You are visitor number (per WebCounter) to our site! - please send us your feedback

Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition

____________________________________ Sunthar Visuvalingam

�The annulment of the Torah is its fulfillment�
(Talmud Menahot 99b; the messianic motto adopted by the Sabbatians).

Prolegomena to a Fresh Approach to the Study Of Religion

Given that religion imposes a total perspective on life, any totalizing approach to its study is immediately confronted with the multiplicity of such perspectives, even within each of the major traditions. However sympathetic he may be to his subject matter, the modern scholar is therefore condemned to a perpetual balancing act between the self-representation(s) of the tradition under consideration and the conflicting claims of scientific objectivity. For the talented, walking this tight-rope of relativism often becomes the license for a flamboyant display of virtuosity��the economics of the profession demands such an excruciatingly high level of performance��in reducing the complexity of the value-system under study to an imported, and all too ephemeral, paradigm borrowed, for better or for worse, from the secular sciences. The alternatives seem to be either a tedious uncritical catechism on ��if not a thinly disguised apologetics for��(one of the strands of) that tradition, or the (not so) subtle imposition of categories��couched in the appropriate scientific idiom��derived from (the dominant prejudices of) a rival religion, invariably the scholar�s own. Is it really possible to (re-) discover a privileged space, within a given religious tradition, that would allow one to make sense of and vindicate it as a whole, even while relativizing the specific external form it has assumed, the crucial choices it has made? Even if we do succeed in isolating and defining such a ground, is it justifiable to extend its perspective and implications to the whole edifice, most of whose inhabitants would simply reject the subversive potential of such a self-negating posture? In other words, can the academic study of religion engage in such a daunting enterprise without becoming directly involved in the pre-existing conflicts of interpretation within that tradition, without consciously assuming the risks of proposing radically new understandings of its past and of thereby lending hitherto unsuspected directions to its future?

With its multiplicity of doctrines, practices and traditions, (the contemporary study of) Hinduism, above all, has been the victim of this lack of an overarching theoretical perspective derived from within. So much so that political historians of India are nowadays able to blithely assert that Hinduism as such is not only a �mere� construction but a recent �invention�. As if this self-evident observation immediately absolved them from the need to account for the widespread and persistent consensus on a core of interlocking institutions, a shared framework of discourse. On the other hand, French scholarship, nurtured by its rationalist background, has produced some remarkable attempts to understand Hinduism on its own terms and as a systematic whole. Madeleine Biardeau�s anthropology of Hindu civilization��a vision to which the present author is also indebted��discovers its unity in the productive tension between the brahmanical model of society, centered on the Vedic sacrifice, and world-renunciation.^[1] This opposition was subsequently superseded by, even as it was absorbed into, the universalizing religion of bhakti which was far more accessible to those at the lower levels of the caste-hierarchy. Despite this crucial structural transformation, the price to be paid for such hard-won coherence��at least for the Hindus��has been imprisonment within an essentially unchanging and idiosyncratic religious system that can be of little relevance to the human condition in general. What is sorely missing from this magnificent edifice��especially for the modern Hindu weighed down by a past so generously thrust upon him on the Orientalist platter��is a systematic analysis of its built-in resources for adaptation. How best can one describe the dynamics of change that would account for not only its longevity but its consolidation over an entire sub-continent?

Jan C. Heesterman finds this relentless dynamism in the �inner conflict� of Indian tradition: the normative model of classical brahmanism, which fails to account satisfactorily for even the known realities of Indian society and history, is itself an abstraction derived from and premised upon a more comprehensive but �repressed� religious system that encompassed and continues to encompass��despite itself but as its necessary complement��the negation of this idealized model.^[2] Hinduism would be the futile attempt, condemned to unending repetition, to resolve this impasse: change the Hindu��or rather his prison��must, but with no decisive control on his part and to no viable purpose. No real attempt is made to determine whether this �inner conflict� is ultimately constitutive of the human predicament per se, whether and how it re-emerges in other religious traditions and within the discourse of modernity itself. Is it possible to demonstrate, on the contrary, that this dialectical tension has been not only deliberately cultivated within the tradition as a means of containing the ever-lurking specter of chaos, but also systematically exploited as an inexhaustible resource for productive cultural ends?

This introductory essay is primarily aimed at clearing the ground for a totalizing approach to Hinduism that will nevertheless restore to it that capacity for simultaneously reshaping both itself and its environment, that creativity which has ensured its survival till today. It therefore refuses to build upon any (implicitly) irreducible opposition between Hinduism and its Other, but rather seeks to understand the mechanisms whereby that which was originally pre-Aryan could end up becoming Hindu, and how that which was originally Vedic could be served out as that which is anti-brahmanical. This was possible only through the juxtaposition, assimilation and fusion of symbols that, to begin with, were disparate in origin and perhaps in function, as were no doubt their underlying practices. But what if such composite figures are merely symptoms of the fundamental incoherence of Hinduism? Wendy Doniger (O�Flaherty) has already explored the ramifications and structural transformations of many of these motifs��including Bhairava�s brahmanicide��in her various works: my primary aim here is to demonstrate that these transformations are not so much an attempt to �solve� insoluble (theo‑) logical contradictions, but rather a precise and systematic encoding of a transgressive sacrality.^[3] The collection of essays in Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees focuses on one glaring and ubiquitous manifestation of Heesterman�s �inner conflict� but within a forum that was intended to demonstrate��or at least to test��the viability of Biardeau�s bhakti perspective. My concluding essay to this implicit debate attempted to (re‑) read the whole volume from the perspective of transgressive sacrality: apart from considerations of context, there was no space, amidst so many other (often discordant) voices, to explicitly elaborate its theoretical presuppositions in a manner readily accessible to non-Indologists.^[4]��

To begin with an approximation, �transgressive sacrality� is simply a blanket term for bundling together (seemingly) disparate phenomena that directly or symbolically violate the founding rules of a given religious tradition but for the same reason are held to be all the more sacred. In so demarcating the contours of what could well prove to be a new discipline, the researcher is merely extending and attempting to conceptualize the symbolic processes that already weave such phenomena together within the discourse of that tradition. Transgressive sacrality invests symbols��whatever their �original� meaning��with wholly contradictory and seemingly incompatible values, in a manner that seems to undermine the brahmanical tradition as a structured edifice of socio-religious norms. But what guarantee do we have that there is indeed a self-conscious �cultural project� encoded into this infinitely malleable symbolic system? The best bet was to raise the stakes by choosing the most absurd representative of this semiotic process, in order to demonstrate the peculiar but consistent logic that informs his very nonsense. A primarily symbolic figure, freed from other �useful� responsibilities, the Vid�shaka (the clown of the Sanskrit drama), may even offer us a privileged handle on this intangible semiotics of transgression. Perhaps in the laughing clown is hidden the founding discourse of the very culture that laughs at him!

