ABSTRACT
Much of the recent study on the body and religion has focused on the way the body is used – ritualized, disciplined, cultivated, transformed – in religious praxis. Absent from much of this discussion is the participation of children. Tantric rituals, typically associated with the use of antinomian elements such as meat, alcohol, and sexual intercourse, are not readily associated with children. However, new evidence suggests children have long been at the heart of Tantric worship, their bodies used as playful, innovative ritual objects mediating powerful, uncontrollable divine forces. This includes the well-known kumārī pūjā and the almost completely unstudied baṭuka worship. Using comparative analysis of a broad range of understudied Tantric texts and rare ethnographic study of a living community of Tantric practitioners at the Kāmākhyā temple in Assam, this chapter argues that the ritual worship of children represents innovative, publicly accessible, chaste, and highly coded inversions of the antinomian rituals of the Kaula Tantras, satisfying bodily desires in order to achieve a liberated state and mediated through the bodies of children. This research also demonstrates how child worship remains one of the most persistent, powerful, and covert symbols of Tantric identity.
