CAROLA ERIKA LOREA
Carola Lorea is a Junior Professor 'Rethinking Global Religion' at the University of Tübingen. She is interested in gender, oral traditions and popular religious movement in South Asia, particularly eastern India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. Her research lies at the intersection between orality-literary studies and the anthropology of religion, with a particular focus on sound, folklore, esoteric movements and the ethnography of Tantra. Her monograph Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali
Madman: a Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (Brill, 2016) is the result of a four year travel-along ethnography with Baul performers in West Bengal.
She received research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and SAI (Heidelberg) to study travelling archives of songs in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. She authored several articles on folklore and sacred songs, translated the works of Bengali poets and novelists, and has been socially engaged as an interpreter for Bangladeshi refugees in Italy.
As a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, she was working on soundscapes of religion and displacement focusing on a numerous, yet understudied community of low-caste religious practitioners called Matua, and the circulation of preachers, performers, religious items and ideas across the Bay of Bengal.
Madman: a Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (Brill, 2016) is the result of a four year travel-along ethnography with Baul performers in West Bengal.
She received research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and SAI (Heidelberg) to study travelling archives of songs in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. She authored several articles on folklore and sacred songs, translated the works of Bengali poets and novelists, and has been socially engaged as an interpreter for Bangladeshi refugees in Italy.
As a senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, she was working on soundscapes of religion and displacement focusing on a numerous, yet understudied community of low-caste religious practitioners called Matua, and the circulation of preachers, performers, religious items and ideas across the Bay of Bengal.
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edited books by CAROLA ERIKA LOREA
[this is just an old version of the proof pages of our Introduction: please do not cite from this pdf but from the published book.]
This is the first collection of essays to approach the topic of Tantric Studies from the vantage point of ethnography and lived religion, moving beyond the centrality of written texts and giving voice to the everyday life and livelihoods of a multitude of Tantric actors. Bringing together a team of international scholars whose contributions range across diverse communities and traditions in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan region, the book connects distant shores of Tantric scholarship and lived Tantric practices. The contributors unpack Tantra’s relationship to the body, ritual performance, sexuality, secrecy, power hierarchies, death, magic, and healing, while doing so with vigilant sensitivity to decolonization and the ethics of fieldwork. Through diverse ethnographies of Tantra and attention to lived experiences and life stories, the book challenges normative definitions of Tantra and maps the variety of Tantric traditions, providing comparative perspectives on Tantric societies across regions and religious backgrounds. The accessible tone of the ethnographic case studies makes this an ideal book for undergraduate or graduate audiences working on the topic of Tantra.
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Ethnography-of-Tantra
Developed in tandem with the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19, this volume is a “phygital” publication, a work grounded in empirical roots as well as digitally born communication. It comprises thirty-eight essays and dozens of videos and other online content that examine Asian religious communities—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, and Christian as well as popular/folk and new religious movements, or NRMs—in terms of the changes brought on by and the ritual responses to the Covid pandemic.
Studying religious narratives, practices, and changes in the Covidian age adds to our understanding of not only the specific groups in which they are situated, but also the coronavirus itself, its disputed etiologies and culturally contextualized exegeses. CoronAsur offers a comprehensive and timely discussion of Covidian transformations in religious communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and political economies, documenting how religious practices and discourses have co-produced the meanings of the pandemic.
Contributors: Fatema Aarshe, Yasmeen Arif, Indira Arumugam, Swayam Bagaria, Raka Banerjee, Malini Bhattacharjee, Md. Khaled Bin Oli Bhuiyan, Chang Hsun, Jack Meng-Tat Chia, Terence Chong, Ankana Das, Deepsikha Dasgupta, Nia Deliana, Beverly Anne Devakishen, Mariano Errichiello, Amelia Fauzia, Nalika Gajaweera, Kanchana Dodan Godage, Daniel P.S. Goh, Emily Zoe Hertzman, Siti Zubaidah Ismail, Nurul Fadiah Johari, Sinah Theres Kloß, Natalie Lang, Erica M. Larson, Lei Ting, Alvin Eng Hui Lim, Lim Peng Chew, Marianna Lis, Carola E. Lorea, Neena Mahadev, Muhammad Lutfi Bin Othman, Mukul Pandey, Dishani Roy, Louie Jon A. Sánchez, Shen Yeh-Ying, Yuki Shiozaki, Show Ying Ruo, Esmond Chuah Meng Soh, Tran Thi Thuy Binh, Vo Duy Thanh, Dean Wang, Catherine West, Lynn Wong, Faizah Zakaria, Saymon Zakaria, Philipp Zehmisch, Zhao Yuanhao, and Yijiang Zhong.