Transgressive sacrality is thus, by extension, the still ill-defined principles that govern the manner in which these violations of the norm are systematically articulated through a network of figures that remain nonetheless sacred: more precisely, it is the implicit �ideology� that maintains, animates and constantly reshapes this symbolic superstructure. But this focus on ambivalence and perpetual transformation, does it not belie the self-representation of the Hindu as the custodian of eternal and unchanging values? Is the eternal law (san�tana dharma) a profound, if necessary, self-deception on the part of an entire culture? The best way of certifying this approach��which one may have otherwise been tempted to simply impose from without��was to recognize therein the still reverberating voice, amplified by the arsenal of modern conceptual tools, of an accredited spokesman of the perennial tradition. Abhinavagupta (10th-11th century A.D.) was not merely the product but the champion of tradition, so much so that his monumental work is mostly in the form of commentary. Having inherited and mastered practically the whole domain of Indian culture, as it was then available in the melting-pot of medieval Kashmir, Abhinava had evolved a highly sophisticated synthesis of Indian aesthetics, philosophy and religion. An original synthesis that not only had a profound impact on the subsequent development of Indian thought but also offers us illuminating insights into the inner logic of the forces at work within Indian culture right from its beginnings. Yet, for Abhinava, the exemplary didact, the culmination of Hinduism��of all religion for that matter ��was to transcend its fundamental and indispensable norms by transgressing them. The primary aim was to achieve the highest possible state of self-realization, that for which every Hindu��every Indian��aspired in his own way.

Transgressive sacrality, then, is the dialectical relation that holds together sacred norms and their violations within a single perspective still geared towards transcendence. My task here is to demonstrate that this inner dialectic has shaped Hinduism, as a symbolic system, long before Abhinava arrived on the Indian scene to give it articulation in conceptual terms that are more intelligible to our own categories of understanding. In many respects, the polyvalence of symbols such as fire and water was far more adequate to represent the complexity of the various psychosomatic processes that accompany this much sought after spiritual transformation. Rooted in bodily functions, the opposition of the pure and the impure��the foundation of the Hindu caste-system��is itself an encoding of the dialectic of interdiction and transgression. Likewise, the brahmanical sacrifice, even in its purified classical form, appears to socially dramatize the inner lived experience of a transgressive sacrality. At its core, Hinduism would be largely the continuous translation and projection of this ineffable experience into a symbolic framework so as to facilitate the controlled assimilation of peoples and modes of life that were initially outside the Vedic tradition and beyond the brahmanical norms: it would have assured, until recently, the still elusive unity of a subcontinent otherwise characterized by bewildering diversity.

Transgressive sacrality, as I understand it, is thus not so much a static system but rather a dynamic organizing principle that brings together otherwise incompatible materials from vastly different domains. These stereotyped, if often enigmatic, equivalences were so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is sometimes difficult to determine if and to what extent any particular reworking of existing materials��or even new creation��reflects a self-conscious appropriation and deliberate propagation of the underlying ideology. The only way to demonstrate its intentional core is to demonstrate the coherence and precision��often to the minutest details��of its symbolic transformations. Despite its very specific formulations and applications in various areas of Hindu life and thought, our working definition of �transgressive sacrality� will have to be necessarily brief and minimal in order to retain its relevance to other traditions, and to leave the door more widely open for the eventual engagement with modernity. Transgressive sacrality��this contradiction in terms, so eminently suitable for the fool�s discourse��is hence (the systematic attempt to formulate, with the help of new conceptual categories,) the theoretical framework that will account for sacred phenomena that otherwise seem to be the very antithesis of the sacred.

Heresy or Sacrilege? Transgressive Sacrality defined

It is important to clearly distinguish the phenomenon of transgressive sacrality^[5] in a religious tradition from the well-known opposition between orthodoxy and heresy.^[6] 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. Heresy (or heterodoxy) challenges some of these doctrines, observances and interdictions and seeks to substitute new ones in their place, and in this way a new sectarian orthodoxy is established that can do without, survive and even aim at completely usurping and replacing the mother-religion. Where the original observances and interdictions are violated, this is merely the inevitable consequence of the adoption of new rules and doctrines which seek to wholly invalidate and replace the former, and not because any specific value is placed on the fact of transgression itself. This would be the relation between Buddhism and Brahmanism, Christianity and Judaism, Shiism and Sunnite Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism, to mention only the best-known examples.

�Transgressive sacrality� within a religious tradition is something completely different for, 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 whose 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 K�p�likas, is simultaneously the policeman-magistrate of the socio-religious order and the guardian of the territorial limits of the sacred city of Varanasi.^[7] Where such sacrality finds expression in well-defined initiatic currents, like Tantricism or the P�shupata �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.^[8]

Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism and the Indian Traditions

The ritual clown (Vid�shaka) of the Sanskrit drama provides the ideal point of departure for delineating the ideology of transgression in brahmanical India, for our attempt to reconstruct the unity of the submerged discourse on/of transgression in India by considering all its diverse manifestations. Indian religiosity generally conjures up before our eyes the self-denial of the yogin or Jaina mendicant practicing severe asceticism, the world-renouncing sanny�sin who competes with the Buddhist monk in his quest of the Absolute Reality of Brahman, the precarious ritual purity of the orthodox brahman shying away from all defilement, the hagiography of the saint (bhakta) intoxicated with the universal love of God, the devout householder on pilgrimage to shrines of various deities, the ethico-rational outlook of �Protestant� Buddhism that has still survived in Sri Lanka, the stubborn and bloody persistence of �pre-Aryan� folk-religion which has been tolerated because of its (reluctant but at least nominal) subordination to �classical� norms, the chaste devotion of a S�t� exaggerated in practices like sat�, and/or the stable socio-religious hierarchy where everyone knows his proper place. Yet deeper familiarity with the tradition confronts us with various distinctly religious��and, at first sight, unconnected��phenomena which flagrantly contradict the above tableau and seem to constitute regular eruptions, within the ideal world of the pure, luminous sacred, of an active underground ideology of transgression that finds in the deliberate manipulation of impurity, violence, sensuality and, yes, what we might even be tempted to call �evil�, depths of the sacred inaccessible to those reluctant to trespass the bounds of the upper-world. Let us rapidly survey some of the typical phenomena I am in this way obliged to try and comprehend.

There are ascetics like the K�p�likas, P�shupatas, Aghoris, having their Vedic predecessors in figures like the Vr�tya, who indulge in various forms of ritualized anti-social behavior easily spilling into the criminal domain, or who specialize in the manipulation of impurities: for this reason, they tend to be written off as �marginal sects�. It is impossible to reduce these currents to popular, licentious, anti-brahmanical movements obliged to assume a pseudo-religious garb. They were all renouncers seeking spiritual liberation through truly penitential and ascetic practices which were inextricably combined with radically transgressive elements to form integral spiritual disciplines. The K�p�lika�s terrible ritual penance corresponds exactly to the punishment prescribed in the brahmanical law-books for brahmanicides. The P�shupata, though obliged to perform lewd obscene gestures in the proximity of women, must however avoid all contact with them; in its classical form it was meant specially for brahmans. Then there are left-hand Tantrics like the Kaulas, many of them brahmans, who live within society as householders and publicly participate in its values, and yet break fundamental taboos like the incest barrier secretly under special ritual conditions. In one play, the Vid�shaka is depicted in open collusion with a Kaula adept called �Bliss of Bhairava� (Bhairav�nanda), who extols the transgressive practices of the Kaula-tantras but is nevertheless venerated by the royal hero.^[9] Corresponding to the cult practice, we are confronted in the mythology by transgressive divinities who assume terrifying or sometimes ridiculous aspects.

