Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara And The Origin-Myth Of Bhairava

Dr. Sunthar Visuvalingam, PhD, born in KualaLumpur, Malaysia, of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, is an independent researcher on Indic traditions (and IT publishing consultant) based in Chicago since 2001. His PhD thesis on “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology and Spiritual Praxis” (1984) was strongly recommended for a DLitt degree and earned him a personal commendation from the Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. He was instrumental in inviting foreign specialists to participate in the international conference on Abhinavagupta at the BHU Musicology Dept. (1981) and remained actively involved in the subsequent IGNCA national conference there (1982). He has collaborated throughout in his anthropologist-wife Dr. Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam’s extensive fieldwork on the popular worship of Abhinava’s supreme tantric (Kaula) deity Bhairava in Banaras, Katmandu and elsewhere. Their paradigm of “transgressive sacrality” was the object of a three-panel pilot international conference at the South Asia Annual conference at Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison (1986). Among their joint-papers proposing an acculturation model of Indian religious history are“A Paradigm of Hindu-Buddhist Acculturation: Pacali Bhairab of Katmandu” (Evam, 2004), “Between Mecca and Banaras: An Acculturation Model of Hindu-Muslim Relations” (Islam and the Modern Age, 1993), “Bhairava in Banaras: Negotiating Sacred Space and Religious Identity” in Visualizing Space in Banaras (2006), and “Violence and the Other in Hinduism and Islam” (Perspectives on Violence and Othering in India, 2015).He has been guest-editingAbhinavagupta: Reconsiderations(2006),which includes papers from the two BHU conferences andhis comprehensive introductory overview “Towards an Integral Appreciation of Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics of Rasa”(being updated 2018). He contributed the chapter on “Hinduism: Aesthetics, Drama, Poetics” to the Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts (2014, ch.24). His publications—including the forthcoming “Indian Carnival and Human Freedom: From Transgressive Sacrality to Global Spring?” Bakhtin in India (2017), based on his keynote address at this international conference (Gandhinagar, 2013), and “Tanmayībhavana as Empathy: Recognizing Other as Self in Abhinavagupta's Aesthetic Vision” (Oxford Center for Hindu Studies) and “Abhinavagupta’s rasa-aesthetics and Bharata’s sacrificial theater: Humor and its semblance in ‘The Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā)”(IGNCA “Abhinavagupta: The Genius of Kashmir” Dec 2016 conference volumes)—are inspired by Abhinava’s constructive vision and way of thinking. Since 2001 he has been hosting and animating the svAbhinava.org global website for collaborative multilingual publishing that aims to apply and extend Abhinava’s insights, making them more accessible to non-specialists, otherwise deterred by the unnecessary jargon of academese. Dr. S. Visuvalingam was a Senior Visiting Fellow at Harvard University from 1991-93, first at the Center for the Study of World Religions, then at the Dept. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Before moving to the United States in 1989, he was a UGC Postdoctoral Research Associate since 1984 at the Dept. of Philosophy and Indian Religions at the Banaras Hindu University. From 1993-2001, he occupied multiple editorial and product specialist roles at Macmillan Computer Publishing (later part of the Pearson Technology Group), culminating from 1999 in Director of Research and Development (charged with reengineering the publishing workflow and knowledge management) for PTG’s InformIT web portal.