Research Monographs by CAROLA ERIKA LOREA
Peer-reviewed Articles by CAROLA ERIKA LOREA
is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of
indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory
epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten-year
ethnographic engagement with Bengali-speaking gurus and performers to discuss how
singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily
experience and exchanged among performers-listeners to build togetherness in ways
that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adoptsBengali understandings
of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies
that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in
their own right, I suggest singing asmethod and using the feelingful body as a research
tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities
I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology’s epistemic
ethnocentrism.
The Matua community counts at present fifty million followers, according to its leaders. It is scattered across a large area and connected through a trans-local network of preachers, pilgrims, institutions, print, and religious commodities. Most Matua followers are found in West Bengal; in southern Bangladesh, where the movement emerged in the 19th century; and in provinces where refugees from East Bengal have resettled since the 1950s, especially Assam; Tripura; the Andaman Islands; Uttarakhand; and the Dandakaranya area at the border of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. Building upon an older Vaishnava devotional stream, the religious community initiated by Harichand Thakur (1812–1878) and consolidated by his son Guruchand Thakur (1847–1937) developed hand in hand with the Namashudra movement for the social upliftment of the lower castes. Rebelling against social marginalization and untouchability, and promising salvation through ecstatic singing and dancing, the Matua community triggered a massive mobilization in rural East Bengal. Partition and displacement have disrupted the unity of the Matua movement, now scattered on both sides of the hastily drawn Indo-Bangladesh border. The institutional side of the Matua community emerged as a powerful political subject, deeply entangled with refugee politics, borderland issues, and Hindu nationalism. In the 21st century, the Matua community represents a key element in electoral politics and a crucial factor for understanding the relation between religion, displacement, and caste, within and beyond Bengal.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
Western phenomenon. Nevertheless, in several South Asian
religious traditions, practitioners are instructed through songs and oral teachings
to exchange and ultimately transcend gender identities. In this article
I discuss the practices aimed at transcending gender identity among some
contemporary Bengali lineages that have been defined as “heterodox” by
nineteenth-century reformers. Several lineages in West Bengal and Bangladesh
perform cross-dressing and meditative identification with the opposite
sex. I discuss such practices using songs, riddles, and oral sources collected
during fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2015. I then briefly trace the
history of religious transvestism in South Asian literature, while contextualizing
this practice within Vaishnava and Sufi traditions. Finally, I discuss how
similar phenomena have been interpreted by modern and postmodern scholarship
to conclude with a conceptual framework for interpreting “pregnant
males” and “barren mothers” in light of contemporary gender theories, with
reference to performativity and ritual liminality.
Islands, bringing along rich repertoires of songs and oral narratives. Rooted in ethnographic
material, this article is inserted in the scarcely-discussed interstice between cultural histories of postPartition
displacement and the trajectories of verbal arts in Bengali language. Exploring the ways
in which identity and community emerge from performance practices, the paper analyses congregational
singing sessions in the Andamans as sites that connect traditional knowledge to contemporary
experiences of displacement, providing a platform to learn, transmit and perform ‘homeland’,
as a notion shaped by the realms of language, devotional music and religious knowledge.
[this is just an old version of the proof pages of our Introduction: please do not cite from this pdf but from the published book.]
This is the first collection of essays to approach the topic of Tantric Studies from the vantage point of ethnography and lived religion, moving beyond the centrality of written texts and giving voice to the everyday life and livelihoods of a multitude of Tantric actors. Bringing together a team of international scholars whose contributions range across diverse communities and traditions in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan region, the book connects distant shores of Tantric scholarship and lived Tantric practices. The contributors unpack Tantra’s relationship to the body, ritual performance, sexuality, secrecy, power hierarchies, death, magic, and healing, while doing so with vigilant sensitivity to decolonization and the ethics of fieldwork. Through diverse ethnographies of Tantra and attention to lived experiences and life stories, the book challenges normative definitions of Tantra and maps the variety of Tantric traditions, providing comparative perspectives on Tantric societies across regions and religious backgrounds. The accessible tone of the ethnographic case studies makes this an ideal book for undergraduate or graduate audiences working on the topic of Tantra.