It is the overbearing fifth-head of the god Brahm�, who represents the values of the pure self-controlled brahman class, that is lopped off by the transgressor-god Bhairava. The tantric depiction of this head subsequently receiving esoteric doctrines from his very decapitator precludes all attempts to interpret the myth as reflecting no more than the clash between orthodox brahmanism and a popular extra-Vedic Bhairava cult, and rather points to a central transgressive dimension hidden in the very heart of brahmanism. For this fifth-head, also the central head, is more often characterized by wholly unbrahmanical traits especially the incestuous desire for his own daughter Sarasvat�, retained from his hallowed Vedic predecessor, Praj�pati, who later came to embody the entire brahmanical sacrifice. The �pre-classical� sacrificer,^[10] on being initiated (d�kshita), regressed into the dark embryonic realm of Varuna��another principal Vedic divinity with transgressive notations ��to be charged with evil and impurity, with a �dangerous sacredness,� before he emerged therefrom by discharging this evil and impurity onto the officiating brahman priest, who in this way came to represent the initiated condition in himself as it were. In the ritual drama, the couple, constituted by the sacrificer/initiate (or sacrificer/brahman-priest) and defined by a cooperative rivalry, forms a paradoxical biunity which seems to be the very model of the inseparable (sacrificer =) hero / Vid�shaka (= initiated condition, brahman-priest) pair in the secularized drama. The avowed helper of his friend, the hero, the selfless Vid�shaka is seen repeatedly bungling his friend�s designs, often in very suggestive situations, before the drama (‑sacrifice) is willy-nilly brought to a successful issue. The initiate is typologically related to other mythico-ritual figures like the brahmac�rin, Vrsh�kapi, Vr�tya, P�shupata, etc., who indulge like him in ritual abuse, obscenities and blabbering nonsense. All these transgressive traits, and more, find condensed expression in the Vid�shaka, whose obscene abuse of the maids may be understood as a displacement of what is finally directed at the heroine herself, who is sure enough presided over by Sarasvat�. Always a brahman, the Vid�shaka is indeed protected by Omk�ra, which is the symbol par excellence of Brahman; he is nevertheless regularly depicted profaning all the values of classical brahman-hood, so as to earn the mocking label of �brahm�n par excellence� (mah�br�hmana). Yet constant allusions, sometimes teasing, are made to the formidable (magical) powers of the apparently timid and gluttonous Vid�shaka, who revels in making abrupt enigmatic remarks dismissed as puerile jokes. Now the term �br�hman� itself is originally believed to have signified both �mana� and �enigma�, and recent anthropological studies have sought to demonstrate that mana as power is unleashed through transgression, and that the key to the enigma is likewise hidden in transgression. The mytheme of decapitation, like that of brahmanicide, indeed signifies transgression: to �over-ask� (ati-prcch)��that is, to ask beyond one�s understanding��in the riddle-contest is to risk the loss of one�s head.^[11]

Among the sixty-three Shaiva saints canonized by the official hagiography, we are confronted by twenty-four cases of violent and �fanatical� modes of bhakti. One readily gives away his wife to Shiva disguised as a lecherous brahman, and kills those relatives who try to oppose this �meritorious� act. Another dismembers his beloved only child��in a manner reminiscent of Abraham�s (would-be) sacrifice of Isaac (or Ishmael)��to cook him for his revered host, an otherwise implacable Bhairava-ascetic. A hunter spontaneously worships the sacred linga by desecrating its purity with meat, saliva, dirt and even blood: he is said to be the reincarnation of Arjuna, the ideal Hindu king, who himself attained his magico-religious powers (symbolized by the P�shupata weapon) precisely through the �auspicious� embrace of Shiva appearing as a tribal hunter. (Attempts at) suicide in order to avoid injuring other �slaves� of Shiva are depicted with sacrificial notations: ultimately, Shiva�s possession of the debased devotee through love (anpu), at the very height of his paroxysm, reflects the original self-sacrifice of the god himself. Shaiva orthodoxy rationalizes the examples of these saints, who are enshrined in all the nuclear Tamil temples, not as an imperfect groping towards true bhakti but, rather, as the ultimate fruition of the constant worship of God through more conventional modes.^[12] Despite its unique character as a mode of spirituality, Hindu �love of God� seems to articulate, through its transgressive dimension, the overlapping values both of Vedic sacrifice and of shamanizing possession.^[13]

The pious Hindu householder who, with his family, regularly visits the temples and occasionally undertakes an arduous pilgrimage to a distant shrine, could have nothing further from his thoughts than transgression. He may visit the K�la-Bhairava temple of Varanasi on the occasion of the important festival of Bhairav�shtam� to pay obeisance to the protector of the sacred city, just as he would worship some other god like Ganesha. Yet this festival finds justification only in the same origin-myth that defines Bhairava as a transgressive��even criminal��divinity, and the temple-walls retain all the symbolism of his bearing Brahm�s skull and being accompanied by his (black) dog, the most impure of animals. Things are no better if he instead approaches the pot-bellied crooked-trunked Ganesha, whose syllable is Omk�ra and who is brahmanical enough for his worship to be enjoined before all auspicious undertakings. For he was worshipped in certain left-hand sects in a transgressive manner, with meat, wine and sexual orgies, in forms corresponding to those of Bhairava. The symbolism of his iconography is invested with these transgressive significations. In this aspect he has penetrated into the Tibetan and Far-Eastern religions as well. The Vid�shaka too is not averse to meat nor wine, and shares his obsession for rounded sweet-meats, which symbolize sexual bliss: in one play this glutton is actually called �big-bellied� (Mahodara) one of the names of Ganesha. He always carries a crooked stick matching Ganesha�s trunk in its phallic signification. His constant assimilation to a �brown monkey� points to yet another model: the Vedic Vrsh�kapi who sought to molest his own �mother� Indr�n�, wife of the royal Indra, with the connivance of the latter. The comic assimilation of the clown-trangressor to the monkey��who seems to �ape� man without even really trying��is universal, and especially characteristic of Amerindian mythology .

