically embodied kind
of power—a ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’—that is exercised upon and through
individual human bodies. ‘Historical forces act upon and through the human
body. As the centre of the struggle for domination, the body is both shaped and
reshaped by the different warring forces acting upon it’.18 One of the most
crucial fields for the operation of bio-power, for example, is sexuality. For
sexuality lies at the pivot of two key axes: power over individual bodies and
power over social bodies or the body politic.19 Control of individual sexual
activity and reproduction, in other words, is the key to the larger control of
populations and governance of society as a whole.

15
David Chidester, Patterns of Power: Religion and Politics in American Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1988), p.2. See also Hugh B. Urban, ‘Politics and Religion: An Overview’, in Lindsay Jones
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: MacMillan, 2005), vol.11, p.7248.
16
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp.92–3.
17
James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 3 (New York: New Press,
2001), p.xxvii.
18
Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (New York: Continuum, 1994), p.90.
19
See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.144.
 506 SOUTH ASIA

However, while I find Foucault’s analysis extremely useful for understanding the
Indian concept of s´akti, I think we also need to take seriously some of the
important criticisms of his model of power. First, as many critics such as Lois
McNay, Jürgen Habermas and others have argued, Foucault’s model of power
is in many ways so broad and generalised that it risks losing some of its
explanatory value: ‘a multiplicity of divergent phenomena are subsumed under a
totalizing and undifferentiated notion of power . . . . [P]ower is generalized to
such an extent that it loses any analytic force’.20 To many critics, Foucault’s idea
of power seems like an omnipresent, all-encompassing, yet strangely impersonal
force, one that acts mysteriously without human agents to exercise it—a kind of
‘intentionality without a subject’ or ‘action without agency’.21 Indeed, this
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rather amorphous concept of power at times begins to sound much like the all-
encompassing, omnipresent concept of s´akti in the Indian tradition. As such,
many critics argue, it risks overlooking the more specific individuals,
institutions, state formations and social relations through which power
operates.22 Second, as many feminist critics have pointed out, Foucault is on
the whole fairly indifferent to questions of gender and to the profound
differences between the constructions of male and female sexuality. As Grace
Jantzen observes, Foucault’s otherwise brilliant analysis fails to examine the
extent to which ‘the structures of power and knowledge have operated unequally
upon women and men’. For in the analysis of any major concept—whether it is
sexuality or mysticism or religion itself—it is critical that we be aware of the
inevitable ways in which ‘gender and power are interlocked’.23

Following these scholars, I will suggest that we can use the Indian concept of
s´akti in order to refine and sharpen Foucault’s concept of power. Above all, I
will argue for a model of power that is at once: a) fundamentally gendered, that
is, intimately tied to constructions of gender and relations between males and
females; and b) performative, that is, continuously re-enacted through
narrations of myths, performances of rituals, and celebrations of festivals that
re-create and re-legitimate these larger relations of power in the socio-political

20
McNay, Foucault, p.105; and Jürgen Habermas The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1987), p.287.
21
David Cousins Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp.10–11.
22
As McNay summarises this common critique, ‘By positing a ‘‘metaphysical’’ notion of power, Foucault
obviates a more complex form of analysis which addresses the institutional specificity of power and the forms
of spatial and temporal mediation in the state, relations of production and the social division of labor’. See
McNay, Foucault, p.105.
23
Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p.15. Foucault’s indifference to the implications of gender has been noted by many feminist critics. See
McNay, Foucault, p.150; and Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p.8.
 MATRIX OF POWER 507

order.24 The result is a complex capillary network of relations that flows

throughout the entire social organism, much as the blood of the goddess flows
from the temple via her annual menstruation, through the priests who offer her
sacrifices, to the Tantric initiates who perform her secret rites, to the kings who
patronise her worship.

Matrix of Power: The Holy Site of K

am
akhy
a
Of all pıthas the supreme pıtha is Kamarupa; it gives great fruit,
_ _
even if worship is done there only once . . . That pıtha is the secret
mouth of Brahman, which brings happiness, _ and where
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Mahisamardinı [the goddess as slayer of the buffalo demon] dwells

_ millions of s´aktis. Since the gods, goddesses and sages are
with her
of this [Brahman] nature, they are all present here; therefore, this
place is kept secret by the great kula s adhakas. Kulac udamani
Tantra (KCT 5.36–40). _ _

That yoni-region is endowed with My splendor, and it is the place

of the origin of all things. Yoginı Tantra (YogT 1.15.51).

As the site of the goddess’ own sexual organ, the holy site of Kamakhya is
often called the greatest of all places of power. It is said that the god Kama—
the Indian version of Cupid or the god of sexual desire—built the first
temple to the goddess here, and it is here that she comes ‘secretly to satisfy her
amour (k ama) with Śiva’.25 Historically, the temple can be traced to at least the
eighth century, and it is still today one of the liveliest goddess temples in India.

According to many traditions, K amakhya and the region of Assam

(Kamarupa) as a whole is the original homeland of South Asia’s many Tantric
traditions.26 This is only fitting, since Tantra in general centres in large part on
the use of k ama or ‘desire (in every sense of the word)’ as a means to both
spiritual liberation and worldly power.27 Indeed, according to the
24
I am using gender and performance here largely in the ways that Judith Butler employs them in her critique
and extension of Foucault in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1989).
25
K.L. Barua, Early History of Kam upa (Shillong: K.L. Barua, 1933), p.167.
ar
26
Wilson, The Vishnu Purana, p.lxi; and Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), p.202.
27
André Padoux, V ac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990),
p.40. The category of ‘Tantra’ is notoriously difficult to define and has a tangled history in the Western
imagination. See Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley:
 508 SOUTH ASIA

Kalik ana—the oldest and most important sacred text composed in Assam
a Pur
_
(tenth or eleventh century)28—Kamakhya is herself the form of the goddess
‘when prepared for sexual enjoyment and assuming a reddish-yellow colour for
the sake of love’ (KP 58.56). And according to the important Tantric text,
the Kaulajñananirnaya (tenth or eleventh century), Kamar upa is the original
_ ı Kaula school—one of the oldest forms of Tantra—which
source of the Yogin
centres around the powerful female beings (yoginıs) who transmit spiritual
knowledge and supernatural powers to those who unite with them in ritual. It
was here that the great sage, Matsyendranatha, is said to have learned the
secret tradition from the many yoginıs who dwell in Kamar upa; indeed, ‘This
teaching [is found] in every one of the yoginı’s lodges in Kamakhya’
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ananirnaya KJñN 22.9b).29

(Kaulajñ
_
The first temple here is said to have been built by Kama and the divine architect
Viśvakarman, who conjured a structure focussed on the goddess’ yoni and
surrounded by images of the 64 yoginıs.30 Although there is today no evidence
of a 64-yoginı temple in Assam comparable to the great temples of Hirapur,
Bheraghat or Khajuraho, K amarupa is still credited by many as the original
homeland of the yoginı cult that spread throughout India around the eighth to
tenth centuries.31