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Ethnography-of-Tantra
Developed in tandem with the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and COVID-19, this volume is a “phygital” publication, a work grounded in empirical roots as well as digitally born communication. It comprises thirty-eight essays and dozens of videos and other online content that examine Asian religious communities—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, and Christian as well as popular/folk and new religious movements, or NRMs—in terms of the changes brought on by and the ritual responses to the Covid pandemic.
Studying religious narratives, practices, and changes in the Covidian age adds to our understanding of not only the specific groups in which they are situated, but also the coronavirus itself, its disputed etiologies and culturally contextualized exegeses. CoronAsur offers a comprehensive and timely discussion of Covidian transformations in religious communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and political economies, documenting how religious practices and discourses have co-produced the meanings of the pandemic.
Contributors: Fatema Aarshe, Yasmeen Arif, Indira Arumugam, Swayam Bagaria, Raka Banerjee, Malini Bhattacharjee, Md. Khaled Bin Oli Bhuiyan, Chang Hsun, Jack Meng-Tat Chia, Terence Chong, Ankana Das, Deepsikha Dasgupta, Nia Deliana, Beverly Anne Devakishen, Mariano Errichiello, Amelia Fauzia, Nalika Gajaweera, Kanchana Dodan Godage, Daniel P.S. Goh, Emily Zoe Hertzman, Siti Zubaidah Ismail, Nurul Fadiah Johari, Sinah Theres Kloß, Natalie Lang, Erica M. Larson, Lei Ting, Alvin Eng Hui Lim, Lim Peng Chew, Marianna Lis, Carola E. Lorea, Neena Mahadev, Muhammad Lutfi Bin Othman, Mukul Pandey, Dishani Roy, Louie Jon A. Sánchez, Shen Yeh-Ying, Yuki Shiozaki, Show Ying Ruo, Esmond Chuah Meng Soh, Tran Thi Thuy Binh, Vo Duy Thanh, Dean Wang, Catherine West, Lynn Wong, Faizah Zakaria, Saymon Zakaria, Philipp Zehmisch, Zhao Yuanhao, and Yijiang Zhong.
is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of
indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory
epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten-year
ethnographic engagement with Bengali-speaking gurus and performers to discuss how
singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily
experience and exchanged among performers-listeners to build togetherness in ways
that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adoptsBengali understandings
of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies
that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in
their own right, I suggest singing asmethod and using the feelingful body as a research
tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities
I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology’s epistemic
ethnocentrism.
The Matua community counts at present fifty million followers, according to its leaders. It is scattered across a large area and connected through a trans-local network of preachers, pilgrims, institutions, print, and religious commodities. Most Matua followers are found in West Bengal; in southern Bangladesh, where the movement emerged in the 19th century; and in provinces where refugees from East Bengal have resettled since the 1950s, especially Assam; Tripura; the Andaman Islands; Uttarakhand; and the Dandakaranya area at the border of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. Building upon an older Vaishnava devotional stream, the religious community initiated by Harichand Thakur (1812–1878) and consolidated by his son Guruchand Thakur (1847–1937) developed hand in hand with the Namashudra movement for the social upliftment of the lower castes. Rebelling against social marginalization and untouchability, and promising salvation through ecstatic singing and dancing, the Matua community triggered a massive mobilization in rural East Bengal. Partition and displacement have disrupted the unity of the Matua movement, now scattered on both sides of the hastily drawn Indo-Bangladesh border. The institutional side of the Matua community emerged as a powerful political subject, deeply entangled with refugee politics, borderland issues, and Hindu nationalism. In the 21st century, the Matua community represents a key element in electoral politics and a crucial factor for understanding the relation between religion, displacement, and caste, within and beyond Bengal.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
I will outline the exclusionary politics of 19th century Bengali Vaishnavism in its approach towards the ‘apasampradāyas’ (deviant sects) – a category which was employed to define a clearer border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. While scholarly literature tends to treat heterodox lineages as passive subjects in the orthodoxization of Vaishnavism, I will focus on the agency and the repercussions among the esoteric and heteropractical subjects who responded to accusations and marginalization from the dominant Vaishnava discourse.
