Disguises of Shiva: Nationalism and Folk Culture in the Bengal Borderland since 1905.
De, Aniket.
2016
- This thesis studies the history of a folk theater form called Gambhira, performed in what is today the northern part of the Indo-Bangladesh border, principally in the districts of Malda and Chapai Nawabganj. On the Indian side, it is performed around the figure of the Hindu god Shiva; people address their complaints and grievances by ridiculing and grumbling to the god. Across the border in ... read moreMuslim-majority Bangladesh, Shiva has been replaced by a Muslim farmer, the genre of grumbling remaining the same. Lying at the interface of cultural and intellectual history and ethnography and drawing on archival and ethnographic work conducted in India, Bangladesh and England, this thesis traces how various changes in this local, small-scale performance form have occurred in dialogue with broader, structural events of modern South Asian history since 1905, like anti-colonial nationalism, the Partition of India, and the making of postcolonial nation-states. The history of Gambhira acts as a lens to reveal how the idea and practice of the “folk” has remained, throughout the twentieth century, a site of mediation between metropolitan political ideologies and local cultural worlds. I see the concept of the “folk” not as the reflection of a homogeneous national spirit, nor as the exclusive domain of subaltern subversion, but as a historically shifting point of contact and negotiation between various metropolitan and borderland ideologies and practices. Consequently, I deploy “mediation” as a theoretical pivot to interpret the change in “folk culture” at certain moments of historical intersections between the nation and its borderlands.read less
- Theater--India--Māldah District--History--20th century.
- Nationalism--India--Māldah District--History--20th century.
- Siva (Hindu deity)
- Nationalism--Bangladesh--Chapainawabganj--History--20th century.
- Theater--Bangladesh--Chapainawabganj--History--20th century.
- Chapainawabganj (Bangladesh)--Civilization.
- Chapainawabganj (Bangladesh)--History--20th century.
- Māldah District (India)--History--20th century.
- Māldah District (India)--Civilization.
- ID:
- ms35tm36f
- Component ID:
- tufts:sd.0000383
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
