Videos by Sunthar Visuvalingam
As a ritual performance, the brahmanical sacrifice (yajña), around which the semiotics of Vedic l... more As a ritual performance, the brahmanical sacrifice (yajña), around which the semiotics of Vedic life revolved, could be undertaken only by twice-born upper-castes and officiated exclusively by trained orthodox brahmins. Participation of otherwise excluded lower castes was ensured through transposition onto public festivals, popular pilgrimages with their mythological backdrop, (antinomian) tantric praxis, individual life-cycle rituals (saṁskāra), etc., and especially the all-inclusive classical theater (nāṭya). Abhinava declares that the ‘stage manager’ (sūtradhāra), though of lowly (śūdra) caste, deserves to be addressed as “Ārya” for he is fully initiated (dīkṣita) into the innermost secrets of Bharata’s nāṭya-veda.
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ (prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution. 6 views
As a ritual performance, the brahmanical sacrifice ( yajña), around which the semiotics of Vedic ... more As a ritual performance, the brahmanical sacrifice ( yajña), around which the semiotics of Vedic life revolved, could be undertaken only by twice-born upper-castes and officiated exclusively by trained orthodox brahmins. Participation of otherwise excluded lower castes was ensured through transposition onto public festivals, popular pilgrimages with their mythological backdrop, (antinomian) tantric praxis, individual life-cycle rituals ( saṁskāra), etc., and especially the all-inclusive classical theater (nāṭya). Abhinava declares that the ‘stage manager’ ( sūtradhāra), though of lowly ( śūdra) caste, deserves to be addressed as “Ārya” for he is fully initiated ( dīkṣita) into the innermost secrets of Bharata’s nāṭya- veda.
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ ( prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution. 8 views
Papers by Sunthar Visuvalingam
The riotous carnival that regularly punctuated the ordered life of traditional societies was char... more The riotous carnival that regularly punctuated the ordered life of traditional societies was characterized by the collective suspension of religious norms. The licentious eruption of animal instincts was epitomized by universal laughter that embraced all and spared none. The vernacular mock-brahmin, who violated the very norms he embodies, nevertheless had his counterpart in the jester of the classical theater, standing beside in dialectical opposition to the king as pivot of the socio-cosmic order. The literate, refined, and spiritual ethos of India’s traditional elite remained continuous with, grounded in, and nourished by ‘Rabelaisian’ popular culture. For the carnival is the temporal projection of a more fundamental, all-pervasive, and ever-present dialectic of order and disorder, interdiction, and violation. The ultimate goal of this alternation was the freedom at the heart of Abhinavagupta’s aesthetics. ‘Creative chaos’ within our multiplying conflicts of civilization assumes ...
Transgressive laughter is best understood through the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the ce... more Transgressive laughter is best understood through the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the central concern of Rabelais, Bakhtin, and Abhinavagupta. The medieval Christian dispensation revolved around the opposition, alternation, and complementarity between the stern, ascetic, otherworldly spiritual ideal of the Church and the periodic extended license of the popular carnival that rejuvenated this world of piety by rendering it topsy-turvy. Through Rabelais, the unschooled obscene clamor of the primordial folk found unvarnished expression in early Renaissance literature. Even while cultivating a superior and exclusive literate world, the medieval elites had fully participated in the unseemly carnivalesque laughter. Age-old festivals parodying and profaning ecclesiastical rites held in the vicinity of, and with the implicit sanction of, the Church were officiated by the lower clergy. As Bhairava-incarnate, Abhinavagupta’s praxis of transgressive sacrality offers a more adequate fr...
Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets
Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture, 2018
Transgressive laughter is best understood through the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the ce... more Transgressive laughter is best understood through the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the central concern of Rabelais, Bakhtin, and Abhinavagupta. The medieval Christian dispensation revolved around the opposition, alternation, and complementarity between the stern, ascetic, otherworldly spiritual ideal of the Church and the periodic extended license of the popular carnival that rejuvenated this world of piety by rendering it topsy-turvy. Through Rabelais, the unschooled obscene clamor of the primordial folk found unvarnished expression in early Renaissance literature. Even while cultivating a superior and exclusive literate world, the medieval elites had fully participated in the unseemly carnivalesque laughter. Age-old festivals parodying and profaning ecclesiastical rites held in the vicinity of, and with the implicit sanction of, the Church were officiated by the lower clergy. As Bhairava-incarnate, Abhinavagupta’s praxis of transgressive sacrality offers a more adequate framework for understanding the still Christian project formulated by Rabelais through the Abbey of Theleme: “Do what thou wilt!”.