What was the impact of these newly created criteria to define who is a proper Vaishnava and who is not? How were these criteria accepted or contested by the groups that were excluded from the formation of a modern Vaishnava identity? Most studies seem to treat Baul, Darbeś, or Sahajiyā communities in general, as passive recipients of urban elites' condemnations. By contrast, I aim to show that these lineages were not simply excluded from the process of institution-making, but that connections and dialogues (although of an unequal and asymmetrical type) and responses to each other's criticism, shaped the formation of these modern Bengali religious identities, in relational terms.
I will portray the complexity of this phase of cultural and religious history by discussing and juxtaposing the songs of two composers, who lived in the same time period and grew up some fifty kilometers apart: Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur, and Duddu Śāh. I propose to compare these two corpora because, although the two composers might not have personally interacted, their songs seem to speak to each other quite directly. In this virtual dialogue, Bhaktivinod Ṭhākur represents the views of an educated elite of Vaishnava reformers, while Duddu Śāh could be considered as the spokesperson for antinomian and marginalized Sahajiyā lineages and their struggle to maintain their traditional authority and status. During the composers' lifetime, this demarcation line, as it will emerge in the course of the paper, was often blurred and impermanent, leaving open and overlapping spaces for dialogue, loans, adaptations and exchange.
Western phenomenon. Nevertheless, in several South Asian
religious traditions, practitioners are instructed through songs and oral teachings
to exchange and ultimately transcend gender identities. In this article
I discuss the practices aimed at transcending gender identity among some
contemporary Bengali lineages that have been defined as “heterodox” by
nineteenth-century reformers. Several lineages in West Bengal and Bangladesh
perform cross-dressing and meditative identification with the opposite
sex. I discuss such practices using songs, riddles, and oral sources collected
during fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2015. I then briefly trace the
history of religious transvestism in South Asian literature, while contextualizing
this practice within Vaishnava and Sufi traditions. Finally, I discuss how
similar phenomena have been interpreted by modern and postmodern scholarship
to conclude with a conceptual framework for interpreting “pregnant
males” and “barren mothers” in light of contemporary gender theories, with
reference to performativity and ritual liminality.
Islands, bringing along rich repertoires of songs and oral narratives. Rooted in ethnographic
material, this article is inserted in the scarcely-discussed interstice between cultural histories of postPartition
displacement and the trajectories of verbal arts in Bengali language. Exploring the ways
in which identity and community emerge from performance practices, the paper analyses congregational
singing sessions in the Andamans as sites that connect traditional knowledge to contemporary
experiences of displacement, providing a platform to learn, transmit and perform ‘homeland’,
as a notion shaped by the realms of language, devotional music and religious knowledge.
get together and overcome internal divisions and conflicts. The festival of
Jhāṃpān (or Jhāpān Melā) provides a different definition of festivals as mirrors of social
dramas and hierarchical divisions.
The Ojhās of Bengal are low-class rural healers specializing in curing snakebites.
The Bedes (or Bedias) are tribal snake catchers who extract venom and sell it to private
clinics. Both groups perform snake charming, a popular entertainment as well as a
ritual practice, during particular religious festivals, such as the Jhāṃpān.
The diffusion and government support of Western medicine and education have
seriously compromised the indigenous knowledge of these groups and attacked it as
irrational superstition. Some of the most popular Jhāṃpān celebrations have been coercively
stopped, and yet the festival is still celebrated in several districts and practitioners
have developed strategic narratives to protect their knowledge.
This article analyzes the changing role of snake specialists in Bengali rural society
through a historical and contextual study of the Jhāṃpān. The decline of this festival
mirrors the crisis of the transmission of indigenous knowledge, which can be understood
only by considering the intersections between healing, ritual, and entertainment
inadvertently contributed interesting material to international linguistic disquisitions when he had the unfortunate idea of defining some African countries as “shitholes.” The translation of such colorful vernacular expression on the headlines of international newspapers became a topic of conversation: journalists reflected on the fact that in other languages on the global media the shithole remark “does not quite translate” (Walters). Taiwan's central news agency decided to translate it as, literally, “countries where birds lay no eggs”; in the French Le Monde a more explicit “pays de merde” was used; in Italy the scatological connotation was maintained by choosing terms like “cesso di paese”
(latrine countries). In any case, polyglot journalists realized that something was missing in the translation of the President’s outrageously disrespectful remark. I couldn't but share the general feeling
of dissatisfaction and incompleteness with the translation of politically charged swearwords.