University of California Press, 2003). David Gordon White offers one of the more useful attempts when he
defines Tantra as ‘that Asian body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the universe
we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that
creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human
microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways’. See David Gordon White, Tantra in Practice
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.9. For other useful studies of Tantra, see André Padoux
(ed.), Mantras et Diagrammes Rituals dans l’Hindouisme (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1986); André Padoux
(ed.), L’Image Divine: Culte et Meditation dans l’Hindouisme (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1990); and Michel
Strickmann, Mantras et Mandarins: Le Bouddhisme Tantrique en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
28
There is much debate over the date of the K alik
a Pur ana. Some date it as early as the 7th–8th centuries,
_
others as late as the 14th. Others argue that there are two distinct strata in the text, one from the 6th century,
the other from the 11th. I agree with Barua that it probably dates from the 10th or 11th centuries. For
discussions of the dates, see Urban, ‘The Path of Power’; B.K. Barua, A Cultural History of Assam (Early
Period) (Guwahati: Bina Library, 1986), p.163; B.N. Shastri (ed.), The K alik
a Purana (Delhi: Nag Publishers,
_
1991), p.27ff; and van Kooij, Worship of the Goddess, pp.1–37.
29
Translated by David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yoginı: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.213. White dates the KJñN as early as the 9th or 10th century; however,
most others date it as 10th or 11th century; see Sanjukta Gupta, Teun Goudriaan and Dirk Jan Hoens, Hindu
Tantrism (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1979), p.11.
30
Mahendran ath Bhattacaryya, S´rı S´rı K
am
akhya-Tırtha (Guwahati: D. Bhattacaryya Press, 2000), p.25; see
__ __
KP 63.5–44; and BNT 14.12.
31
See BNT 14.12, 14.39–46. According to R.K. Sharma, ‘Matsyendranatha . . . developed the Yoginı cult
when he lived in the midst of women in Kamar upa. Every woman in Kamar upa was recognized as a Yoginı
and hence he named this cult after them. The new Kaula (secret) m arga was . . . a Śakta cult. It aimed at
propitiating the s´aktis through the medium of Yoga’. See R.K. Sharma, The Temple of the Chaunsathayoginı
_
at Bheraghat (Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1978), p.30.
 MATRIX OF POWER 509
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Figure 2
 mund a
The Goddess in her Terrible Form as Ca  , outside Ka
 ma
 khya

Temple _ _

Kam akhya herself is an extremely complex figure, who represents a remarkable

melding of many different traditions and deities. She is a kind of composite
figure who combines great goddesses from mainstream Hindu mythology like
Durg a and Laksmı, with the many local, indigenous goddesses worshipped
by tribal groups _ throughout Assam. Within the temple Kamakhya is
represented not by any human image, but by a large rock that happens to
have a rather vaginal looking cleft running down it. When she is represented
in iconic form, she appears as an extremely ambivalent goddess, who has
two very different sides. On one side, she has a benign, loving, maternal
form (her s´ anta or peaceful state), associated with sensuality and pleasure.
On the other side, she also has a terrible, wrathful, destructive form (her
ugra, terrible state), for example as the dark goddess of time and death,
Kalı, or the emaciated terrifying C amunda, who smiles ghoulishly as she sits
upon a human corpse and drinks blood _ _ from a skull-bowl (Figure 2).32 In
popular art today, she is commonly depicted as a fusion of Laksmı, Kalı and
Durg _
a, seated on a lotus with twelve arms holding various weapons, but also

32
See KP 60.55; and van Kooij, The Worship of the Goddess, pp.32–3.
 510 SOUTH ASIA
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Figure 3
 ma
Mother Goddess Ka  khya
 , a popular poster from Guwahati, Assam
Source: Photo by author, 2006.

resting her foot upon the corpse of Śiva, who is in turn lying upon a lion
(Figure 3).

In addition to these mainstream Hindu goddesses, however, the image of

Kam
akhy a has also assimilated a wide range of local tribal goddesses of
Assam. Long before the coming of br ahmanic Hinduism, Assam’s indigenous
peoples like the Koches, Kacharis, Nagas, _ Manipuris and Jaintias had
worshipped powerful deities such as Śavarı and Khesai Khati (she who eats
raw flesh).33 According to the Yoginı Tantra, a product of seventeenth-century
Assam, the religion of Kamarupa is kirata dharma (YogT 2.9.13). The term

33
Kakati, Mother Goddess Kam
akhya, p.16; and H.K. Barpujari, The Comprehensive History of Assam, Vol.I
(Guwahati: Publication Board of Assam, 1990), p.319.
 MATRIX OF POWER 511

ata here is a general term used to describe the non-Hindu tribal peoples of
kir
the northeast hills; and the text goes on to characterise the kir ata religion of
Kamar upa as follows: ‘there is no renunciation or long [penance] in Kamarupa.
Meat is not forsaken there; and there is no celibacy. In the deeds and dharma of
women there is no sin . . . . In Kamarupa, ducks, pigeons, tortoises, and boars
are eaten’ (YogT 2.9.14–16). As we will see below, there is much evidence of
tribal influence in K am akhy a’s worship—above all in the practice of animal
sacrifice—which continues to this day.

As Kakati suggests, it is likely that the syncretic image of Kamakhya emerged as

a means of uniting the many diverse deities of Assam around a single religious
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and political figure: ‘This cult of K am akhya belonged to matriarchal tribes like
the Khasis and Garos. To win their allegiance . . . royal patronage was extended
to the local cult of K
amakhy a’.34 As we will see in part IV below, it is also likely
that the assimilation of all these local goddesses into one Great Mother was an
attempt on the part of Assam’s kings to unite a variety of local indigenous
communities into a larger political formation under a single ruling power.

It is difficult to trace the origins of K amakhya pıtha, which is lost in a tangle of

mythic narratives and legends surrounding Assam’s _ many real and imaginary
kings. According to the K alik
a Purana, the worship of Kamakhya began during
the reign of the mythical king Naraka, _ who is said to have founded the
Kamar upa dynasty and established the worship of the goddess.35 The historical
origins of the K amakhy a temple, however, are much murkier. Although
Kam akhya is first mentioned as one of the four great s´ akta pıthas in the
Hevajra Tantra (eighth century), little is known about this temple _until much
later, when it was rediscovered in the sixteenth century. Apparently, the
original temple had been destroyed by either invasion or natural disaster and
had fallen into ruin.36 The present temple was constructed in the late sixteenth
century by the Hindu kings from Koch Behar, who conquered the Ahom,
Kachari and Manipuri peoples and brought most of the region under Hindu
rule.37

34
Ibid., p.16.
35
Shastri (ed.), The K
alik ana, p.55.
a Pur
36 _
According to traditional accounts, the temple was destroyed by a Muslim invasion led by the Mughal
general Kalapahar. However, others think it was ruined by a natural disaster such as an earthquake. See B.N.
Sastri, ‘Destruction of the Kamakhya Temple as Referred to in Yogini Tantra’, in Journal of the Assam
Research Society, Vol.14 (1979–80), pp.6–7.
37
Gajendra Adhikary, A History of the Temples of Kamrup and their Management (Guwahati: Chandra
Prakash, 2001), pp.50–65.
 512 SOUTH ASIA

In sum, K amakhy a represents a complex mixture of indigenous tribal and

ahmanic Hindu influences. Indeed, many previous scholars have described
br
Kam _ a as a kind of thin veneer of Hinduism superimposed onto an
akhy
essentially non-Hindu tribal foundation.38 My own opinion, however, is that the
goddess represents a more complex process of negotiation and interaction between
the Hindu traditions coming from central India and the many local traditions of
the northeast hills. Kamakhy
a, we will see, lies at the nexus of many circuits of
power flowing between elite br ahmanic and local indigenous traditions—between
the orthodox dharma of the Vedas and_ the kir ata dharma of non-Hindu Assam.
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II. Blood for the Goddess: Blood and Sacrifice in the Public Ritual Cycle

One should chant and worship K amakhya’s [menstrual] cloth, etc.

Then one will attain all one’s desires, O Goddess, without doubt.
a Tantra (KT 7.57–58).
Kubjik

By means of sacrifice, the gods are pleased. By sacrifice, everything

is established. The earth is supported by sacrifice. Sacrifice itself
rescues living beings. K
alik ana (KP 31.7).
a Pur
_
The worship of K am
akhya has two primary forms, one exoteric and public and
the other esoteric and secret.39 Both centre around blood, sexual fluids and the
circulation of power through the circulation of fluids. In the public ritual cycle,
the most important rituals are Kamakhya’s annual menstruation, through which
the goddess’ power is transmitted to the world, and the performance of animal
sacrifice, through which blood is returned to the goddess by her devotees.

