How did primitive jungle myths about jaguars and monkeys become the philosophical foundation for understanding sacred transgression in Indian aesthetics? Dr. Sundar’s third Abhinavagupta session takes a stunning cross-cultural leap.Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology — particularly The Raw and the Cooked — Dr. Sundar maps mythological cycles of hunters, animals, fire, and inversion onto Abhinavagupta’s framework of transgression and the sacred. The vidushaka (court jester) emerges as a figure whose rule-breaking mirrors Bhairava’s cosmic transgression — both are clowns who embody the sacred through impurity. The bat, the upside-down posture, death by laughter, and the Tantric path of deliberate boundary-crossing all converge in a breathtaking synthesis of Indian and Western thought.For serious students of Kashmir Shaivism, Sanskrit theatre, and comparative mythology — this is rare, original scholarship.

About the Speaker:
Sunthar Visuvalingam’s 1984 PhD from BHU on “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology, and Spiritual Praxis,” was strongly recommended for DLitt. An independent researcher based in Chicago, his subsequent publications are developing its interdisciplinary insights in multiple directions, including comparative religion, aesthetics, and anthropology.

Prachand Praveer has published fifteen books, with notable fiction such as Alpahari Grihtyagi , the non-fiction prose viz. ‘Abhinav Cinema’ and its English translation ‘Cinema Through Rasa’, and an introductory book of Indian Classical phonology ‘Varnochchar Vidhan’.