This article is an occasion to share some problematic aspects encountered in this domain.
It concerns what I consider one of the most challenging translations of my life, both as a scholar, who regularly translates literary material for academic purposes, and as a literary translator. In 2016 the Italian publishing house Metropoli d'Asia released my translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's Kāṅāl Mālsāṭ, conventionally translated as “The War Cry of the Beggars”, with the Italian title Gli ammutinati di Calcutta (Calcutta's Mutineers).
https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/nabarun-bhattacharya-9789388630511/
This collection of articles includes case studies from South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia to explore the entangled themes of vaccination, public health, faith, and trust. They are guided by the questions: What kinds of community relations, power structures, spiritual inclinations, and influential authorities (religious, governmental, and medical, among others) lead people to trust or not trust COVID-19 vaccines and information about them? How are COVID-19 vaccines understood, accepted, and/or supplemented by Asian communities of practice? How are other concepts of immunity mobilized and given authority based on preexisting onto-cosmologies and structures of trust? Protection,
as the articles in this special issue suggest, is a historically constituted, experiential, processual, and relational category of knowledge and practice that demands multilayered attention in the face of crises like COVID-19.
The interconnected world history of the Bay of Bengal is re-enacted in people’s memories,
habits and everyday practices. The word for ‘star anise’ in Central India is Singapoor ke phool
[Singapore flower], a colloquial echo of a pre-modern network of maritime trade. The Bengali
word for window [janala] is directly borrowed from Portuguese, a reminder that language
witnessed the syncretic impact of early European settlements around the Bay. Epic stories
from the Ramayana, originating in ancient India, are re-enacted daily in Javanese traditional
theatre. These are just a few of the examples that can serve as metaphorical mappings of the
past and present of a network of interdependent livelihoods, a busy seascape, and a web
of littoral hubs, which constitute the life of the Bay of Bengal.
Plot:
Due gang rivali sul finire del XX secolo si scontrano e si incontrano in una fantasmagorica Calcutta. La prima gang è composta dagli iconici Fyataru, un gruppo di angeli punk dal retrogusto anarchico che vivono ai margini della società e combattono le disgustose ipocrisie di un sistema politico e burocratico stantio, malvagio e corrotto. Con i loro poteri sovrannaturali, fra cui spiccare il volo al solo pronunciare un cacofonico mantra e lanciare bombe di escrementi umani in testa ai ministri corrotti, i Fyataru mirano ad eliminare tutti gli " ismi " e tutti gli " scismi " che tormentano l'umanità urbana. La seconda gang è formata dai Choktor, una setta magica di stregoni tantrici. Seguendo i saggi consigli di un progenitore-sciamano nelle vesti di un uomo-corvo, le due gang si uniscono e danno vita ad un'insurrezione scoordinata e rivoluzionaria. Calcutta diventa l'improbabile campo di battaglia di una guerriglia diretta contro le forze del Governo a cui partecipano i poveri, gli scontenti, ma anche gli scheletri, i fantasmi e dischi volanti. La polizia è allo sbaraglio, e il Governo è costretto a proporre un trattato di pace con esiti misteriosi. " Questa è l'epoca dei quizzoni. In ogni quartiere, in ogni casa, solo e nient'altro che quiz. Più cresce l'intelletto umano, e più diventa raffinato il cervello dei bambini, più si stabilisce la perversa necessità del quiz. A quando risalgono i primi vespasiani di Calcutta? Se si caga per strada a Londra, a quanto ammonta la multa? Come si chiama il nonno dell'allenatore di cricket Kopil Dev? Perché le mazze da cricket sono immuni alle termiti? Dove si va per comprare alcolici sottobanco a Shantiniketan? Simili domande e le loro rispettive risposte, sono tenute in serbo numerose ".