As the embodiment of the goddess’ yoni or sexual organ, Kamakhya is believed to

menstruate once a year, an event that lies at the centre of the most important ritual
celebration for the goddess during the summer month of As  adha (June–July)
called Ambuv aci Mel _ _ of As
a. From the 6th or 7th until the 10th or 11th  adha, the
_ _ this
goddess herself enters a period of menstrual impurity and seclusion. Clearly,
festival is tied in part to agriculture and the cycle of the monsoon. Occurring as
it does at the peak of the hot, dry summer months, it celebrates the coming of the
life-giving waters (ambu) that will fertilise the earth and regenerate the crops.40
38
Kakati, Mother Goddess K am a, p.79; and Gait, History of Assam, p.58.
akhy
39
On the relation between the public, orthodox form of worship and the secret, heterodox worship, see van
Kooij, Worship of the Goddess, pp.28–9; and KP 78.140ff.
40
Caldwell describes a similar cycle of menstruation in the goddess traditions of Kerala, where it is closely
tied to the agricultural cycle. See Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother, p.115.
 MATRIX OF POWER 513
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Figure 4
 ma
Menstruating Figure on Outer Wall of Ka  khya
 Temple
Source: Photo by author.

In order to understand the deeper significance of this festival, however, we need to

understand the place of menstruation and menstrual blood in the Hindu
imagination. Like all bodily fluids, and particularly sexual fluids, menstrual blood
is considered to be an extremely powerful but ambivalent substance. It is, on the
one hand, the sacred power of life and procreation itself. But it is also, on the other
hand, extremely impure and polluting. As David Gordon White observes, ‘Indian
traditions have always viewed sexual fluids, and most particularly menstrual
blood, as polluting, powerful and therefore dangerous substances’.41 The act of
menstruation is likewise regarded as a powerful and creative, but also dangerous
and polluting, event. And as Caldwell comments:

Menstruation, while signaling the potential for fertility, also

implies a danger: the intense emotions of sexual desire which

41
White, Kiss of the Yoginı, p.67.
 514 SOUTH ASIA

accompany physical maturity may lead the girl to disaster if not

restrained until her marriage. Menstruation in a married woman
signals the loss of a potential fetus, a death of sorts. In
menstruation, death and desire are intimately interwoven.42

Thus, when Mother K am akhya menstruates for three days each year, she is
considered to be in a state of ‘impurity, just like the impurity of woman due to her
menstruation’,43 and her temple must be closed to all visitors during these days.
But it is this very same impure, dangerous and potentially destructive blood of
the goddess that is believed to bring life and creative energy to the earth and to
her devotees. Accordingly, on the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple
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doors are opened up, and red cloths representing the bloody menstrual flow are
distributed to the awaiting pilgrims, who thereby receive the power and grace of
the goddess. Mahendran ath Bhatt ac
aryya suggests that the festival as a whole
_ _
reflects both a profound Tantric influence and the presence of underlying non-
Hindu tribal elements: ‘The Ambuv aci festival is a sign of Tantric influence. Due
to the mixture of this Tantric influence and fertility beliefs, the Ambuvaci Mela
exists in a unique form’.44

If the goddess gives power and fertility to the world through the blood of her
annual menstrual flow, her priests and devotees also return blood to
Kamakhya in the form of sacrifice. The primary public form of worship at
Kamakhya is now—and probably always has been—animal sacrifice, which
to this day is offered several times a day throughout the year, and hundreds
of times on holy days. According to the K alik ana, the male gods like
a Pur
Ganeśa, Śiva, and Krsna can be worshipped with sweets, _ chanting, religious
_ _ _
vows, etc., but the goddess can only be satisfied with blood (KP 55.1–2).
Animal sacrifice has, of course, been performed throughout the Hindu
traditions of India since the time of the Vedas, which centre in large part
around the performance of yajña or sacrifice. Although animal sacrifice was
gradually removed from mainstream Hindu traditions, it has survived in the
marginal areas of India, such as parts of the south, Bangla, and in hilly tribal
areas like Assam. Sacrifice, either as a physical ritual or as a symbolic trope,

42
Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother, p.119. There is of course a vast literature on menstruation in India: see for
example Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, Indian Puberty Rites (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1980); Susan
S. Wadley, The Powers of Tamil Women (New York: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs,
1980), p.164; and Frédérique Apffel Marglin, ‘Female Sexuality in the Hindu World’, in Clarissa W.
Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret R. Mills (eds), Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in
Sacred and Social Reality (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp.39–60.
43
Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya, p.23.
44
Bhatt aryya, S´rı S´rı K
ac am a-Tırtha, pp.112–3.
akhy
__
 MATRIX OF POWER 515
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Photo 5
Sacrificial Area for Buffalo Sacrifice
Source: Photo by author.

is a recurring structural theme in Hindu tradition—one encountered, as

Madeleine Biardeau points out, in the Vedas, in the Epics and the Pur
anas, in
akta Tantra.45
bhakti literature and in Ś _

45
Madeleine Biardeau and Charles Malamoud, Le Sacrifice dans l’Inde Ancien (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1976), p.81. On sacrifice in India, see J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of
Tradition: Essays in Ancient Indian Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and J.C.
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993).
 516 SOUTH ASIA
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Photo 6
Sacrificial Area for Goat Sacrifice
Source: Photo by author.

The kind of sacrifice we see in the worship of Kamakhya, however, is very

different from the kind of sacrifice described in the Vedas. The early Vedic
ritual centred around the offering of ‘pure’, that is, domesticated, animals,
primarily to male deities. According to the S´atapatha Br ahmana, this pure
_
category includes humans, cows, horses, goats, and sheep (ŚB 6.2.1.1–3), while
impure or wild animals include the gaura (a kind of buffalo), the gavaya
(a species of ox or wild buffalo), the wild camel and the ‘barbarian of the jungle’
(ŚB 7.5.2.32). The Brahmanas also warn sternly of the dangers one faces if one
_ of these impure animals as a sacrifice: ‘father and
is foolish enough to offer any
son will be set at odds, roads will run apart, beasts and criminals will terrorize
the countryside’, and so on (ŚB 13.2.4.1–4). In the Vedic rite, moreover, the
animal is not bloodily butchered but instead ‘pacified’, that is, suffocated in an
unbloody manner outside the ritual enclosure before being offered to the god.
Indeed, as J.C. Heesterman has argued, the Vedic ritual tried to eliminate or
‘rationalize away’ as much of the blood and violence as possible from the
sacrifice.46

46
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict, pp.87–8.
 MATRIX OF POWER 517

The offerings to K amakhy a, however, are quite different—indeed inverted. Here

the ritual centres around the offering of victims that would be considered quite
inappropriate and impure by Vedic standards. According to the K alik
a Pur ana,
‘birds, tortoises, alligators, goats, boars, buffaloes, iguanas, the nine kinds of deer, _
crows, yaks, black antelopes, hares and lions, fish, the blood of one’s own
body . . . and in the absence of these sometimes horses and elephants too’ (KP 55.3–
5) are all admissible as offerings—a motley list that probably reflects the local tribal
practices of non-Hindu Assam.47 Moreover, until the nineteenth century human
sacrifice was also quite common at K amakhya, and there are still reports of such
sacrifices being performed secretly today. Nowadays, though, the most common
animals sacrificed on a regular basis are goats and pigeons; while the most prized
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victim for special occasions, festivals and holy days like Durga and Kalı P uja is the
buffalo (mahisa)—an animal that is, from the standpoint of Vedic Hinduism, one
_
of the most impure of all victims. The Kalik ana recommends that:
a Pur
_
One should offer a buffalo to the goddess Bhairavı or to Bhairava.
He should worship the victim with this mantra: ‘Just as you bear
enmity to the horse and you carry the goddess Candika, so too may
__
you bring harm to my enemies and bring me prosperity. You are the
mount of Yama [the god of death]’. K alik ana (KP 67.58–9).
a Pur
_
It is significant, as Biardeau observes, that the worship of the goddess should
centre around the sacrifice of the very un-Vedic and impure buffalo. In contrast
to the pure, domestic, Vedic victim, the buffalo is an explicitly impure, wild,
savage animal, ‘a stranger to human society and the sacrificial world’ that
embodies the forces of darkness, evil and opposition to the divine order: ‘The
Vedic literature . . . does not count it among the permitted animals in sacrifice.
But it is apt, by this fact, to play the role of the principle that is antithetical to
the goddess, the incarnation of total evil’.48 Thus it is only fitting that the
impure buffalo should be offered to the goddess in her most powerful and
destructive forms, such as K alı, Durga and Kamakhya. For the goddess
assumes the impure and polluting tasks that are beyond the transcendent male
gods—tasks such as slaying demons and handling the bloodshed that is part of
life in sams ara: ‘The goddess—who calls the battle the sacrifice of battle—fears
neither . ._ . impurity or violence . . . . The low tasks are left to the goddess so that
the purity of the god may be maintained, and Tantrism . . . glorifies her’.49