If in despair the pilgrim finally flees for refuge to the benign vegetarian virgin Vaishno Dev�, Bhairava is already waiting for him there, for all the stages of the pilgrimage are modeled on the incidents of Bhairava�s pursuit of the goddess to violate her sexually after he, the senior-most disciple of Gorakhn�th, was refused meat and wine by her. Bhairava�s decapitation by the Goddess, after his passage through the womb cave of this �primordial virgin� (�di-kum�r�), and his subsequent consecration as her foremost devotee,^[14] in reality underlies the scenario of Hindu pilgrimage everywhere. The founding myths of the Tamil temples��where the transcendent divinity is otherwise worshipped according to strict rules of purity��are based on the paradigm of a violent and bloody self-sacrifice of the deity to the Mother-Goddess in a marriage that is simultaneously a rebirth from her virgin-womb.^[15] Indeed, Bhairava was absolved from his brahmanicide at Varanasi only when he dipped into the Gang� at a particular �fish-womb� (matsyodar�) conjunction when the entire sacred city was enveloped by her maternal waters. Bearing a feminine name (K�sh�), the sacred city is itself assimilated to the (Mother-) Goddess. This transgressive god of the K�p�likas seems to provide the model for all Hindus who arrive in Banaras in search of final emancipation.^[16]

Every other temple the Hindu visits has Bhairava as the guardian door-keeper. Converting to Jainism does not help much when even the Jainas have adopted him, sometimes under the name of M�nabhadra, as door-keeper. His foremost center of pilgrimage in Rajasthan is the shrine of Nakoda Bhairava within the Jaina temple to P�rshvan�tha. Jainas and Hindus frequent the site more for the sake of this �subsidiary� deity, before whom many enter into a state of trance, than for the veneration of the exemplary Jaina ascetic. Perhaps because of its (self‑) image of extreme asceticism and non-violence, the role of tantricism in the Jaina tradition still needs to be adequately addressed. Radical tantricism seems to have developed within the �ethico-rational� Buddhist world-view in tandem with, if not prior to, its explicit formulation through a specifically Hindu idiom. In the sole surviving �Hindu� kingdom of Nepal, it is the Buddhist Vajr�c�ryas who seem to be the true custodians of the secrets of Bhairava. They officiate especially at the royal level of the Newar cult, for example, in the twelve-yearly festival of Pachali Bhairava, who possesses a low-caste Buddhist dancer in order to renew the power of the Hindu king through a ritual exchange of swords. Truly striking is the crucial role of Newar Buddhism in generalizing and consolidating��even without the direct participation of the Hindu brahmans��a socioreligious model that is still modeled on the �pre-classical� Vedic sacrifice. Fleeing to Tibet is not much of a solution when the �Yellow-Hat� Gelugpa orthodoxy has adopted (Vajra-) Bhairava within its esoteric core. The central myth of �Red Hat� doctrine and practice is the liberating murder of the demonized Rudra (-Shiva) by (a Buddhist divinity identified with) Bhairava (Jigs-byed)��but in a scenario that underlines the consubstantiality of the killer and his victim. Not only is this discourse saturated with K�p�lika notations; the paradigm, along with some of its motifs, can be traced to Vedic roots.^[17] The point here is that the symbolism of transgression is omnipresent and inescapable in Indian religious culture, even when the fact is denied or absent.

The shamanistic possession and blood-letting that characterizes folk religion has often been contrasted with and opposed to the sober �brahmanical� insistence on purity and non-violence. Its subordination to the latter �great tradition� would be reflected in the manner in which carnivorous local deities ��and the relatively impure social groups that worship them��are ranked below the pan-Indian vegetarian deities within the hierarchical order of the Hindu pantheon.^[18] What could then be more natural��especially for an anthropologist formed within an �egalitarian� culture��than to see in the antinomian traits of some of these �criminal gods� and converted �demon-devotees� the futile expression of deep-rooted resentment, perhaps mixed with a vengeful envy, against the socioreligious domination of the brahmans? In the relentless pursuit of his �brahmanicidal� passion for the virgin �ryam�lai, the daughter of a thousand Vedic brahmans, the untouchable trickster-god, K�ttavar�yan��so popular among Tamil audiences��wreaks mischief by upsetting all hierarchies, before he finally undergoes his inevitable punishment. The problem, however, is that this deviant �son� of Shiva insists on consummating his passion��his predestined �marriage� to the sacrificial stake��even when it is discovered that he is himself a brahman, and hence a suitable match for the coveted bride. It is no doubt easy for the underprivileged to identify with the rebellious hero who is put on a par, even equated, with the �king of the �ryan city� whose order he subverts. Taken together with all the other symbolic notations in the narrative, it is difficult not to conclude that (not only Tamil) folklore has thereby only served all the better as an entertaining medium for conserving and elaborating the transgressive dimension of the brahmanized d�kshita.^[19]

The socially inferior Hindu woman is not only educated in all the arts but also granted unlimited erotic satisfaction and liberation within the sacred precincts of the temple-walls which, adorned with ascetic-and-courtesan motifs and soaring to the pinnacles of orgiastic ecstasy, project her heavenward as voluptuous nymphs (apsaras). It is in the same temple that the chaste Hindu wife, bound in matrimonial subservience to her husband, comes to pray and make offerings for the weal of her family. But within the secret tantric rituals the distinction between the courtesan and the familial woman would appear to become blurred. Indeed, one may wonder to what reality the adulterous beauties (abhis�rik�) extolled so effusively by the Sanskrit poets correspond� For the active role of the female partner in the transgressive sexuality of these rituals is explicitly justified by reference to the indispensable, if only passive, presence of the sacrificer�s wife during his performance of Vedic sacrifice.

The tantric aspects of the �matriarchal� cult of the Mother-Goddess in her bloodthirsty forms like K�l�, C�mund�, Chinnamast�, etc., are too well-known. The Tamil Goddess Ank�lamman, the focus of a cremation-ground cult which involves the bloody removal of a fetus from a pregnant goat, would appear, at first sight, to be primarily the concern of the untouchable fishermen who are her devotees.^[20] Yet, her founding myths relate the violent obstetrics to (the renewal of) kingship within a triangular relationship that equates the profane palace, the pure brahmanical temple (at Tiruvann�malai) and the impurity of death. It is here, in the cremation-ground, where she resides as the termite-mound, itself a womb-symbol, that the skull-bearing Shiva (‑Bhairava), finally liberated from his brahmanicide, would have reunited with his consort to form the primordial androgyne. The (royal) sacrificer too was conceived as regressing into the womb of his wife-mother, with whom he formed an indissociable pair (dampat�). The consecration even transformed him (temporarily) into a brahman: it is for this reason that the effigy of the pregnant queen-goddess in the cremation-ground is itself assimilated to (the corpse of) a brahman-woman. It would be easy to demonstrate that the practice of sat� is also derived from the same complex of ideas surrounding the wife of the sacrificer. Whatever the socio-historical origins of these mother-goddesses, they have been harnessed to exteriorize and render explicit��even and especially at the folk-level��the transgressive dimension hidden within the heart of the patriarchal brahmanical tradition. Ultimately, we are left��as in the pot-bellied Ganesha��with the �irrational� image of the �pregnant male� who takes the place of the mother to give birth to himself.