Cura e traduzione dal bengali di Carola Erika Lorea
accompagnato dalla sua traduzione in francese. Il sonetto fu composto in occasione del seicentesimo anniversario di Dante Alighieri e il poeta lo presentò in dono al regnante italiano come “une petite fleure orientale”. Il ministro del Re inviò in risposta una lettera secondo la quale il sovrano si diceva estremamente lieto di come “il genio italiano avesse trovato eco sulle rive del Gange” e di come l’Italia avrebbe potuto fungere da “anello per poter unire
Oriente e Occidente”.
Nonostante le brillanti aspettative del Re, sul suolo italiano le lingue e le culture dell’India sono scarsamente conosciute. Ad eccezione di qualche opera di Rabindranath Tagore, divenuto il più celebre letterato indiano in Occidente per via del Nobel per la Letteratura che ricevette nel 1913, gli scaffali delle librerie
nostrane sono restii ad ospitare nuove traduzioni provenienti dalle “rive del Gange”, se non consideriamo i contemporanei romanzieri, di discendenza indiana ma perlopiù domiciliati negli Stati Uniti, che hanno per madrelingua l’inglese.
La sensibilità poetica è in costante diminuzione nel pubblico italiano, e così pure il mercato della poesia; grande differenza, questa, rispetto alla sensibilità letteraria indiana, molto più avvezza alle composizioni in versi e grande consumatrice di
opere in poesia.
Questa collezione di versi accompagnati da una traduzione giocosa e sperimentale ha la speranza di guidare il lettore italiano in un primo approccio verso la poesia moderna in lingua bengali, di cui Jibanananda Das è il maggior esponente. Al contempo la struttura del libro, corredato di testo a fronte in originale, lo rende
idoneo per accompagnare l’attività didattica degli studenti italiani che si avvicinano allo studio della lingua bengali, e dei sempre più numerosi studenti madrelingua bengali che intraprendono lo studio dell’italiano.
AUTORI:
Mario Prayer è Professore Associato di Storia e Istituzioni dell'Asia Meridionale e affidatario di Lingua e Traduzione Bengali presso il Dipartimento "Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali" della Sapienza - Università di Roma.
Neeman Sobhan, scrittrice e giornalista, è Lettrice di Lingua Bengali presso il Dipartimento "Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali" della Sapienza - Università di Roma.
Carola Lorea è Dottoranda in Civiltà, culture e società dell'Asia e dell'Africa presso il Dipartimento "Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali" della Sapienza - Università di Roma, in co-tutorato con la Jadavpur University di Kolkata (India).
The Politics of Musical Time: Expanding Songs and Shrinking Markets
in Bengali Devotional Performance
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
A Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation
(Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 22). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. xviii,
332 pp., figs.
Reviewed by Dr. Heda Jason: private scholar, E-Mail: [email protected]
My doctoral research focused on the oral repertoire of Baul songs; particularly, of the composer Bhaba Pagla (1902 – 1984). His songs adopted traditional literary topoi of yogic metaphors, leaving ample space for contrasting exegeses: for instance, according to the interpreter, maraṇ can mean both “death” and “ejaculation”, kāṇḍārī (helmsman) can be interpreted as a guru, or a spouse, etc.
This paper aims to demonstrate how the ambiguous and amphibious language of religious songs can be appropriated and interpreted by middle-class devotees who strive to transform the antinomian, non-institutionalised movement represented in Bhaba Pagla's songs into a philanthropic and universalist religion, for successful proselytism.
These dynamics are culture-specific and pertain to the context of Bengali politics and society. At the same time, they reflect a more general tendency towards institutionalisation and hinduisation of religious movements in modern and contemporary South Asia, drawing inspiration from the recent past (e.g. Ramakrishna Mission and Matua Mahasangha).
With the diffusion and the governmental support of Western medicine and Western education, the indigenous knowledge of the Ojhās is seriously compromised and may be affected by rapid decline. The Ojhās' specialisations are equally challenged by the institutions, the religious establishment, and by left-wing activism. The performative as well as healing competencies of the Ojhās are not recognised by the State - whereas other groups of performers/practitioners are protected by the governmental recognition and the economic facilities granted with the “Folk Artist Identity Card”. Their heterodox shamanic practices are ostracized by both Hindu and Islamic religious establishments. Attacked as irrational superstitions, their healing techniques are strongly opposed by social activists and socialist theatre groups operating at the village level.