47
Kakati, Mother Goddess K am a, p.65.
akhy
48
Biardeau, Le Sacrifice, pp.146–7.
49
Madeleine Biardeau, ‘Devi: The Goddess in India’, in Ives Bonnefoy (ed.), Asian Mythologies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.98.
 518 SOUTH ASIA
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Figure 7
Severed Buffalo Head after Being Offered to the Goddess
Source: Photo by author.

But that is not all. The manner in which the victim is killed in sacrifice to
Kam akhya is also very different from the Vedic rite. The Vedic ritual called for
an unbloody strangling of the victim outside the ritual space, with as little
violence and impurity as possible. Indeed, ‘the beheading of an animal is
expressly said to be a demonic act’.50 The sacrifice to Kamakhya centres,
conversely, around an extremely bloody act of beheading inside the ritual
enclosure; and the focal point is the offering of the blood and the severed head
to the goddess. According to the K alik ana, the sacrificer should first
a Pur
worship the victim as a form of K _
ama, and then identify the sword with Śiva in
his terrible form as the destroyer and drinker of blood: ‘he should worship the
sword as black [Śiva], whose essence is the black night, terrible, with bloody
eyes, and adorned with a red garland, wearing a garment of blood, with a noose
in his hand, drinking blood and eating a lump of raw flesh’ (KP 55.14–15).

50
O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil, p.155. See also Heesterman, The Inner Conflict, p.87.
 MATRIX OF POWER 519

Finally, the central act is the beheading of the victim and the offering of the
severed head. While the rest of the victim’s flesh is cut up and distributed to
devotees, the head is taken by the priest, who places a lamp upon it and
presents it, together with the victim’s blood, to the goddess:

He should take the stainless sword and behead this most excellent
victim. Then, having carefully gathered the blood of the victim,
together with water, salt, delicious fruits, sweets, perfume and
flowers, [he should say the mantra], ‘om, aim, hrım, s´rım, I offer you
the blood, O Kauśikı’. He should set_ the _blood_ in the_ designated
place. Having offered the severed heard, with a lamp upon it, the
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worshipper obtains the full fruit. K

alik
a Pur ana (KP 55.17–20).
_
Here again, sacrifice to K
amakhy
a bears little resemblance to any Vedic ritual;
rather, it evokes the non-br
ahmanic traditions of India. Among the Kacharis
_ typically centres around beheadings and
and other tribes of Assam, sacrifice
offerings of heads—and ‘only the heads’—to the deity.51

What we see here in the sacrifice to K amakhya, I would suggest, is a complete

structural inversion of the traditional Vedic rite. And this inversion in turn
involves a systematic transgression of the normal laws of class and purity that
surround the rite. Thus, instead of a pure, domestic animal, a wild, impure
animal is offered; rather than being strangled in an unbloody manner, the victim
is beheaded in a very bloody manner, and the severed head made the primary
focus of the ritual; and the deity to whom it is offered is not a transcendent male
god, but the goddess in her most violent forms as mediator of impurity and
conqueror of evil. These oppositions can be summarised as follows:

Vedic Sacrifice Tantric Sacrifice

Victim Domestic animal Wild animal
Status of Victim Pure Impure
Means of killing Unbloody suffocating Bloody beheading
Role of the head Head ignored Offering of blood and head
Deity to whom offered Pure male deity Goddess as handler
of impurity

51
Sidney Endle, The Kacharis (Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1975), pp.39–41.
 520 SOUTH ASIA

But why all this systematic inversion and transgression? The reason is to ensure
the release of s´akti—the power of the goddess that flows through the universe
and the social order alike. According to the K alik ana, a ritual of this sort
a Pur
can bring all manner of supernatural powers and secret _knowledge to the one
who performs it. ‘This is a very great secret, bringing success in all things’, for
by means of it one may ‘obtain all his desires [in this world] and Śiva’s form in
the other world . . . . He will be endowed with long life, enjoyment of sensual
pleasures and wealth’ (KP 56.53, 54).

In sum, the public ritual cycle forms a kind of circuit or cyclical flow of power
between Mother K am akhya and her devotees, embodied in the fluid form of
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blood. The goddess menstruates annually, giving life to the earth and blessings
to her devotees through her blood; and blood is returned to her through the
offering of animal victims, forming a capillary network of power that flows
between the deity, the earth, the priests and her devotees.

III. Goddess of Desire: Sexual Rites and the Secret Ritual Cycle

Kama is the root of the world’s existence. All that is born

originates from k ama. It is by kama also that primordial matter
and all beings eventually dissolve away. Without Śiva and Śakti,
creation would be nothing but a figment. Nothing from birth to
death occurs without the activation of k ama. Śiva is manifest as the
great linga,
_ Śakti’s essential form is the yoni. By their interaction,
the entire world comes into being. (S´ilpa Prak as´a, 2.499–501).

If animal sacrifice represents the primary public worship of the goddess, there
has also long been another, esoteric or secret form of worship known only to
her Tantric initiates. This centres around the infamous pañcamak ara or ‘five
M’s’—that is, the five substances normally prohibited in mainstream Hindu
society that are central to Tantric ritual: wine (madya); meat (m amsa); fish
(matsya); parched grain (mudr _ of class
a); and sexual union, often in violation
boundaries (maithuna). According to the Yoginı Tantra, these comprise a
powerful, dangerous, but ‘heroic’ mode of worship (vıra) forbidden to the
uninitiated ‘bestial’ (pas´u) people (YogT 1.6.13).

As the embodiment of k
ama, the desire that drives all creation and life in the
universe, K
am a is also ‘the goddess of sex’.52 Thus a key part of her
akhy

52
Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya, p.6.
 MATRIX OF POWER 521

esoteric worship is the fifth M, maithuna or ritualised sexual union of male and
female partners who themselves become embodiments of the supreme male and
female principles, Śiva and Śakti. The female partner herself becomes the
embodiment of the power of the goddess centred in the sexual organ, and she is
worshipped as such in the ritual of yoni-p a (Yoni Tantra, YT 2.22–24; YogT
uj
1.6.11–12). Indeed, the yoni of the female partner ultimately is the sacred
yoni-pıtha of K
am akhya itself (KCT 5.1,3), which can be entered via sexual
_
intercourse. 53

Since the 1960s, of course, the topic of ‘Tantric sex’ has become absorbed into
Western popular culture and today is mass-marketed through books, videos,
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and slickly-designed web-sites on the Internet with titles like The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Tantric Sex or Tantra Between the Sheets: The Easy and Fun
Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex. Pop-star Sting claims to practise Tantric sex and to
have achieved five-hour-long orgasms. None of this, however, has much at all
to do with Tantra in its Indian contexts.54 Sexual union in the worship of
Kam akhya is not about mind-blowing sex, the multi-orgasmic man or ‘nookie
ana’; rather, it is in many ways the esoteric counterpart of the public
nirv
_
sacrificial ritual. It is the ‘primal sacrifice’ ( aga) or ‘clan sacrifice’ (kulay
adiy aga)
known only to initiates,55 and it is offered to the goddess, who is now embodied
in the female partner and worshipped in the human pıtha of the yoni (YogT
1.6.11–12). And the goal here is much the same as that of_ the blood sacrifice: to
obtain the power or s´akti of the goddess, who is now embodied in the person of
the female sexual partner.