s of Papers Ami Upadhyay & Dushyant Nimavat, “Dialogic-Classical Indian Philosophy with special r... more s of Papers Ami Upadhyay & Dushyant Nimavat, “Dialogic-Classical Indian Philosophy with special reference to Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen” “India is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” This statement that Winston Churchill once made may be right in one sense that no other country in the world holds such an astonishing mixture of ethnic groups, abundance of incomprehensible languages, varieties of climate and topography, disparate convictions, divergent customs, diversity of religions and cultural practices, and levels of cultural and economic development as India does. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1981) set up a theory related to dialogism. It stated that there is necessity of creating meanings in a dialogic way with people. In his theory, Bakhtin emphasizes the chain of dialogues. According to him, every dialogue results from a prior one, and every new dialogue is to be present in future ones too. A ‘word’ is itself a dialogue...
... (de forma extendida) 'familia' y de ahí que el rito sexual que pasa... more ... (de forma extendida) 'familia' y de ahí que el rito sexual que pasa por ese nombre podría haber servido simplemente para subrayar su carácter incestuoso o ... Estas ecuaciones verbales subrayan el hecho de que, bajo estas condiciones específicas, la experiencia física ...
Introduction: the Tamed Goddess and her Wild Guardian Bhairava in Kāśī, the womb of the Goddess T... more Introduction: the Tamed Goddess and her Wild Guardian Bhairava in Kāśī, the womb of the Goddess The Gaṅgā and the Matsyodarī yoga Baṭuka Bhairava, the son of the goddess Caṇḍī Kāśī: Goddess and liṅga of light Vaiṣṇo Devī’s decapitation of Bhairava The pilgrimage to Vaiṣṇo Devī Bhairava, the Goddess and bhakti Bhairava as royal sacrificer: Newar Festivals of the Goddess Indrayātrā: Taleju, Kumārī and the demon-mother of Indra Pacali Bhairava Yātrā: Ajimā, Ganeśa and Bhadrakālī Bhadrakālī in the Bisket Yātrā: the autochthonous goddess and Hindu tradition Bhairavī Rathayātrā: possession, sacrifice and the legacy of the shaman Tradition, gender, and transgression: the Goddess as androgyne
Introduction Sanskrit theater as the total art-form based on the rasa-canon Aesthetic identificat... more Introduction Sanskrit theater as the total art-form based on the rasa-canon Aesthetic identification is the very life of rasa-dhvani Universalization of shared emotions in aesthetic relish Rasa is ultimately reflexive consciousness mediated by emotion Suggestion, the soul of poetry even before its late formulation Painting the world with musical colors: the ineffability of rasa Good taste, bad taste, ‘Hindu’ taste: the aesthetics of rasābhāsa Aesthetic rapture embodies a ‘descending’ spiritual realization Ambiguous status of art within the spectrum of the religious life Quiescence as the soul of rasa: liberation through emotion Rasa in the service of devotion or the aestheticization of bhakti? Religious art as propaganda: trans-sectarian aesthetics of rasa Sanskritize, popularize, and acculturate: the vernacular triumph Muslim allegories on the taste of Love: becoming God’s image Banarasipan as ‘intoxicated’ (mastī) state of spiritual autonomy Is Abhinavagupta still relevant to the ...
... | Ayuda. La sacralidad transgresiva en el hinduísmo y las religiones del mundo. Autores: Sunt... more ... | Ayuda. La sacralidad transgresiva en el hinduísmo y las religiones del mundo. Autores: SuntharVisuvalingam; Localización: Debats, ISSN 0212-0585, Nº 80, 2003 , pags. 116-127. © 2001-2010 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.
Debats, 2003
... | Ayuda. La sacralidad transgresiva en el hinduísmo y las religiones del mundo. Autores: Sunt... more ... | Ayuda. La sacralidad transgresiva en el hinduísmo y las religiones del mundo. Autores: SuntharVisuvalingam; Localización: Debats, ISSN 0212-0585, Nº 80, 2003 , pags. 116-127. © 2001-2010 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.
