Last Edited: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 07:02 PM -0500 | Updated: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 07:06 PM -0500
This exhaustive hermeneutics of the mythico-ritual universe embroidered around the brahmanicide Bhairava, the god of transgression par excellence in the Hindu tradition, began its career rather humbly as a straightforward descriptive and conceptual essay entitled "Adepts of Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition" that was presented by myself (Elizabeth) to the Assembly of the World's Religions (Dec 1985) at New York, as a complement to Sunthar Visuvalingam's own presentation on "Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition" (1984). Alf Hiltebeitel subsequently requested that we contribute expanded versions to Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Popular Guardians of Hinduism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 157-229, a collective volume he was editing from the papers presented to the conference on the same subject that he had organized around the oeuvre of Madeleine Biardeau that attempts to (re-) construct a coherent model of Hinduism. Indeed, "Bhairava's Royal Brahmanicide" was also intended to complement and substantiate Sunthar's concluding essay on "The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīksita," which attempts to integrate the otherwise often discordant approaches of the remaining contributions into a comparative and globalizing problematic on dialectical relationship between (religious) norms and their (deliberate) violation. Among its highlights are comparisons with Dionysus, Newar ethnography, sacred and profane kingship, (re-) interpretation of (not just) the core structure of the Mahābhārata, socio-religious paradigm for the transition from a 'dualistic' Vedic cosmogony to the Hindu trinity, transgression and acculturation, etc. Whereas Biardeau offers us a still brahmanical, understood in its classical sense, model of Indian society, where Bhairava remains primarily a 'protector of territory' (kshetra-pāla) now subservient to the pantheon of Hindu bhakti, this essay attempts to incorporate this normative model within a larger, subversive, perspective wherein Bhairava is simultaneously the transgressor-god par excellence, the Other at the heart of Vedic ideology. The original text has been judiciously paraphrased so as to clarify, especially for the non-Sanskritist, the play of polysemy that informs Hindu myth and ritual. The notes below should help readers contextualize each section within the contemporary intellectual debates on the 'anthropology' of Hinduism.
1. Preliminary survey of the extent, scope and significance of Bhairava worship
This introductory section provides a panoramic vista of the multiple, apparently bewildering, facets of Bhairava's worship and identity, often within the same circle or sect of worshippers depending on the context, and across various regions and historical periods. The aim is arrive at a global interpretation that is able to account for the apparent contradictions starting from first principles. By the time readers have completed the following sections, which explore and analyze various aspects of Bhairava from very different perspectives, they ought to be able glimpse the inner logic immanent to the elaboration and spread of his worship as a whole.
2. The Origin Myth of the brahmanicide Bhairava
3. The 'Supreme Penance' of the Criminal Kāpālika-Bhairava
4. The apollonian Vishnu and the Dionysian Bhairava: Bhakti and Initiatic Hierarchies
The 'structural' approach to transgressive sacrality in ancient Greece developed in the central paragraph of this section has been elaborated throughout this monograph and also in Sunthar's concluding essay to Criminal Gods. On our first visit to Dumézil, Sunthar had talked to him about the Jean-Pierre Vernant's collaboration with Madeleine Biardeau (and Charles Malamoud) especially in deciphering the archaic sacrifice with respect to its Greek and Vedic variants. The anthropological germ of Georges Bataille's dialectic of transgression actually goes back to an 'esoteric' thread in the lectures of Marcel Mauss, from whom the French scholars have inherited the sacrificial problematic. Dumézil generously took it upon himself to have Lévi-Strauss pass on Sunthar's Ph.D. thesis to Vernant (or was it the other way around?), and Sunthar was able to discuss with the latter at the Collčge de France and was also given quite a few of his books, which are referenced in Criminal Gods. On subsequent trips to Paris, Sunthar also met with Vernant's collaborator, Marcel Detienne, a couple of times to discuss the latter's own contributions. Sunthar also talked over the phone with Maria Daraki (a real Greek!), who in her own book has criticized Detienne's interpretation of Dionysus, but was unable to meet her in person as she was leaving the next day for Greece. The commonality between Vernant's originally 'Marxist' (even communist, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet still seems to be...) inspiration and Biardeau's 'Catholic' outlook is the determination to understand culture as a totality. Detienne has been the most 'structuralist' (read: 'Lévi-Straussian') among the 'Greeks' and perhaps the least 'ideologically' motivated. Based on Sunthar's discussions with them, we have not encountered any valid objection to the radical, though tacit, re-interpretation of their work in our essays. Our understanding of ancient Greek civilization has much to gain by drawing parallel insights from the deployment of transgressive sacrality in Indian tradition.
The Transgressive Fifth Head of Brahmā and the Pāshupata Ultimate Weapon
The Royal Dīkshita: Arjuna's Penance and Indra's Brahmanicide
The Sin-Eating Bhairava: Death and Embryogony in Kāshī
The Khatvānga-Bhairava: Executioner, Victim and Sacrificial Stake
The 'Tribalizing' Ekapāda-Bhairava and Anuttara in Trika Metaphysics
Mitra-Varuna and the niravasita-Bhairava: the Royal MahābrāhmanaThis section was intended as a 'tour de force' reconciling the 'Indo-European' sociologism of Dumézil's trifunctional interpretation of the Vedic pantheon (Mitra-Varuna, Indra, Ashvins) with the 'primitive' dualism of Kuiper's cosmogonic approach to Vedic religion (Indra versus Varuna), but within a framework that simultaneously accounts for the subsequent development of the Hindu trinity (Brahmā, Vishnu, Shiva + the Goddess) within Biardeau's 'anthropology' of bhakti. The core structure of India's national epic, the Mahābhārata, plays a key hermeneutic role in all these approaches, including our own from the vantage point of transgressive sacrality. Elizabeth's paper on "The king and the gardener" demonstrate how we may arrive at the same interpretation of the Vedic-Hindu pantheon through the detailed ethnographic study even of a single local cult.
Having read a remark by Dumézil that the mythological insights expressed in Varuna and Vidūshaka (VV) were perhaps not irreconcilable with his own approach, Sunthar decided to attempt a resolution of the sharp controversy that had been raging between the French and Dutch approaches to Indian mythology. Under the pretext of writing a review of VV for the Indo-Iranian Journal, Sunthar secured a meeting with Dumézil at his home just a couple of days before returning to Benares. [to be completed]
The unraveling of the mutual imbrication of the traits of various epic heroes and Vedic-Hindu divinities is also the occasion for deciphering the ten 'secret names' of the royal Arjuna.