The brahmanicide Bhairava is simultaneously the policeman-magistrate of the sacred city of Varanasi

An expanded version of "Adepts of the god Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition," presented by my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, to the same Assembly, has been published under the title "Bhairava’s Royal Brahmanicide: The problem of the Mah�br�hmana," in Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees (Albany: Suny Press, 1989), pp.157–229. It deals in greater detail with many aspects of this divinity par excellence of transgressive sacrality, which I have been able to no more than allude to in my own paper. Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) had already explored the structural features and ramifications of the brahmanicide motif in her various works: Elizabeth’s (and my own) focus is primarily on demonstrating that it is not so much an attempt ‘solve’ insoluble logical and theological contradictions, but rather a systematic and self-conscious encoding of a transgressive sacrality. As Das , p.749 n.38, has not failed to recognize, we believe that without a just appreciation of the ‘theology’ underlying the elaboration of the Hindu symbolic universe, Indology, in both its philological and anthropological variants, remains a futile exercise. Cf. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)