According to the Yoni Tantra, a key text from the Koch Bihar region adjacent
to Assam, and closely tied to the Kam
akhya tradition, the sexual rite is a bali or
offering, directly comparable to the bali-d
an or sacrificial offering of an animal
victim. The sexual rite is first preceded by the offering (s amisam balim) of an
_ _

53
As Lousie M. Finn notes, ‘There is a direct equivalence between the s´akti’s physical body and Kamar upa.
The sadhaka is immediately transported there by entering the temple of the yoni in the s´akti’s body, i.e.
through sexual intercourse’. Louise M. Finn, The Kulac udamani Tantra and the V amakes´vara Tantra
_ _
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz, 1986), p.113n.
54
See White, Kiss of the Yoginı, p.xiii; and Urban, Tantra, Chap.6.
55
See White, Kiss of the Yoginı, p.106; and Gavin Flood, Body and Cosmology in Kashmir S´aivism (San
Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), pp.283–301. According to the Brhat-Tantras ara (BTS), a
_
work of 16th century Bengal, the sexual rite and emission of semen is directly comparable to the pouring out
of libations onto the sacrificial fire: ‘Sexual union is the libation; the sacred precept is the shedding of semen’
(BTS 703). The text also identifies the sexual fluids with the ucchista, a term traditionally used for the
__
‘remnants’ or leftovers of the sacrificial meal, which is considered the powerful ‘seed’ of the next sacrifice
(BTS 703). See Śrırasikamohana Cattopadhyaya (ed), ‘Brhat Tantras 
ara’ of Krsnananda Agamav agıs´a
__ _ __ _
(Calcutta: Navabharata Publishers, 1996).
 522 SOUTH ASIA

animal sacrifice, and it concludes with the offering (bali) and oral consumption
of the combined semen and menstrual blood:

Having offered animal flesh [s amisam balim], in an empty house or

[his own] house, the son of K _a becomes
alik _ liberated with the ten
million kulas. Having recited and read [the mantra], having seen
and touched the vulva of a menstruating woman, the adept himself
becomes the Lord of Yoga . . . Having made an offering [bali] with
his own semen and the menstrual blood [yonipuspa], he should
recite the mantra . . . With the vulva and penis, with_ the washing of
the vulva, with the uttering of the word ‘vulva’ [bhaga], and with
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the nectar of the vulva and penis, the best of adepts should make a
food offering [naivedyam]. Yoni Tantra (YT 2.14–17, 2.26).

J.A. Schoterman points out that the offering and consumption of the sexual
fluids (the yonitattva or kula dravya), is a Tantric analogue of the consumption
of the Soma beverage in the Vedic sacrificial rite: just as the Soma-juice was
mixed with milk or water, so too, the Yonitattva is mixed with wine (YT 1.24b)
or water: ‘the Vedic drinking of the Soma has been transformed into a yogic
practice connected with the Yonitattva’.56

Like the blood sacrifices offered to K amakhya, however, these esoteric sexual
rituals involve a series of structural inversions and transgressions. What we
have here is, in many ways, a kind of sexual union in reverse, that is, in violation
of mainstream Hindu social patterns. In the rite described in the Yoni Tantra,
for example, sexual union is ideally performed while the female partner is
menstruating—an act that would normally be considered extremely impure by
mainstream Hindu standards. At the same time, these rites also involve union
in explicit violation of class laws, that is, between partners of conflicting social
status. According to the Yoginı Tantra, conventional sexual union follows the
traditional laws of social class: ‘Br
ahman women for br ahmans, ksatriya women
for ksatriyas, vais´ya women for vais´yas, O Goddess—that is _the traditional
_ _ rule
_
in sexual union’ (YogT 1.6.37–38). But for the most radical, left-hand Tantric
who follows the path of the avadh uta or ‘one who has shaken off worldly life’,
all things are permissible. Any foods, any beverages, and sexual relations with
any class are allowed for the Tantric hero who has left class, caste and purity
behind:

56
J.A. Schoterman, The Yoni Tantra (Delhi: Manhohar, 1980), p.30.
 MATRIX OF POWER 523

Edible food and wine of all kinds are for him, O Sambhavı. Meat
and fish are his, O Goddess, as are all things in water, on earth or
in the air . . . . Apart from his mother’s yoni, he has intercourse with
all yonis. Yoginı Tantra (YogT 1.6.42–44).

Among all stages of life, among all castes, all yogis and in all
places, one should make no distinctions. Bliss is itself the nature of
the Ultimate Reality. And that is located within the body . . . .
Yoginı Tantra (YogT 1.6.51).

Finally, the end result of this sexual-sacrifice is also an explicit act of inversion
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and transgression. As White has convincingly argued, the oldest forms of Tantra
such as the Yoginı Kaula tradition centre on not just the emission of sexual
fluids, but on the consumption of these fluids as a sacramental meal.57 Instead of
the mixing of male and female sexual fluids within the female body, as in
conventional intercourse, here the combined semen and vaginal fluid and/or
menstrual blood are first collected, then consumed orally. Thus consecrated to the
goddess, these sexual fluids become the kula dravya or ‘lineage substance’, which
is said to be a tremendous source of initiatic knowledge and esoteric power. This
ananirnaya, the key Tantric text said to
ritual is described in detail in the Kaulajñ
have been revealed to Matsyendran _
atha in Assam:

One should fill [a vessel] with blood together with an equal amount
of semen, as well as with the kundagolaka secretion. This is
combined with honey and clarified _butter.
_ [Menstrual] blood, a
woman’s nectar, [and] semen are mixed with alcohol by the
brahmin practitioner . . . . The great-souled one who is accompa-
nied by his female consort [thereby realizes] a state of intoxicated
ananirnaya (KJñN 18.7–9).58
bliss. Kaulajñ
_
In India generally, as we saw above, sexual fluids are considered dangerous and
polluting—ambivalent substances that overflow the boundaries of the physical
body. In the Tantric rite, however, the sexual fluids become the ultimate source
of power.

57
White, Kiss of the Yoginı, p.109; see YT 2.22–24. According to the KJñN, ‘One should propitiate the
assembly of Yoginıs with all sorts of edible and pleasurable items. Thereafter one should practise the drinking
of [their] menstrual blood (dh arapana) if one wishes to have a long life’ (11.18a–19a; White’s translation).
58
Translated by White, Kiss of the Yoginı, p.108. As White notes, the term kundagolaka usually refers to the
__
‘female and male sexual emissions’, but it is sometimes used simply for ‘specific types of female discharge’
(p.78).
 524 SOUTH ASIA

Clearly the aim of this esoteric ritual, with its systematic inversion of normal
sexual intercourse and class laws, is ultimately not dissimilar to that of the public
sacrificial ritual: the release of the tremendous power of the goddess. As Mary
Douglas observes in her classic study, Purity and Danger, ‘The danger risked by
boundary transgression is power. The vulnerable margins which threaten to
destroy order represent powers in the cosmos. Ritual which can harness these is
harnessing power indeed’.59 No wonder worship of the yoni and the Yonitattva
gave the P andavas victory in battle (YT 4.28), allowed Lord Śiva to conquer
death (YT 1.8)_ _ and destroy Tripura (YT 4.28), and enabled Lord Rama to defeat
the demon Ravana (YT 4.7) for ‘if, having obtained the Yonitattva, one enters
_
battle, he will conquer all his enemies and be victorious’ (YT 6.6–7).
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In sum, the esoteric ritual cycle of the ‘sexual sacrifice’ represents a circuit or flow of
power that is parallel to, yet beneath or behind, the public ritual cycle of blood
sacrifice. Here, the power of the goddess flows through the menstrual fluid and
semen of her human embodiments, the male and female partners; and it culminates
in the Yonitattva or kula dravya, the combined male and female sexual fluids, which
are first offered to the goddess and then consumed orally by the male initiate.