Contemporary “humanist” approaches to violence take (post-Enlightenment) Man to be essentially re... more Contemporary “humanist” approaches to violence take (post-Enlightenment) Man to be essentially reasonable and pacific. Its etiology is sought in the perpetrator’s succumbing to animal nature and/or in the victim’s defiance of (internalized former) oppression. Religious fanaticism underpins millennial conflicts because the underlying worldviews and consequent claims are intractable to Reason. Reinterpreted through its mimetic dualist structure and the universal scapegoat mechanism invested in the marriage of Lat Bhairon, martyrdom of Ghazi Miyan, and ritualization of Shia-Sunni conflict in Muharram, the 1809 Hindu-Muslim riots of Banaras demonstrate instead that religious traditions aim to contain an innate primordial violence channelized to better serve their divergent founding projects. Recovering their shared sacrificial core is the urgent prerequisite to eventual reconciliation and for deconstructing the now “secularized” modes of scapegoating the Other.
“Transgressive sacrality” within a religious tradition, though violating the interdictions and ob... more “Transgressive sacrality” within a religious tradition, though violating the interdictions and observances of the tradition in question, it does not seek to replace the latter. Instead it lays claim to a superior degree and second order of spirituality derived precisely from the violation of socio-religious interdictions, the general validity and binding force is not at all questioned by the transgressor. In fact, transgressive sacrality cannot operate without the existence of such binding and powerful taboos, and often presents itself as an esoteric form of the mother-religion, the latter serving as the exoteric prerequisite and recruiting ground for it. Unlike heterodoxy, which publicly questions and challenges the authority of the mother-religion, the adepts of transgressive sacrality often paradoxically play the role of champions of orthodox religion in the public life of their respective communities. Thus the brahmanicide Bhairava, guilty of the most heinous socio-religious crime in Hindu society and whose mythic model is imitated ritually by transgressive ascetics, like the Kāpālikas, is simultaneously the policeman-magistrate of the socio-religious order and
the guardian of the territorial limits of the sacred city of Vārāṇasī. Where such sacrality finds expression in well-defined initiatic currents, like Tantricism or the Pāśupata “sect” in India, one often finds a graded development from the neophyte, observing more
rigorous interdictions and a more intense asceticism than that generally prescribed by the public religion, to the adept, who is required to flagrantly violate even the most fundamental taboos of his society. This type of sacrality finds its most spectacular expression in the phenomenon of “ritual clowning” in “primitive” religions, like that of the Pueblo Koyemshi, where the highest specialists of the sacred publicly violate fundamental taboos before the half-terrified half-amused spectators of the tribe, whose entire religion would seem to be founded on the observance of these very taboos, which the clowns indeed help maintain by their ridiculous negative example.
Nothing could be more opposed, at first sight, to the pre-Aryan wilderness of the bloodthirsty go... more Nothing could be more opposed, at first sight, to the pre-Aryan wilderness of the bloodthirsty goddess than the purified male-dominated arena of the Brahmanical sacrifice. Nevertheless, the popular pilgrimage cults to her shrines and the communal festivals celebrated in her honor remain structured by the Vedic paradigm. On the other hand, the sacrifice is pervaded by a feminine dimension, rich in embryonic symbolism, whose transgressive centrality is obscured by the outwardly passive role assumed by the wife of the ‘Aryan’ sacrificer. This article explores the role of the tantric god Bhairava—who is typically coupled with the wild goddess and yet cast in the image of the (preclassical) dīkṣita—in drawing these two cultural universes together to form Hinduism as we know it today. Bhairava-Viśvanātha’s marriage to the solitary Newar goddess (‘Bhadrakālī’) not only bequeathed the Vedic mystery of the severed head to the Katmandu Valley; it can still help us decipher the feminine aspect of Kāśī and the otherwise unsuspected implications of the Hindu’s perennial love for his sacred city.
[pages 106–176] [page breaks in final print version are shown within red brackets. Cross-referenc... more [pages 106–176] [page breaks in final print version are shown within red brackets. Cross-references are to the page numbers of the printed volume and not to the page numbers of this PDF file; however they have been hyperlinked to the appropriate text places. Corrections to errors in the printed text are highlighted in yellow]
The meaning and role of carnival is best understood through the semiotics of transgression. 1 A r... more The meaning and role of carnival is best understood through the semiotics of transgression. 1 A religion is defined by its imposition of a specific system of observances and interdictions, binding on all its adherents and even more so on its spiritual elite. " Transgressive sacrality " within a religious tradition violates the interdictions and observances of the tradition in question, but does not seek to replace the latter. Instead it lays claim to a superior degree and second order of spirituality derived precisely from the violation of socio-religious interdictions, the general validity and binding force of which is not questioned by the transgressor. Indeed, such transgressive sacrality cannot operate without the existence of such
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Videos by Sunthar Visuvalingam
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ (prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution.
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ ( prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution.