Though the Hindu��and, by extension, the Indian��socio-religious hierarchy rests upon the superior ranking of the pure, one constantly encounters impure figures who are nevertheless valorized in a public setting. Thus, the other Hindu epic, the Mah�bh�rata, portrays Shr�-Draupad�, who incarnates the prosperity of the kingdom and the fertility of the earth, with disheveled hair in the impure state of perpetual menstruation. Among the Newars, she is simply identified with the impure bloodthirsty Bhairav�, the consort or feminine double of Bhairava. The tradition itself has been obliged to account for such apparent anomalies��which include the courtesan, Ganesha, the Vid�shaka and a host of other figures��by underlining their �auspicious� character.^[21] The Hindu king who, despite his apparent secularization, is in many ways the pivot of the socio-religious order, is described in his primordial mythical prototype of Vena, as having an irredeemable evil and impure dimension that is expelled from him in the form of an untouchable outcast. Transgressive notations are not lacking in the mythology, ritual and representations of kingship as including the office of the royal chaplain. Bhairava himself has inherited the legacy of brahmanicide from Indra, the king of the gods, one of whose characteristic deeds is the slaying of his brahman chaplain �Omniform� (Vishvar�pa). Protected always by Indra, the hero of the Sanskrit drama is often the king, the sacrificer par excellence, and in such cases the Vid�shaka is subtly identified with the royal chaplain (even with his divinization: Brhaspati) who officiates for the king and forms a biunity with him. It is precisely this transgressive dimension that accounts for the generally non-sectarian character of Hindu kingship, for the role of the latter as a political catalyst in the socio-cultural integration of diverse caste groups, religious communities and tribal populations that were originally beyond the pale of brahmanical society.^[22]

Then there are festivals of transgression like Holi, corresponding to the �end-of-the-year� saturnalia of most archaic societies, carefully delimited in time, during which the entire populace is expected to transgress socioreligious norms, and established hierarchies are reversed. Not only is the Vid�shaka sometimes depicted participating with gay abandon in such festivals but, being a brahman with impure low-caste traits, he tends to level out the hierarchy in his own person. Another �origin� proposed for this manhandled clown is the low-caste Soma-seller of the Vedic ritual who was beaten after the brahmans had swindled him of this inebriating sacred plant that grew only on alien soil. The origin of the Sanskrit drama has been traced back to such New Year festivals in the archaic Rigvedic cosmogony, when demoniac forces led by Varuna are supposed to overrun the cosmic order: the Vid�shaka himself has been identified most recently with Varuna.^[23] This annual renewal of the socio-cosmic hierarchy through the raising and felling of a wooden pole has survived in Nepal, where it is identified not only with the royal Indra attached to the Vedic sacrificial stake (y�pa), but also with Bhairava in the form of the phallic linga.^[24] Ritualized conflict around the divinized world-pillar is not only allowed but even expected during these �holy-days� as a cathartic safety-valve for human aggression.

Hindu eschatology has even projected this sacrificial leveling of the social hierarchy onto the figure of the �barbarian� (mleccha) Kalki as the final �messiah� (avat�r) who would come from the West. After the Muslim conquest of (north) India from the twelfth century, such archaic festivals were preserved in an Islamicized mold. Already from the fifteenth century, we hear the orthodox clergy regularly protesting against the excesses during the Hindu-Muslim celebration of the �marriage� of Gh�z� Miy�: for not only would caste-distinctions be suspended among the Hindus but the barriers between Hindus and Muslims would also be (temporarily) abrogated. More than facilitating the Islamicization of pre-existing Hindu cults, transgressive sacrality transformed the practice of Islam itself as it flowered on Indian soil. Whereas Muharram elsewhere is celebrated only by Shias as an occasion of mourning for the martyrdom of Husain��with pitched battles against the Sunnis who were held responsible for this horrible injustice��in India it used to be celebrated more like a carnival appropriated by both Sunnis and Hindus. �Lawless� Sufi fakirs collaborated with their Hindu counterparts in lampooning all aspects of Indian religious life including the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Drunkard, who would �cite� verses from the Koran in praise of wine, usury and adultery, was hilariously depicted wearing a brahmanical thread made of (impure) leather. The village idiot is dressed up as a lascivious long-tailed �monkey� (lang�r) to take the prime initiative in violating the norms of sexual segregation, and creating an atmosphere of general promiscuity. Indeed, the specifically Indo-Islamic �marriage-in-death� of the proselytizing martyr Gh�z� Miy㗗likewise represented by a pole bearing his decapitated head��may be understood as a transposition of the Muharram scenario so as to incorporate a pre-existing sun-cult analogous to that of (M�rtanda-) Bhairava.

In the holy city of Banaras, the eternal Hindu order (san�tana dharma) is represented by (the remaining stump of) a monumental pillar (l�t) standing in the middle of a Muslim prayer-cum-sacrificial site (�dg�h). It is here that Bhairava metes out his (metaphysical) �punishment� that confers final emancipation, regardless of caste and creed, to all who die in Banaras. Lower-caste Hindus and Muslims used to celebrate the cosmogonic marriage of this phallic pillar��identified as (the linga of L�t-) Bhairava��with an adjoining maternal well. Everyone believed that it was slowly sinking into the ground, and that the caste-hierarchy would be abolished when its capital was level with the ground. The �unprecedented� Hindu-Muslim riots of 1809 were sparked off��just after the imposition of British colonial rule��when the lower-caste Muslims sought to �hasten the end� by uprooting the pillar and desecrating it through cow-slaughter. What is truly striking about the Hindu memorial of grievances��submitted after a massive retaliation on the entire Muslim population of the city��is that it inscribes the transgressive felling within a pre-existing Vedic sacrificial schema. The immovable world-pillar would have succumbed to its �decapitation� only because it was splashed with the �brahmanicidal� blood of the cow and��so the memorial adds��of its calf. The Muslims would have thrown the massive column into the maternal Gang�: an impossible feat, unless we recall that this is precisely what the Hindus themselves did to the Indra-pole at the end of the royal festival.^[25]

If Indian civilization has not given rise to spectacular revolutionary movements this has been largely because disorder and self-negation are essential components at the very heart of its underlying sacrificial order.^[26] Among the ritual models of the Vid�shaka is not only the untouchable reviler (apagara) but also the �nihilist� (n�stika) of the (pre-classical) Vedic sacrifice. Like the �orthodox� brahman ritualists, the �maligner� (vid�shaka) does not hesitate to deny the efficacy of the gods and even their very reality. Indeed, the first appearance of the degenerate brahman clown, who even in the classical Hindu theater is constantly relegated �beyond the pale of the Vedas� (avaidika), is in the (surviving fragments of the) plays of the Buddhist scholar-poet Ashvaghosha. By providing a symbolic locus not only for the meaningful interiorization of alien elements that threaten the eternal world order (dharma), but also for the exteriorization of a pre-existing Vedic ideology of transgression,^[27] the nonsensical clown-transgressor provides us a deep insight into the ambiguous role of Tantricism as a complementary, alternate and even counter-tradition in the immense process of acculturation in the Indian subcontinent that has given rise to what is nowadays conveniently called �Hinduism�. It is impossible to give here a satisfactory survey of transgressive phenomena in the Indian traditions and a convincing exposition of their mode of articulation in the Vid�shaka, but at least our readers can no longer be unaware that such phenomena not only exist and are interlinked but also insinuate themselves into every sphere of traditional existence.