IV. Goddess of Power: Kingship, Sacrifice and Power in Assamese

History

By sacrifices, one achieves liberation; by sacrifices, one reaches

heaven; by offering sacrifice, a king defeats enemy kings. Kalik
a
ana (KP 67.6).
Pur
_
As the embodiment of s´akti or divine power, and as a goddess tied to the earth,
agriculture and land, Kamakhy a was closely connected to kingship and royal
power throughout Assamese history. Both Hindu mythology and the historical
narratives of Assam closely link kingship with the goddess—though in complex
and ambivalent ways, for the king is consistently portrayed as both a devotee of
the goddess and a man flawed by sin and weakness. According to Hindu
mythology, the first devotee of the goddess was King Naraka, who is believed
to have founded the first kingdom in Assam, Pragjyotisapura. An ambivalent
character from the very beginning, Naraka is said to be_ the son of Lord Visnu
in his boar incarnation, who united with the Goddess Earth during the highly__

59
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London:
Routledge, 1966), p.161. See Hugh Urban, ‘The Power of the Impure: Transgression, Violence and Secrecy in
Bengali Ś
akta Tantra and Modern Western Magic’, in Numen, Vol.50, no.3 (2003), pp.269–308.
 MATRIX OF POWER 525

inauspicious time of her menstrual period.60 And tradition has it that Naraka
conquered the indigenous peoples of the region, slew Ghataka, the king of the
atas, and established br
kir _ 38.99–161). Thus
ahmanic traditions in the realm (KP
Naraka’s kingdom flourished—until_ the arrogant monarch forged an alliance
with Vana, a demon king in the non-Hindu tribal region of Sonitpura in eastern
Assam. _ Thereafter he became ‘inimical to gods and Brahmans . . . [and]
destroyed heaven and earth, carrying his torture and destruction every-
where’61—prompting the sage Vasistha to prophesy that so long as he lived, the
goddess would remain hidden (KP_ _ 39.18). In fact, the goddess does seem to
have gone into hiding for a considerable time, as there is little mention of
Kamakhy a or her temple between the time of the K alik
a Purana (tenth–
_
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62
eleventh centuries) and the building of the present temple (sixteenth century).

Like mythical Naraka, Assam’s historical kings were no less devoted, yet
ambivalent, patrons of the goddess. As we saw above, the present temple was
built in the sixteenth century by r
ajas from the Koch Behar region. The foremost
_
of these was Viśva Singha who, like Naraka, was said to have been semi-divine
but also tied to a curse. According to the mytho-historical account of the Yoginı
Tantra, Viśva was the son of a powerful yoginı named Revatı, who was so
beautiful that Lord Śiva himself wooed her and made love to her. But because of
her arrogance, Revatı offended a powerful sage and was cursed to become a
mleccha, that is, a non-Aryan outcaste or barbarian (YogT 1.13.2–12).

Despite his cursed origins, however, Viśva is also credited with the rediscovery of
Kamakhy a. According to one widespread legend, the king took his army into
Assam to wage war against the tribal kingdoms of the region, but lost his way in
the forest. Eventually he came upon an old woman who gave him water from a
sacred spring which, she claimed, flowed from the goddess’ own yoni and marked
the spot where the original Kam
akhy a temple had stood. The king prayed to the
goddess and vowed that if she would aid him in battle, he would build her a new,
glorious temple made of gold. The king was indeed victorious and established a
new kingdom in the region with K am akhya at its religio-political centre.63

60
Schoterman, Yoni Tantra, pp.30–1; see KP 36. 1ff.
61
Sree Dharanikanta Devsharma, The Holy Shrine of Kamakhya (Guwahati: The Author, 1999), pp.14–16.
See also Subhendugopal Bagchi, Eminent Indian S´akta Centers in Eastern India (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak,
1980), p.145; and Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.209.
62
Strangely, there is little mention of Kamakhya during the Assamese Pala dynasty (9th–12th centuries).
There is only one reference to Kameśvara (Śiva) and Mahagaurı (the goddess) in an inscription of King
Indrapala (11th century), which may be a reference to Kamakhya. See Shastri, The K
alik ana, p.67.
a Pur
63 _
Devsharma, The Holy Shrine of Kamakhya, pp.19–21.
 526 SOUTH ASIA

Meanwhile sometime in the mid sixteenth century, the existing temple was
destroyed, either by invasion or by some natural disaster.64 The present temple
was instead built by Viśva’s son, N aranarayana (a.k.a. Malladeva), and his
brother, Chilarai, in 1565. And it was Narana_ rayana who brought most of
Assam under a single rule, subduing the tribal Ahoms, _ Manipuris, Kacharis,
Jaintias and Tripuris. The rebuilt K amakhya temple’s inner wall still contains
an inscription celebrating his ‘glory’, ‘charity’ and ‘excellence’ as a ‘worshipper
of Kamakhya’.65

Like Naraka, Naranar

ayana had a complex relationship with the tribal peoples
of Assam. Although he was_ famed for his conquests, Naranarayana was also
_
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known for his tolerance of indigenous traditions. For instance, according to

one story, N
aran
ar
ayana allowed his Kachari soldiers to worship Śiva in their
_
own tribal mode, alongside his br
ahmanic method of puj
a:
_
Besides the Vedic rites there were and even now are various tribal
modes of worship of Śiva. On the eve of his expedition against the
Ahoms . . . King Naranarayana of Koch-Bihar worshipped Śiva
according to accepted s´ astric_ rites. But at the insistence of his
Kachari soldiers, the sacrifice of swine, buffalo, he-goats, pigeons,
ducks and cocks and offering of rice and liquor and also dancing of
women (deodhai) were allowed.66

Like Naraka, too, N aranar

ayana was a flawed king whose pride eventually led
to a terrible fall. When N _ ar
aran ayana heard that a pious br ahman named
Kendukalai had received a vision of the _ goddess, he demanded that the _ priest
persuade the goddess to reveal herself to him also. The goddess became so
furious at his audacity that she beheaded the priest and cursed the king:
thenceforth, if he or any of his descendents ever visited the temple, doom would
befall them.67

This intimate connection between kingship and the goddess continued even after
the fall of the Koch Behar kings and the ascent of the Ahoms in the seventeenth
64
Sastri, ‘Destruction of the Kamakhya Temple’, pp.6–7.
65
R.M. Nath, History of the Koch Kingdom, 1515–1615 (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989), pp.58–62. The
inscription reads as follows: ‘Glory to the king Malladeva who by Virtue of his mercy, is kind to the people,
who in archery is like Arjuna, and in charity like Dadhichi and Karna; he is like an ocean of all goodness, and
_
he is versed in many s´ astras; his character is excellent; in beauty he is as bright as Kandarpa, he is a
worshipper of K amakhya. His younger brother Śukladeva built this temple of bright stones on the Nıla hill,
for the worship of the goddess Durga in 1487 Śaka [1565 CE]’ (ibid., appendix).
66
Adhikary, A History of the Temples of Kamrup, p.38.
67
Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya, p.20.
 MATRIX OF POWER 527

century. Although originally a non-Hindu people derived from the Tai or Shan,
the Ahom kings adopted br ahmanic traditions and worship of Kamakhya after
they subdued the region, bringing_ in new priests from Bengal and other parts of
India and constructing hundreds of temples. Thus the great Ahom king, Rudra
_
Singha, wished to be initiated into the ‘cult of strength or Śakti’ and so invited a
famous br ahman Bengali named Krsnar ama Bhattacarya to come to Assam and
68 _ _ _ _ _ _ in 1714 before the priest
initiate him. Unfortunately, Rudra Singha _ died
arrived—but his wife was inducted, and had the br ahman installed on Nilachala
hill to serve as priest of the Kamakhy a temple. _

Each of these narratives has a consistent structural theme centering around

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kingship, the goddess, and the tension between Hindu and tribal religious
_
practices. In each case—Naraka, Viśva Singha, _
Naranarayana Singha and Rudra
_
Singha—the _
king worships the goddess and conquers his enemies; but in each case,
he also has some flaw or weakness; and in each case, this flaw revolves around the
king’s relation to tribal or mleccha traditions—whether by making alliances with
tribal kings, allowing tribal practices to continue or through his own tribal origins:

Punishment Brahmanic vs.