In this paper I analyse the changing role of the Ojhā in the village society as it appears from a historical and contextual study of the folk festival known as Jhāṃpān. The Jhāṃpān is celebrated in West Bengal and Bangladesh in mid August, during the day of worship of the snake-goddess Manasa. It is typically a gathering of Ojhās and takes shape as a procession: the Ojhā masters, surrounded by their disciples and accompanied by drums and devotional songs, display their skill in handling poisonous snakes, while the villagers enjoy the performance and follow the parade.
Emerging from both literary survey and ethnographic field-work, the history of the decline of the performance of the Jhāṃpān festival mirrors the crisis of the transmission of the Ojhā's knowledge, a crisis that can only be understood by considering the intersections between healing, ritual and entertainment.
The myth of secrecy: studying esoteric traditions of Bengal
by
Carola Erika Lorea
Ph.D. La Sapienza University of Rome – jointly supervised by Jadavpur University of Kolkata
Is it possible at all to discuss esoteric traditions?
The provocative voice of Edward Conze stated: “There is something both indecent and ridiculous about the public discussion of the esoteric in words that can be generally understood”.
In their studies on esoteric heterodox sects of Bengal, both Hugh Urban and Tony Stewart found themselves obstructed in the “double bound of ethic and epistemology” (Urban 2012): if the researcher is a practitioner, he would not be allowed to reveal the secret knowledge. If a researcher is not a practitioner, he would not be able to give any reliable information on it.
Thus scholars of Bengali Tantric and Sahajiya sects excluded the possibility of conducting a participative research in the field of esoteric lineages.
On the other hand, in the lyrics of gurus and practitioners of living lineages, as they emerged from textual and contextual sources collected in a two years field-work in West Bengal, secret knowledge appears to be a permeating topic of Bengali esoteric songs: in Padmalocan, Lalon Fakir, Bhaba Pagla and others'lyrics, the elitist, secret character of knowledge seems to be cherished and highly “advertised”.
The proposed paper analyses the topic of secrecy and the relation between secrecy and power as perceived by the community of practitioners as well as by academia. The questions that arise from a close examination of the functions of secrecy and – consequently - of the secret code-language known as sandhyā-bhāṣā, are multiple: is it possible to understand and publicly write about esoteric knowledge at the same time? What is the compromise that the researcher has to negotiate with? Has any convincing compromise been applied so far?
A possible solution may be the idea that there is no polarization between secrecy and revelation, but rather a wide range of nuances comprising partial revelation, selective secrecy, revelation through hints (likhiye dhākilo), chronological changes and situational adjustments. Problematizing the attempt at crystallizing secrecy, we may find out that secrecy emerges as an attribute exploited in the construction of the Exotic, while the language of secrecy is interpretable as a strategy of creation of an alternative social power and a voice for subaltern consciousness(es) to speak.
The first historical sources referring to the Jhāṃpān Mela are dated as early as 1495. Travelers and scholars refer to its celebration from the colonial times until the '70s. In the last decades, references to the performance of the Jhāṃpān are scarce and inconsistent: the only place where its celebration remained constant is Bishnupur, the ex-capital of the Malla dynasty, wellknown for its terracotta temples.
My paper addresses the following question: Why is the celebration of Jhāṃpān in decline? Is it due to pressure from the dominant culture, or to social change at the folk level? To what extent is this related to the changing sociocultural role of the Ojhās in the field of folk medicine and religion? How is the persistence of the festival linked to the industry of cultural tourism in Bengal?
The proposed paper aims at exploring the cultural dynamics involved in the disappearance of a folk festival, thus investigating the social functions of a multidimensional performative event that connects ritual, healing, and entertainment.
In the particular context of post-colonial South Asia, the frontiers of the Indian subcontinent have been reconfigured after the artificial separations created by the Partition, which politically divided homogeneous ethnic, linguistic and cultural regions. After 1948, with the formation of West and East Pakistan, people belonging to the same sociocultural universe, for instance Bengalis and Punjabis. became physically separated by a boundary.