The Symbolic Communication of Transgressive Sacrality:
The Clown of the Sanskrit Drama

I have already mentioned how the public display of undisguised transgressive sacrality, where sanctioned in archaic societies, lends the performance a comic aura and tends to transform the transgressor into a ritual clown. The normal reaction to such transgressive behavior generally takes the form of distressing negative emotions like disgust, shame, indignation, fear, etc., precisely the kind of emotions that the adept himself seeks to overcome and surpass while committing ritual transgression privately in closed esoteric circles. But when such public transgression is socially sanctioned, often through direct or indirect valorization of the person of the transgressor, the negative affects and reactions of the spectators are simultaneously neutralized by positive participatory affects, and the combined energies of the mutually opposing emotions are discharged in the form of pleasurable laughter. The �bisociation theory���implicit in Abhinavagupta��discovers the universal cause of laughter precisely in the mutual neutralization of two simultaneous but sharply contrasting, opposing reactions (emotional, cognitive, motor, etc.,) to one and the same stimulus.^[28] And such is the exoteric perception of the ritual transgressor that obliges him to assume a comic character. The inherent ambiguity/ambivalence of our laughter at a forbidden theme leaves it wholly unclear whether the driving force behind the laughter is due to one�s participation in the transgression or due to one�s resistance to it or, rather, due to both. The intimate association of transgression and the comic reacts in turn upon the transgressor encouraging him to amplify and diversify his comic effects even independently of his primary function of transgression. Thus an integral element of the P�shupata�s spiritual discipline is to laugh explosively and to provoke others� laughter through ridiculous behavior. In a traditional culture sharing a depreciative, repressive attitude to profane laughter, the P�shupata�s �sacred� laughter in imitation of the violent laughter of his elect divinity Rudra can only further signify transgression.^[29] What matters here is how the clown-transgressor through his comic behavior mediates��even while embodying the conflict�� between the two opposing poles of archaic sacrality: the transgressive pole that he enacts both materially and symbolically thus permitting the exoteric public to participate in it��even if only indirectly, partially and unconsciously��and the interdictory pole that contributes towards rendering these transgressions ridiculous, fit only to be shunned by the same public. However paradoxical and teeming with contradictions, a vital mode of communication between the two conflicting dimensions is in this way established and maintained.

When this clown-transgressor later steps out of his ritual context into the secularized stage of the Sanskrit drama, governed by its own aesthetic and ethical norms, his performance has already evolved in at least two complementary directions. Firstly, the material transgressions have been underplayed, disguised, even largely eliminated, and displaced into symbolic substitutes in the form of various stereotyped comic traits pertaining to the appearance, gestures, utterances and interventions of the Vid�shaka, already illustrated above. His deformity, gluttony, contrary speech, obscenity, crooked stick, etc., are all synonyms insofar as they all comically signify transgression through parallel codes like the visual, alimentary, linguistic, sexual and geometric. Secondly, the comic aspect, originally the fall-out of his transgressive role, now acquires an independent status: it undergoes secondary elaboration to serve the purposes of plot-development, dramatic humor, characterization and so forth, while its social-censure function is more systematically and self-consciously exploited. The normative classical Sanskrit drama, even while entertaining all sectors of the society, seeks to reinforce the proper and harmonious pursuit of the four traditional legitimate goals of Indian life: sensual enjoyment, acquisition of wealth, fulfillment of ordained socio-religious duties and spiritual emancipation in ascending hierarchy of values. Though this is normally achieved through the voluntary and total identification of the audience with the exemplary conduct of the hero, Abhinavagupta also prescribes for the comic the additional function of safeguarding socio-religious norms through negative example. By introducing improprieties, in the form of comic incongruities, into the pursuit of the four goals, the dramatist should wean away the laughing audience from imitating such deviant behavior, from becoming themselves objects of ridicule in real life. One frequent form of the farce provokes much merriment by caricaturing��but not really distorting��transgressive ascetics like the K�p�likas, and P�shupatas pursuing final emancipation through �improper� means.

The problem with the �negative� example of the Vid�shaka is that, instead of pursuing any goal whatsoever of his own, he selflessly devotes himself to aiding the hero in achieving his own goals. Though mocked and even manhandled by the inferior characters, he is the only personage who can address the hero (or king) on equal terms, and continues to enjoy the confidence of the latter even after repeated betrayals of trust. One princely hero finds life unbearable without this �other half� of his body. This supreme though indirect valorization of his person, in the midst of symbolic traits and associations that dissolve him into a background of ultimate metaphysical principles like Brahman and the sacrifice, exalted divinities like Varuna, Brahm� and Ganesha, hallowed ritual personages like the royal chaplain (or brahman officiant) and cherished religious symbols like Omk�ra, would underline his being not only ironically but also really �the brahman par excellence� (mah�br�hmana). Abhinavagupta cryptically observes that the Vid�shaka, whose comic function he nowhere denies, manifests the �semblance of humor� (h�sy�bh�sa) which can only hint at the vital function of sacred transgression that his profane comicality vehicles and simultaneously disguises.^[30] For the ramifications of the transgressive notations invested in the diverse figures of his background form a veritable symbolic system that would seem to embrace the entire socioreligious life of the community in a web of significations held together, at its secret center, by a transgressive conception and experience of the sacred. The Vid�shaka is an exceptionally striking example of how, by various intricate yet conventionalized techniques, the language of transgressive sacrality is communicated��through the aesthetic appeal of humor even in an apparently secular artistic medium like the Sanskrit drama��to an audience that thereby comes to participate in spite of itself in a symbolic universe whose coherence it does not recognize and whose values it is as yet not prepared to accept. In the laughing Vid�shaka, an exoteric vision wholly enmeshed in the hierarchy of the four goals��which he entertainingly reinforces by his negative example��is nevertheless forced to submit itself to the claims of an esoteric vision that encompasses it and is all the more effective for the reason that it is carefully hidden.

The language of transgressive sacrality finds its ideal expression in the archaic sacred enigma (br�hman), whose structure and mechanism characterizes much of the Vedic hymnology:

�The aim was to compose on a given theme, or perhaps according to a given plan, not introducing direct accounts of the lives of the gods so much as veiled allusions, occult correspondences between the sacred and the profane, such as still form the foundation of Indian speculative thought. A large part of Sanskrit literature is esoteric. These correspondences, and the magic power they emanate, are called br�hman: this is the oldest sense of the term. They are not intellectual conceptions but experiences which have been lived through at the culmination of a state of mystic exaltation conceived as revelation. The soma is the catalyst of these latent forces. The designation kavi is given to the poet who can seize and express these correspondences, and to the god who sends him inspiration�. The kavi of the classical period, the learned poet, transposes the old Vedic ambiguities to the aesthetic plane by means of double meanings and multiple senses; the classical vakrokti, �tortuous speech��. This, then, is the origin of Vedic esotericism, which�is linked with the esotericism of later India, as it appears in the Tantras, in learned poetry, in the theories of aesthetics on which this poetry is based, and even in legal tradition. The Indian mind is constantly seeking hidden correspondences between things which belong to entirely distinct conceptual systems.�^[31]

The antinomian practices of the �epileptic� P�shupata, who constantly meditated on the �terrible� (raudra) br�hman epitomized by the �quivering� (vipra) sound-syllable Omk�ra, have roots both in the Vedic ritual and in archaic techniques of ecstasy.^[32] The brahman Vid�shaka, who through his enigmatic �poetic humor� (k�vya-h�sya) is still the bearer of the ancient br�hman, has at last disclosed��at the very heart of the sacrificial drama��the transgressive experience that unites the Vedic �seer� (rshi) and the tribal shaman.