King Great Deed Sin or Fault or failure _
Tribal tension
Naraka Founds Makes pact Goddess Pact with
kingdom of with tribal hidden from tribal king
Kamarupa, king him
worships
Kamakhya
_
Viśva Singha Rediscovers Mother Mother is a Wars against
Kamakhya offends a mleccha tribal kings
temple sage
N
aran ar
ayana Rebuilds the Demands a Descendents Defeats tribal
Si_ngha _ temple vision of the cannot visit kings, but
goddess the temple allows
soldiers to
worship in
tribal mode
_
Rudra Singha Patronises Non-Hindu, Dies before Non-Hindu
ahma s,
br tribal origin becoming tribal origin
worships Hindu
Kamakhya

68
Chandra Kanta Sarma, An Early History of Kamarup Kamakhya (Guwahati: Kalita Art Press, 1998), p.16.
See Sarma, Kamrup Kamakhya, p.21.
 528 SOUTH ASIA

In sum, the king in these narratives is always an ambivalent character,

simultaneously a devotee and a flawed being tied to impurity, sin and non-
Hindu tribal traditions.

There is a logic in this connection between royal power and the spiritual power
of the goddess—as also in the ambivalent status of the king. The goddess is the
embodiment of the earth and the land, of which the king is the ruler and
protector. The goddess, moreover, embodies a fierce and awesome source of
power, the power to destroy demons, to cleanse the world of evil—and, by
extension, to defeat the enemies of the state: ‘she is closer to earthly
values . . . but she is more apt to make use of the violence without which the
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earth could not live’.69 But more importantly, the role of the king also embodies
many of the same tensions between dangerous impurity and terrible power as
does the menstruating goddess: for the king is bound to the world of warfare,
battle and violence that is necessary to the functioning of the state.70

Both of the two most important Assamese texts, the K alik

a Purana and the
_ the king,
Yoginı Tantra, devote a great deal of attention to the governing role of
and to worldly politics. Many of the rituals described in the K alik
a Purana,
moreover, are specifically designed to ensure the prosperity of the kingdom and _
the conquest of enemies. Indeed, the offering of sacrifices is necessary for the
ongoing vitality of the body politic: and the king risks famine, death and
disaster if sacrifices are not performed (KP 85:12–13). At the same time, the
power of the sacrifice can be used even more specifically to destroy
one’s enemies and rival kings by symbolically identifying them with the ritual
victim:

A king may offer a sacrifice for his enemies. First the sword is
consecrated, and the buffalo or goat is consecrated with the name
of the enemy . . . . It is best to offer sacrifices whenever enemies
become strong. At such times, he should sever the head and offer it
for the destruction of enemies. He should infuse the soul of the
enemy into this animal. With this slaughter, the life of the enemy is
also slain. He should say, ‘O Candika, of horrid form, devour my
enemy, so and so! . . . This enemy _ _ of mine, who has done evil, is
himself in the form of this animal. Destroy him, O Mahamarı,
devour, devour him! Spheng, _ spheng!’_ With this mantra, a flower

69
Biardeau, ‘Devi’, p.95.
70
See Heesterman, The Inner Conflict, p.10; and Urban, ‘The Path of Power’, pp.804–11.
 MATRIX OF POWER 529

should be placed on the head of the victim. Then he should offer

the blood. K
alik ana (KP 67.152–58).
a Pur
_
Note however, that kings can also sacrifice human beings. The K alik
a Pur
ana,
in fact, terms human sacrifice the most perfect offering: ‘when a human being_ is
sacrifice[d] the goddess remains pleased for 1000 years; and when three are
sacrificed, for 100,000 years’ (KP 67.19). Here again we can probably detect
some non-Hindu tribal influence. Although, as humans are listed in the Vedas
as the first of animals fit for sacrifice, paradoxically, consumption of human
flesh is explicitly considered taboo throughout Vedic literature.71 In non-Hindu
societies, on the other hand, human sacrifice continued until the colonial era.
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Various hill tribes of Assam such as the Nagas, Chutiyas and Jaintias were well-
known for it, and the ritual was performed by Assam’s kings up to the reign of
Gaurın _
atha Singha (1780–96).72 Even today, there are periodic reports of
human offerings taking place secretly.

Yet like the blood of the goddess, the offering of a human being is at once an
extremely powerful but potentially dangerous thing. Indeed br ahmans,
belonging to the most pure rank in the Hindu class system, are forbidden _to
perform human sacrifice on pain of having short miserable lives and going to
hell (KP 67.48–50). But members of the ksatriya, the royal or warrior class,
_
may perform this rite so long as it is performed in an impure place like a
cremation ground. In this context, the human victim is symbolically identified
with the person of the king himself, who invokes the protection of his kingdom
and its wealth. He asks her to:

Save me, who am seeking protection, along with my sons,

livestock, and friends; save me along with my kingdom, ministers
and fourfold army. Save me, by giving up your own life . . . . Dying,
with copious streams of blood flowing from the arteries of your
neck and smearing your limbs, cherish yourself, for your death is

71
Brian K. Smith, Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.251.
72
See Wendell Beane, Myth, Cult and Symbols in S´akta Hinduism: A Study of the Indian Mother Goddess
(Leiden: Brill, 1977), pp.87–8; and Edward Albert Gait, ‘Human Sacrifice in Ancient Assam’, in the Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol.67, no.3 (1898), p.59. Caldwell describes a similar role of sacrifice and
kingship in South India, where there is a ‘harvest of war’, in which the cutting off of heads promotes the
fertility of the kingdom: ‘blood becomes the central metaphor for the fertilizing fluid of life . . . . Only by the
spilling of this blood-seed in battle or in sexual relations can new life develop and take birth. The sacrifice of
the male blood-seed to the hot and thirsty feminine body of the earth is an act which enables the perpetuation
of life . . . . The related practice of human sacrifice among numerous indigenous South Asian communities was
directly associated with maintaining the fertility of the earth’. See Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother, p.113.
 530 SOUTH ASIA

inevitable. The one thus worshipped is my own self. Let him be the
abode of the guardians of the four quarters. He is possessed by
Brahm a and all the other gods. K alik ana (KP 67.86–87,
a Pur
90–92). _

Much like the menstruating goddess, the king is thus a figure associated by
nature with both impurity and power: like the goddess, he must do battle
against evil, shedding the blood of enemies, which necessarily entangles him in
the sins of violence. This is a recurring theme in much classical Sanskrit
literature, such as the Laws of Manu and the Mah abharata, where the king is
often portrayed as a deeply ambivalent character who wields a dangerous and
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frightening power. As Heesterman observes, the king is often described as the

‘the ‘‘eater’’ of the people who devours everything . . . . The king is put on par
with a butcher who keeps a hundred thousand slaughterhouses’.73 And the
K alik ana follows in that tradition. It makes clear that acts of impurity and
a Pur
violence are _a necessary part of the king’s duties: ‘Kings become impure when
delivering judgment, performing rites of sacrifice and invading the enemy
kingdom’ (KP 85.73). This is why the king patronises the br ahmans—so that
they can ward him against the effects of the evil deeds he must_ inevitably
perform.

