Is the writer then a kind of entry-level yogi, engaging in a daily practice that mingles asceticism, dangerous mental disciplines, multifarious cognitive states, suffering and joy? There have been many figurings of the artist in recent history: Romantic seeker-explorer, drunken hedonist, bohemian outcast, manic depressive, social reformer, truth teller, tortured confessor of secrets. Perhaps it would be apposite to set next to these a portrait offered by Madhuraja, Abhinavagupta’s contemporary and student:
[Abhinavagupta] sits in the middle of a garden of grapes, inside a pavilion made of crystal and filled with beautiful paintings. The room smells wonderful because of flower garlands, incense-sticks and (oil-) lamps … The room is constantly resounding with musical instruments, with songs and with dancing … Abhinavagupta is attended by all his numerous students, with Kṣemaraja at their head, who are writing down everything he says. To his side stand two women, partners in Tantric rites (dūtī), who hold in one hand a jug of wine, śivaraasa, and a box full of betel rolls, and in the other hand a lotus and a citron. Abhinavagupta has his eyes trembling in ecstasy. In the middle of his forehead is a conspicuous tilaka made of ashes … His long hair is held by a garland of flowers. He has a long beard and golden (reddish-brown) skin; his neck is dark with shining yakṣaparīka powder … he sits in the Yogic position known as virāsana [the pose of the hero]. One hand is held on his knee holding a rosary with his fingers clearly making the sign (mudrā) that signifies his knowledge of the highest Siva. He plays on his resonating lute with the tips of his quivering fingers.30
10 APPLICATION.RESTART()
In recent decades there has been something of an Abhinavagupta revival, an increasing interest — in India and elsewhere — in his work. This is due, in no small part, to a fascination with the person one glimpses in the texts — with the sheer range of knowledge, the confident voice, the subtlety of the mind; his contemporaries regarded him as “Shiva incarnate,” and one feels the glamour across the centuries. As often happens with culture heroes, his life shades off into legend: around 1025 CE, he and 1,200 followers are said to have entered a cave, singing a hymn Abhinavagupta wrote to Bhairava (the terrifying manifestation of Shiva); none of them were seen again. We have twenty-one of the books he wrote, and know of twenty-three other now-lost titles.1 His grand masterwork, the Tantraloka, has been translated into Hindi and Italian, but still awaits an authoritative and complete translation into English. “Abhinavagupta Studies” is a fast-expanding field because much remains to be done.
Efforts to restore Sanskrit to some semblance of its former glory are afoot. At the time of this writing, a nonprofit group based in Bangalore, Samskrita Bharati, has begun the task of translating the Amar Chitra Katha comics into Sanskrit.2 The organization’s slogan is, “Revive a language. Rejuvenate a culture. Revolutionize the world.”
Something of the same wide-ranging cultural aspiration fuels some governmental attempts to bolster the teaching of Sanskrit. In 2010, the BJP-led Uttarakhand state government proclaimed two villages to be “Sanskrit Villages,” which meant that funding was provided to teach all citizens — including Dalits — the language. Uttarakhand has “a separate Sanskrit Education Department, 88 government-aided Sanskrit educational institutes, and 47 Sanskrit colleges giving ‘Shastri (BA)’ and ‘Acharya (MA)’ degrees.” But in one of the villages, “people learnt to speak the language with much hope and now wait in vain for the gains that were to follow.”3 The Congress government that followed dropped the project, so the villagers’ ambitions of being appointed Sanskrit teachers for other villages remain frustrated.
The Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has more explicit aims: Sanskrit computational linguistics, Sanskrit informatics, Sanskrit computing, Sanskrit language processing. There has also been an effort over the past two decades to reintroduce the Indian scholastic tradition into humanities departments, and students have responded with enthusiasm. Controversies have flared over some of the more clumsy attempts by academic nationalists to proclaim — by fiat — the continuing relevance and accuracy of “Vedic astrological science” and similar subjects. Sanskrit departments are still Brahminical redoubts, within which Dalit students face active prejudice.
In 2004, the Department of Posts released a postage stamp honouring Panini, in the denomination of Rs 5.
After Abhinavagupta, rasa-dhvani theory became the predominant system of aesthetic analysis in the subcontinent, although it was by no means accepted universally. Many poets wrote poetry that displayed astonishing technical virtuosity rather than depths of dhvani; the great Anandavardhana himself, despite his stern pronouncements about “picture poetry,” wrote a spectacular picture poem called the “Devisataka” (The goddess’s century) which when decoded syllabically according to the embedded instructions reveals an intricate, spoked wheel. He explains in the poem that the goddess appeared in a dream and not only told him to write the poem but also acted as his instructor.
Perhaps the goddess — who gives rise to fullness and void — understands that every form needs its opposite.
The simple on-off operations of a computer’s logic gates might mislead one into regarding that computer as a large and overly complicated abacus. But, as Ada Byron pointed out:
The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever. In fact the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.4
In 1936, in his famous paper “On Computable Numbers,” Alan Turing announced, “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” and then showed how — at least in principle — to build such a machine.5
“Any indefinite function,” “any computable sequence”—that simple word any holds here a vastness perhaps equal to the universe, or your consciousness. Whether the universe is an abhasa—a simulation — or whether self-awareness can be produced by recursive algorithms are questions open to debate, but one thing is certain: the ability to materially express computable sequences and therefore move the world is unprecedented and extraordinary. “Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do,”6 Ada Byron wrote to Charles Babbage, with an inkling of the uncanny powers they were beginning to glimpse. “The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere ‘calculating machines,’” she wrote elsewhere.
It holds a position wholly its own…. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed … in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.7