Abhinavagupta on Ascending and Descending Realization

My own understanding of transgressive sacrality stems from a study of and reflection upon the works of Abhinavagupt�c�rya whom we already know as India�s greatest theoretician of aesthetics and the dramatic art. He is being increasingly recognized as India�s most totalizing, most representative metaphysician, who was able to synthesize within a single harmonious intellectual framework entire realms of experience, like aesthetics, Tantric ritual and practice, and the world of everyday transactions, necessarily ignored by the world-negating Ved�ntin Shankara.^[33] Now Abhinava, the crowning theoretician of the transgressive ideology of the Trika tantrism which developed out of the radical practices enjoined in the textual traditions of the esoteric Kaula and Krama schools, attributes his highest spiritual realization of the supreme all-devouring Bhairava-consciousness to precisely such transgressive praxis. At the same time, he clearly recognized the dichotomy between the esoteric and the exoteric domains, the latter governed by rigorous socioreligious norms from which perspective alone he comments on the Sanskrit drama. Forbidding the uninitiated access to the secret texts of the Bhairava-traditions, he insists on the continuity between the Vedic and Tantric traditions of esotericism exploiting extreme impurity and radical transgression in order to transcend the pure/impure distinction, and attributes the reticence of the Vedic seers (rshi) on this transgressive dimension of their realizations to their concern with preserving the exoteric worldly order founded on norms of purity.^[34]

The Trika distinguishes between two modes or, rather, logically successive states of spiritual realization, which I shall respectively translate by borrowing the terms �ascending� (sankoca: �retraction�) and �descending� (vik�sa: �expansion�) realization.^[35] During the ascending realization, Consciousness isolates itself from all objectivity (including body, mind, etc.) until it transcends the latter through a process assimilated to a gradual �self-purification�. For it is the contact with such extraneous matter that sullies the pristine purity of Consciousness and imposes all manner of adventitious limitations and human finitude upon it. Practices like yoga or Ved�ntic world-renunciation are equally subsumed under this mode of realization which likewise determines their �philosophical� outlooks, and it is here that the continuity, evident in the P�shupata praxis, between ritual purity and yogic asceticism must be sought. For this withdrawal, with its accompanying observances of chastity, non-violence, fasting, silence, truthfulness and so on, are already prefigured in the system of socioreligious interdictions which reach their maximum intensity in the orthodox model of the classical brahman. But the process attains completion only when Consciousness �re-descends� to assimilate the entire objective world to itself, a �universalization� culminating in the state of Anuttara, impossible to describe in terms of sankoca and vik�sa, understood as constituting the ultimate essence of Bhairava. This claim is typically inserted in the midst of arguments justifying the non-observance of the distinction pure/impure or edible/prohibited (food) and so on. The logic behind this equation becomes clear when we consider the definition of purity: whatever is (experienced as) distinct from Consciousness is impure, whereas whatever is (experienced as) identical with Consciousness is pure. Both terms of the opposition are therefore relevant only with respect to that preliminary, though better known, process of the ascending realization. For the Kaula adept intent on universalizing his Consciousness by re-descending to and assimilating the lowest and most impure aspects of objective manifestation, it is the pure-impure distinction itself that is considered the ultimate impurity to be transcended.^[36] It is in attempting the dangerous process of totalization that the adept often commits deliberate transgressions to shatter the rules and limitations that had earlier propped up both his worldly life and spiritual disciplines. It is the impurity represented by Bhairava, the disgust it evokes, that accounts primarily for his �terrifying� character. It is because the universalization of Consciousness necessarily involves the overcoming of this disgust to assimilate the worst impurities in an act that amounts to transgression, that the ultimate Anuttara state itself comes to be represented by Bhairava.

Once it has been sufficiently kindled, Fire, instead of being snuffed out, purifies in the very process of consuming whatever impurities it comes into contact with. Whereas only pure offerings are made in the brahmanical sacrificial fire, the Trika technique of hathap�ka �cooking, burning or digesting (the world) by force� aims at offering the entire objective universe into the blazing gastric Fire of one�s own Bhairava-Consciousness so that it is transformed into undifferentiated ambrosia to relished till satiation.^[37] In the Vid�shaka, this totalization is symbolized by his gluttonous, all-devouring appetite, the dramatic transposition of the mythical Fire that in the Puranic cosmogonies destroys the world at the end of each cycle and whose imagery has been borrowed in the above technique. His rounded sweet-meats (modaka) likewise represent the Vedic soma-amrta (ambrosia), which would seem to ultimately refer to the supremely blissful state, often induced by sexual techniques, of Consciousness, which moreover is believed in the Trika to have a rejuvenating influence on the whole psycho-physical system as a side-effect. Similar ideas would seem to inform the symbolic repertory of the Vedic and folk cults, that are all too easily dismissed as �magical� or �fertility� rites. Rejuvenation also accounts for the auspiciousness of figures like the king and the courtesan, whose transgressive notations resist neat categorization in terms of the pure and the impure .

Though transgressive sacrality claims privileged access to the fullest expression of the Sacred, it accommodates all the varied even opposing modes of spiritual practice that proliferate in Hindu religious life. But whereas those techniques aiming at an ascending realization and the religio-philosophical currents based on them advocate turning away from the world of ordinary sensory-experience to attain an ultimate reality that is transcendent, the techniques of the descent insist that it is possible to recognize��Abhinava�s metaphysics calls itself �recognition� (Pratyabhij��) ��this transcendent reality as simultaneously immanent, even glorifying itself, in the everyday world of sensory-experiences. Not falling a prey to it by recognizing one�s inner transcendence��a capacity which the adept generally achieves only through repeated experiments in inner withdrawal and steady introversion ��it is possible to continue living in the world, enjoying it as a manifestation of the Divine. It is not surprising that it is only a metaphysics of the descent, like the Pratyabhij��, that has provided the basis of a successful account of the aesthetic experience, distinguishing it carefully from the bliss of transcendent reality on the one hand and gross sensuous pleasure on the other. By living through ordinary experiences in an extraordinary mode, the adept of the descent has an essentially aesthetic perception of life.