But, like the menstrual blood of the goddess, it is precisely the impurity of
bloodshed and sacrifice that allows the king to unleash and annex the
tremendous power of the goddess: for ‘he who performs this [sacrifice] enjoys
all the pleasures of this world and after death remains in the abode of the
goddess for three kalpas and then becomes a sovereign king on earth’ (KP
67.175). Ultimately, a king who performs these rites can achieve success in
everything, not only ‘all the objects of his desire and Śiva’s form in the afterlife’,
but also strength in battle and invincibility against any foe: ‘That hero, like me
[Śiva] enters into battles. The weapons of the enemies become like grass upon a
fire . . . . That Tiger among men becomes strong and virile’ (KP 74.69–70).

Here again, the king lies at a crucial nexus in the larger circulation of power
between the goddess, the earth, and her devotees. In this case, the blood and
s´akti of the goddess flows to the land, then to the king who is its human ruler,
and finally back to goddess through the blood of animal sacrifice and of
enemies slain in the ‘sacrifice of battle’. Again, this circulating power is
inherently dangerous and impure, tied as it is to the forces of death and
bloodshed—but it is also life-giving and creative. And, again, it is inherently

73
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict, p.109.
 MATRIX OF POWER 531

gendered, flowing as it does from the yoni of the Mother Goddess to a male
king, who rules over a feminised motherland and spills blood with the
masculine tools of war and sacrifice.

Conclusions and Comparative Comments

Women are gods, women are life, women, indeed, are jewels One
should always associate with women, whether one’s own wife or
another’s. What I have told you is the secret of all the Tantras.
Yoni Tantra (YT 7.16b–17b).
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To conclude, I would like to suggest that the particular case of Kamakhya has
some much larger comparative and cross-cultural implications for our
understanding of sacred power. The kind of power that we encounter in the
case of Kamakhya is one in which modern Western distinctions between the
religious and the political, and between the spiritual and the sensual, do not
really make much sense; on the contrary, in that context the categories of
religion, politics and sexuality are intimately related and inextricably
intertwined.

Following Foucault, I have argued that power operates not as a top-down

oppressive force wielded by the few, but rather as a circulating flow of
relations that extends between all members of the social order, from kings
and priests down to ordinary male and female devotees. In the case of
Kam akhy
a, this flow of power is symbolised above all by the flow of blood:
the blood that flows from the goddess each year in her menstruation, the
blood that flows from victims slain in sacrifice, the blood that flows from
female partners and is consumed in esoteric rituals and the blood that flows
from human victims and enemies slain by kings in the sacrifice of battle. Like
blood, this is a highly ambivalent kind of power that is at once dangerously
impure and yet vital to the existence of life.

At the same time, though, I have suggested that the Indian concept of s´akti
offers some important alternatives and correctives to Foucault’s model of
power. In contrast to Foucault, I have argued that s´akti, in this case, is not
some kind of vacuous impersonal force or intentionality without a subject.
Rather, power here is both gendered and performative, in Judith Butler’s
sense of the terms. That is to say, power is intimately tied to constructions of
masculinity and femininity and to relations between the sexes. And, like
gender in Butler’s analysis, power is not an essence or a substance but
 532 SOUTH ASIA

rather an effect that must be performed and continuously re-performed

through ‘acts, gestures, enactments’, and other forms of social discourse.74 In
the case of Kamakhya, these performative enactments include the recitation
of mythic narratives, the daily performance of animal sacrifices, the secret
Tantric sexual rites, and the large public festivals that together bind the
goddess and her devotees in a complex network of power and gender
relations.

Metaphysically and metaphorically, power here is largely feminine: it is the

creative s´akti of the goddess that flows through and sustains the universe with
her life-giving blood. But institutionally and politically, power is largely
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masculine: it is the ritual authority of the priests who perform her rituals and
the royal power of the kings who rule her land. In fact, one of the things that
Kamakhy a’s rituals do, I would argue, is to transfuse and transform the
metaphorical power of the goddess into the physical power of the male kings
and priests. Through a kind of sexo-religio-political alchemy, the feminine
energy of the yoni is transmuted into the masculine authority of the br ahman
and the r aja. _

Of course, as Butler suggests, there are always opportunities for subversive

forms of performance and ‘new possibilities of agency’ that might resist and
transform the dominant relations of power.75 In the case of Assamese
Tantra, the fact that women are identified with the goddess and her power
has meant that some women have historically been able to use that power
for more tangible forms of authority: the history of Assam provides many
examples of prominent female gurus, even to this very day (in the person of
a of Kamakhya).76 However, their power
the internationally-famous Śrı M
has always been on the periphery and at the margins of the institutional
worship of K am akhy
a, which has historically been, and still remains, the

74
Butler, Gender Trouble, pp.24, 136, 141. Biernacki also uses Butler to discuss women in Tantra (Renowned
Goddess, pp.23–5), though in a very different way than I am here. In particular, she does not discuss Butler’s
key concept of performativity.
75
Ibid., pp.69, 146. As William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal explain Butler’s model, ‘every social-
symbolic order [is] a regulatory consolidation of power . . . . Such an order is established and maintained
by prohibitions and repeated performances of identities within that order. Yet . . . to be constituted within
such a symbolic order is not to be determined by it. There is always the possibility of agency’. See
William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, Theory for Religious Studies (New York: Routledge, 2004),
pp.68–9.
76
See Loriliai Biernacki, ‘Shree Maa of Kamakhya’, in Karen Pechilis (ed.), The Graceful Guru: Female
Gurus in India and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.179–202. For a
discussion of the question of ‘what’s in it for the women’ in Tantra, see also Hugh Urban, The Economics
of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
pp.82–90.
 MATRIX OF POWER 533
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Figure 8
 ntrika, Guwahati, Assam
Red-clad Ta
Source: Photo by author.

domain of the hundreds of red-clad priests who run the central temple
complex.

But whatever its form, whether masculine or feminine, spiritual or political,

power here is intimately tied to impurity: the impurity of the menstruating
goddess, whose polluting but life-giving blood flows to the earth each year; the
impurity of her animal victims, decapitated and offered in sacrifice; the
impurity of the male and female sexual fluids consumed in Tantric ritual; and
the impurity of the king, whose political and military power inevitably ties him
to violence and bloodshed. It is this very impurity—its aura of mixed awe,
dread, terror and fascination—that invests this goddess and her worship with
their particular power. The paradox is what makes Kamakhya such an
important example for all of us interested in the nature of power—whether in
the specific context of Tantra, or in the comparative study of religions as a
whole.
 534 SOUTH ASIA

Abbreviations
BNT Madhusudhan Kaul (ed.), Brhannıla Tantra (Delhi: Butala, 1984).
KCT G.C. Ved _ udamani Tantra (Calcutta: Tantrik
antatırtha (ed.), Kulac
Texts, 1915). _ _
KJñN P.C. Bagchi (ed.), Kaulajñ ananirnaya (Varanasi: Pracya Prakaśana,
1986). _
KP B.N. Shastri (ed.), K alik
a Purana (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1991).
KT Jyotirl
al Das (ed.), Kubjik _
a Tantra. Mula Samskrta o B
anganuvada
sameta (Calcutta: Navabh _ _
arata Publishers, 1978). _
ŚB Albrecht Weber (ed.), S´atapatha Br ahmana (Benaras: Chowkhamba
Sanskrit Series, 1964). _
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YogT Biswanarayan Shastri (ed.), Yoginı Tantra (Delhi: Bharatıya Vidya

Prakaśana, 1982).
YT J.A. Schoterman (ed.), Yoni Tantra (Delhi: Manohar, 1980).