Papers by Sunthar Visuvalingam
the guardian of the territorial limits of the sacred city of Vārāṇasī. Where such sacrality finds expression in well-defined initiatic currents, like Tantricism or the Pāśupata “sect” in India, one often finds a graded development from the neophyte, observing more
rigorous interdictions and a more intense asceticism than that generally prescribed by the public religion, to the adept, who is required to flagrantly violate even the most fundamental taboos of his society. This type of sacrality finds its most spectacular expression in the phenomenon of “ritual clowning” in “primitive” religions, like that of the Pueblo Koyemshi, where the highest specialists of the sacred publicly violate fundamental taboos before the half-terrified half-amused spectators of the tribe, whose entire religion would seem to be founded on the observance of these very taboos, which the clowns indeed help maintain by their ridiculous negative example.
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ (prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution.
My comprehensive hermeneutics of ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) shows how this ‘profane’ ( prakaraṇa) drama not only remains a yajña in disguise, but helps clarify the inner meaning and purpose of this foundational Vedic institution.
the guardian of the territorial limits of the sacred city of Vārāṇasī. Where such sacrality finds expression in well-defined initiatic currents, like Tantricism or the Pāśupata “sect” in India, one often finds a graded development from the neophyte, observing more
rigorous interdictions and a more intense asceticism than that generally prescribed by the public religion, to the adept, who is required to flagrantly violate even the most fundamental taboos of his society. This type of sacrality finds its most spectacular expression in the phenomenon of “ritual clowning” in “primitive” religions, like that of the Pueblo Koyemshi, where the highest specialists of the sacred publicly violate fundamental taboos before the half-terrified half-amused spectators of the tribe, whose entire religion would seem to be founded on the observance of these very taboos, which the clowns indeed help maintain by their ridiculous negative example.
the central concern of Rabelais, Bakhtin and Abhinavagupta. The medieval Christian
2
dispensation revolved around the opposition, alternation and complementarity between the stern,
ascetic, otherworldly spiritual ideal of the Church and the periodic extended license of the
popular carnival that rejuvenated this world of piety by rendering it topsy-turvy. Through
Rabelais the unschooled obscene clamor of the primordial folk found unvarnished expression in
early Renaissance literature. Even while cultivating a superior and exclusive literate world, the
medieval elites had fully participated in the unseemly carnivalesque laughter. Age-old festivals
parodying and profaning ecclesiastical rites held in the vicinity of and with the implicit sanction
of the Church were officiated by the lower clergy. As Bhairava-incarnate, Abhinavagupta’s
praxis of transgressive sacrality offers a more adequate framework for understanding the still
Christian project formulated by Rabelais through the Abbey of Theleme: "Do what thou wilt!"
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The best vantage point for understanding ‘transgressive sacrality’ as a universal phenomenon is the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the central concern of Rabelais (1494–1563), Bakhtin (1895–1975), and Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020).2 The medieval Christian dispensation revolved around the opposition, alternation, and complementarity between the stern, ascetic, otherworldly spiritual ideal of the Church and the periodic extended license of the popular carnival that rejuvenated this world of piety by rendering it topsy-turvy. Through Rabelais—the erudite monk and priest, who embodied the transition to the ‘humanist’ era—the unschooled obscene clamor of the primordial folk and festive marketplace found unvarnished exaggerated expression in early Renaissance literature. No longer capable of appreciating much less endorsing such celebration of the beast in Man, post-Enlightenment critics, severing his essential links with the ‘unofficial’ world of debasing folk humor, had sought to minimize the ‘Rabelaisian’ by reducing its thrust to negative anti-clerical satire or rebuked its capricious author wherever his excesses seemed too gratuitous.3 By rehabilitating carnivalesque laughter as intrinsic, readers, the aspiring new elites, from the surviving oral mass culture (Berrong 52-78).4 Princely Pantagruel himself embodies—especially after meeting the disconcerting Panurge—the values, ideals, temperament and comportment of the Renaissance Man par excellence.
Is ‘aristocratic’ Thélème therefore, pace Bakhtin, a (definitive) repudiation by Rabelais of his own earlier celebration of generalized antinomian license, or rather a (necessary, though guarded) reformulation that permits a better understanding of the presuppositions, parameters, and finality of that elusive ‘liberation’? Juxtaposing the medieval Christian carnival to its still surviving counterpart in the Hindu subcontinent—the traditional excesses of which have not been wholly smothered by the recent cultural passage of its (especially anglophone) elites to Westernizing modernity—may allow us to propose a more dialectical understanding of how such (systemic and not only carnivalesque) transgression could culminate in (inner) spiritual freedom.