Though this explicit formulation of the soteriological distinction between ascending and descending realization against the background of the Trika metaphysics has found late expression in the history of Hindu traditions, the class of transgressive practices it seeks to account for and justify, along with the abiding symbolic universe they have generated, has been a permanent feature of this tradition right from its Vedic origins. It alone explains the necessity of Dum�zil�s first or priestly function being split between the opposing poles of the pure, luminous Vedic Mitra governing the socio-religious order based on interdictions and the dark, chaotic Vedic Varuna inspiring the transgressions of secret initiatic societies, parallels to which Dum�zil finds in other archaic and primitive societies. Caillois has gone further in demonstrating the universality of this opposition or alternation, within a single religious tradition, between the pure sacrality of order and interdiction and the impure sacrality of chaos and transgression. The dialectic of transgression, its theory, in all archaic and primitive religions has been expounded with lucidity by Bataille: transgression does not contradict the rigorous observance of taboos but presupposes and completes it even while transcending it. The access to the sacred impure which is the basis of transgression is mediated by the sacred pure, which alone is the explicit model of profane society.^[38] Unless this dialectic is recaptured in its dynamic movement, which imitates the alternation of the two opposing yet complementary modes of spiritual realization, the curious conjunction of elements of both dimensions of the sacred in a single figure, like the P�shupata or the Vid�shaka, will remain forever insoluble.^[39] What distinguishes transgressive sacrality from mere sacrilege is its systematic re-inscription within a symbolic context charged with a transcendent significance.^[40]

Transgressive Sacrality in the World Religions: the Modern Problematic

�In his address entitled �The Center for the Study of World Religions: Vision and Future� (24 October 1991), Ronald F. Thiemann, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, pleaded for a semiotic approach as the way out from the current impasse in the dialogue between religious studies, as an academic discipline, and the work of theological reflection proper.^[41] This was integral to his convincing case for greater overtures to religious traditions and modes of faith that have till now been marginalized by the establishment. One can only welcome this belated, but loudly heralded, reinstatement of the archaic religions of the Americas, Africa and Oceania, which do not seem to have lived up to the expectations of the Judaeo-Christian worldview. One is now tempted to look instead to modern disciplines like anthropology, law, psychology and medicine for the conceptual tools needed for interpreting and (re-) evaluating this long neglected and often unintelligible heritage. But are we now faced with the even greater risk of seeing these archaic manifestations of the sacred reduced to epiphenomena of more fundamental socio-historical and psychophysical processes, or even of �mere� linguistic constructions?^[42] There has always been a fascination for India at Harvard, and this has been particularly true of the Center for the Study of World Religions.^[43] No doubt, this involvement with Indian bhakti, monasticism, yoga, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and so on, has been shaped by the same cultural ethos that has proved to be such a formidable barrier, till now, in recognizing the claims of �primitive� modes of spirituality. The present paper, which draws freely upon the conceptual arsenal of modern secular disciplines, is part of a much larger project that seeks to excavate the archaic paradigms that still underlie and inform these manifestations of high religious culture in India. It attempts to use these later developments, which India shares with the West and the Middle East, to arrive at a non-reductive understanding of the otherwise disconcerting manifestations of transgressive sacrality in the archaic religions and, eventually, even in the Abrahamic tradition. In short, India may still have a privileged role to play in mediating this renewed encounter between the West and the sources of archaic spirituality.

Having provided a working definition of transgressive sacrality, I surveyed its typical manifestations in Indian religious life. Beginning with concrete examples of transgressive behavior that could easily be written off as marginal, we moved systematically towards the center of the Hindu tradition by gradually shifting our focus to their overarching symbolic universe. Like fish in water, even those (non-) Hindus who in no way subscribe to transgression as a mode of sacrality live within this universe, and thus participate in its underlying values. The clown of the Sanskrit drama then served as a vantage point for demonstrating the systematic and self-conscious character of this semiotics of transgression, that has informed every facet of Hindu life ranging from such pragmatic concerns as law and politics to even such trivia as humor and laughter. Moreover, the clown clinches the case that the distinction between the sacred and the profane��though sanctioned by traditionally imposed demarcations��is ultimately not based on any objective criteria: it is a question of a quasi-linguistic perception. Finally, I have relied upon Abhinavagupta��upon whom so many currents of Indian cultural expression converge��to suggest that the dialectic of transgressive sacrality and its symbolic elaborations are conducive to��and, by implication, derive from��an inner experience of self-transformation upheld within the Hindu tradition as the ultimate aim and meaning of human life in its totality. The existential model of a sensibility that could reconcile transcendence and life in the world, and dissolve the opposition between the sacred and the profane, is thus provided by the common denominator of the aesthetic experience.�

However, this paper also raises and postpones a host of questions: Can we hold on to a hard and fast distinction from heresy, when I have myself contended that Vajray�na Buddhism fits so neatly into a pre-existing brahmanical schema of transgressive sacrality? Is transgressive sacrality necessarily geared to, conditioned by, perhaps even derived from, the needs of acculturation, as seems to be the case in Hinduism? Or can it take on radically different expressions, as within the politico-historical dimension of a monotheistic messianism? Is there, after all, such a thing as transgressive sacrality in its pure state, independent of its articulation within a specific religious tradition? The exoteric perspective is obliged to explain away transgressive symbols in innocent terms, whereas the esoteric understanding recognizes transgressive meanings in even apparently innocuous details: this conflict of interpretations is constitutive of Hinduism. Is then symbolic participation in transgressive sacrality merely a preparation for the real thing, which is however denied to most, at least in this lifetime? Is it perhaps somehow efficacious in itself, regardless of the believer�s own ignorance of the veritable meaning of his actions and implications of his faith? If transgression is ultimately an inwardly lived experience��hence the apparent �irrationality� of the symbolic motifs it often weaves together��both these positions would be equally tenable. Is transgressive sacrality an all-too-powerful religious construction that has been imposed from without upon a historical form of human life, that can in reality do without it? Of what relevance is it then for those��especially modern (neo‑) Hindus��who in no way subscribe to it? Or is it simply a �return of the repressed� from within masquerading as religiosity without? How then have the other religions dealt with the same primordial instincts, and is modernity so immune to their claims? Having reclaimed the archaic symbolism of fire and water, can the Indian model of (Self-) Consciousness be extended to those Abrahamic currents that insist on the total Otherness of the divine? How would it square, on the other hand, with a materialistic psychoanalysis that reduces consciousness itself to an epiphenomenon? Can transgressive sacrality be as central to the Abrahamic tradition, where the mythico-ritual structures that invariably serve as its vehicle have been reduced to a minimum so as to cede before the reign of the moral imperative? And what becomes of its dialectic within the �remissive� culture of the (post-) modern world, which denies even these ethico-religious interdictions much of their binding force? Would not transgressive sacrality eventually undermine the authority of revelation and, with it, the whole basis of religious tradition? On the other hand, is it not retrograde to revert to a, both spatially and temporally, remote and apparently obsolete genus of the sacred, when even its more proximate post-Enlightenment species seem doomed to extinction with the relentless hegemony of a secular mentality? These are just some of the questions that this essay could very well take up in its sequel, a second part entitled �Transgressive Sacrality in the World Religions: the Modern Problematic.�

Endnotes to Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition