Pregnant Males, Barren Mothers, and Religious Transvestism Transcending Gender in the Songs and Practices of “Heterodox” Bengali Lineages (original) (raw)
Related papers
Surrendering to the Earth. Male devotional practices in the Bengali Dharma cult.
Fieldwork in Religion, 2005
The essential traits of the Dharma cult are grounded in the folklore of the agricultural people of Rarh (West Bengal). The annual worship of Dharma, the gajan, is here examined on a gender basis. By considering fertility as the leitmotif of the cult and Dharma worship the masculinization of an ancestral female cult, I shall focus on the presence of blood as the discriminator in ritual acts. I argue that while female devotees foster and care for the deity by virtue of their own body, men are in a position of 'guiltiness' and they must ritually become women. Thus the two intruding acts par excellence (ploughing the soil and sexual intercourse) are ritually replaced by piercing men's flesh. Self-tortures and immolation will be discussed in order to examine the gajan as the dramatic representation of the hierogamy among Bengali agricultural people.
Androgynous Divinity: Celebrating Transsexuality in the Kolkata Durga Puja
InPlainspeak:A digital magazine on sexuality in the Global South, 2018
Roland Barthes in ‘Myth Today’ defines ‘myth’ as ‘a system of communication’, ‘a mode of signification’. He emphasises that this ‘mode of signification’ is not fixed –‘they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely’. Myths do not convey meaning directly but in covert ways, and the process of signification in myths takes the meaning of symbols to the realm of association, and not denotation. Most importantly, myths naturalise, de-historicise and de-politicise all that is profoundly historical and political. But, by naturalising, myths often become comforting narratives of truth that sanctify that which is labelled or dismissed or criminalised as ‘unnatural’ in the modern world. One of the most intriguing mythological symbols in the Puranic-Agamic tradition in India is that of the Ardhanarishwara which has expanded in meaning when located in the realm of association with sex and sexuality in India. It is interesting to note how this fascinating image of Shiva and Shakti in fusion has found its way into political discourses of sex and sexuality, inaugurating a new mode of signification. The image, having found place within Kolkata’s Sharadotsav (another name for Durga Puja) has garnered newer meanings. Ardhanarishawara, (literally a deity who is half-man, half-woman) a divine image of androgyny, has transited through a changing realm of significations, whereby its fluidity and ambivalence as regards to gender and sexuality emerged as a powerful symbol which could be subscribed to in order to legitimise tritiya prakriti or ‘third gender’in India.
Promising Rituals: Gender and Performativity in Eastern India
Promising Rituals: Gender and Performativity in Eastern India, 2012
This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Thākurāṇī Yātrā, the local processions, and the role of female ritual specialists. The study uses the premise that religious practices in themselves are neither restricting nor liberating; rather rituals provide a perceptual context with the ability to affect the self-understanding of participants, and their conception of agency, in a way that spills across non-ritual spheres. Conceptualizing gender identity as resulting from seen, but mostly unnoticed, everyday activities and approaching cultural performances as sites of collectively defining the self, the author offers a telling and vivid account of how women perceive, realize and reflect on religious ideas, while engaging in rituals and, by doing so, negotiate complex gender norms. The book also examines the assumptions of recent theories on the social construction of identities, often-debated impact of religion on women, performativity and ritual agency in the ‘doing’ of gender in a traditional, non-Western context. This book will serve as essential reading for scholars of sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, history, religion, performance, and folklore studies.
Keeping in mind the present cultural scenario, Muslim community studies have emerged as a cross-disciplinary field that includes sociological, political, economic, literary, and sexuality studies. This wide framework of crossdisciplinary subject position naturally addresses a number of multi-dimensional global issues. One such issue is the rich folk cultural tradition of Bengal that includes one particular strand of songs which is interestingly patronized solely by the Muslim women especially from some areas of Bengal. These women unfold all the stories of their domestic slavery, insults, suppressed desires, disgust against the male folk of their family-the trauma they have to undergo generations after generations, along with all their longings for a better life condition within their songs, in spite of knowing that they are never going to achieve them. Within this paper, I shall try to bring into the forefront how ages of oppression, as Foucault has observed, have led them to form a kind of passionate attachment to the forms of power that oppress them. This is problematic. Unless the oppression is recognized and worked through, no real liberation is possible for the oppressed. As a consequence, all these have remained simply as the instance of their fairytale, 'wishful thinking'. The fear of being under constant surveillance by the oppressive authority compels them to self-restriction, in every sphere of their lives. Moreover, such a rich tradition has unfortunately never been imparted its due acknowledgment, neither within the family, nor by the greater society. Interestingly, within the whole Muslim world, there are very few instances of such practices of singing by women. Singing, in Islamic Shariyat, has been considered as 'nafarmani', i.e., against Islamic Shariyat. So the question that naturally engages the socio-political studies on this topic is, where from did such tradition emanate? In this context, the paper will also endeavor to investigate the origins of the emergence of such a rich and rare tradition.
Contemporary South Asia, 2005
"The paper describes the concluding rite of the gajan, a major hierogamic celebration of West Bengal. The night before the end of the festival, ascetic devotees dance with rotten human corpses and human heads in honour of Dharma Thakur, a local fertility deity. After giving a description of the ritual, I try to enlighten the relation between the fertility leitmotif of the gajan and its climax: the danse macabre (dance of death). The practice of sporting with corpses and their ritual beheading will be analysed by furnishing a psychoanalytical and cross-cultural interpretation. In order to do that, it will be suggested that the ritual behaviour of Dharma’s devotees is due to the gender modification of the actual recipient of the service. Only if we accept that the object of worship is female (the Goddess, Dharma’s spouse), will it be possible to explain the psychical crises occurring to male devotees and their efforts to become ‘ritual women’. The paradigm of the ‘guilty male’ of agricultural societies will be further analysed by comparing the Bengali mar:a¯ khela¯ (playing with corpses) with similar practices within different cultural environments, including Sanskrit Puranic lore, Greek mythology and Italian popular Catholicism."
Refiguring the South Asian American Tradition Bearer: Performing the Third Gender in "Yoni Ki Baat"
Journal of American Folklore , 2015
In recent years, a growing group of scholars has begun to draw upon queer theory as they research aspects of LGBTQ folk performances and texts from around the globe. In the process, folklore scholars have become increasingly intrigued by bodies that appear to transgress dimorphism, and complicate binary oppositions like male/female. Performances of gender identity and sexuality by hijras in South Asia have awakened audiences’ imaginings since the Kama Sutra period (Gupta 2005:180). In folktale, dance, song, religious epic, and popular culture, the figure of the hijra often evokes a liminal play of “otherness.” Commonly known as the “third gender”—a conceptual space outside of typical Western constructs—hijra individuals engage with varied notions of transsexual, transgender, intersex, cross- dresser, eunuch, or sexual fluidity. This article focuses on a feminist appropriation of the hijra within yoni ki baat, a South Asian American version of The Vagina monologues. The authors explore how the figure of the hijra—drawn from South Asian folk narratives, religious discourse, and popular culture—might be used strategically by social activists in political performance narratives to (1) encourage a complicated sense of sexually ambiguous or queer practices and identities, and (2) acknowledge individuals facing social oppression due to their marginalized identities. As such, their approach conceptualizes performance as both a relational space and as a space in which to wonder about questions of relationality (Madison and Hamera 2006; Schechner 1990).