From one side of the border to the other, a shared heritage of (intracultural) folkloric traditions provides a compact sense of belonging, while new policies of territorial control, a strict militarization of the frontiers and a competitive exploitation of natural resources and rivers regularly results into political tensions between neighboring states, i.e. India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
The conflictual relationship is increased by the polarization of religious identities. At the folk level though, where the dichotomy between the Hindu-Muslim identity is renowned to be more fluid, harmonious and negotiable, a number of traditions in the realm of folk music, oral literature and folk religions has always crossed the bridge of politically imposed essentialized categories of self-definition and continues to be the epitome of pacific coexistence, syncretical creations and mutual understanding. This is for example the case of the music of the Bauls and Fakirs of Bengal, performed by itinerant bards on trains, at local fairs and various festive occasions. Icons of cross-religious brotherhood shared by both sides of the India-Bangladesh frontier, the music of the Bauls has been repeatedly supported and encouraged by the government and local NGOs through subsidized events and concerts according to the political needs of the moment, from the release of tensions in the international relations between West Bengal and Bangladesh in historical moments marked by a peak of violence and communal riots, to the promotion of cultural tourism.
The first part of the panel will discuss the forms that the manipulation of folklore for realpolitik assumes in the context of modern and contemporary South Asia, what is its impact on the transmission of indigenous traditions, what are the stylistic changes and the new genres emerging from the encounter with new urban audiences, and what are the socioeconomic repercussions on the local communities.
The second part of the panel sought to investigate the ways in which a shared folkloric patrimony can act in its intercultural function (A. Jabbour 2004), how folklore operates in liminal contexts and how it is able to transcend political and cultural barriers in a global perspective, where traditions are exported and reshaped via the diaspora, accommodated in a new social dimension and appropriated by other cultural groups and mass media.
Similar problematic issues will be addressed from a multidisciplinary perspective that considers folklore in its performative aspect, contextualized in its historical, social and religious reality. The traditions we discuss are presented with the help of original audio-video material collected during field-work along and across South Asian borders.
As pointed out by Thomas Coburn (1984), the definition of what constitutes a “Hindu scripture” is Christian-biased and literary: in actual practice, mystical experience and the oral
transmission of religious concepts are emphasized over what is written down (Coburn 1984: 45).
In the South Asian context, written texts cannot be seen as a central source for the understanding of religious movements such as those that arose in Bengal out of the Sahajiyā – Sufi
confluence (Cashin 1995: 17). Baul songs represent an encyclopedia of beliefs, theological doctrines and yogic practices, as well as a creative expression of aesthetic entertainment. Being non-institutional, antinomian and heterodox movements, Baul lineages do not recognize any fixed written canon, while they do share a rich and ever-changing corpus of orally transmitted songs.
Studying songs as the fundamental corpus of a religious movement is crucial in the context of Bengal: for its first eight hundred years (10th - 18th century), the history of Bengali literature has actually been “a history of Bengali songs” (S. Cakrabarti 1990: 13). But how to study songs as
religious texts? In my research on Baul songs, I adopted a performance-centred approach, where these are seen as 'events' rather than 'texts'; Bengali esoteric songs are not fixed and they are constantly negotiated with and adapted for an audience. Furthermore, following the Tantric tradition of sandhyā bhāṣā (Bharati 1961), the nature of Baul songs is highly enigmatic and explicitly ambiguous, requiring the layered interpretation of a living Guru as a 'human dictionary' (Jha 1999).
With this paper I show the methodological advantages offered by a contextual study of songs-in-performance based on an ethnography of oral exegesis. This approach contributes to the broader issue of how to study religious 'texts' when these are represented by a fluctuating repertoire
of oral literature, composed by ecstatic saint-songwriters and performed by itinerant musicians.
In the years following Partition, millions of refugees moved from Pūrba to Paścim Baṅga, leaving their properties and their land, and carrying along a cultural heritage linked to their territory and their folklore.
How did this folklore move, enriching the local culture and integrating within West Bengal? Particularly, how did the oral tradition known as Baul interface with the new political and religious barriers embodied in the West Bengal/East Bengal borders? What was the impact of Partition on the performers and practitioners of the Baul tradition?
These questions have not found any documented answer as yet. This paper aims at explaining why the wide scholarship extant on Bauls has failed in treating this subject and tries to offer possible perspectives on the Baul tradition across the Bengal border. In order to do so, I will analyze the case of Bhaba Pagla, as a popular composer of Baul songs and guru to many Bauls, and his community of disciples.