Department of Sociology

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http://presiuniv.ndl.gov.in:4009/handle/123456789/2332

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Browsing Department of Sociology by Author "Sarbadhikary, Sukanya"

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    Endurance, Aesthetics and the Everyday: Chhou in Purulia
    Sarbadhikary, Sukanya
    Aesthetic experience, built upon a discursive striving for achieving a transcendental state through formal techniques and processes of bodily refinement, is generally conceptualized as detached from the mundane world of earthly passions, emotions, and interests. My thesis, through a detailed ethnographic exploration of the discursive, subjective, and social registers of Chhou, a popular masked epical dance drama from Purulia (West Bengal), aims at exploring the diverse ways in which the aesthetic and the mundane realms interact with each other. I conceptualize the sensuous human body as the primary ontological ground where the experiences of transcendental pleasures and immanent pain, suffering, and endurance fold into each other in course of the everyday practices of dance and labour. My thesis is broadly divided into two interrelated sections, focusing respectively on dance and everyday life. The first part primarily discusses Chhou’s discursive structure, including music, gesture, and movement patterns and embodied training procedures, and dancers’ own subjective appreciation of spontaneous sensory immersion. Chhou’s openness to change and diversification has given birth to two prominent practising formats: the traditional and the contemporary. While the former emphasizes a classicized discipline of aesthetic transcendence, the latter attempts at modifying traditional discursive structure by incorporating populist cultural elements and upholding the aesthetic importance of a natural human body. The second part of the thesis explores in detail, how dancers’ everyday life is constituted of an interesting symbiotic relationship between everyday labour, dance, and environment. Purulia’s adverse climatic conditions constitute a constant source of threat and anxiety for Chhou dancers, whose primary occupation is agriculture. However, the sensuous process of long-term, compulsory labour is considered by dancers as pleasurable and liberating. I illustrate the details of dancers’ work ethics, which emphasizes the socio-moral significances of pain, suffering, and endurance, and also explore the ways in which sensory embeddedness in an exacting work culture creates scopes for experiencing pleasure, well-being, self-worth, and social subversion. This somatic culture is integrally tied to the dancers’ experiences and understanding of corporeal-orificial openness to and entanglement with natural environment, which determines the overall rural lifestyles, dietary habits, clothing patterns, etc.
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    Fertility worship and monsoon among agricultural communities of Bardhaman
    Sarbadhikary, Sukanya
    Religious life worlds are generally constructed through ideas of transcendence, abstraction and immateriality, and thus detached from everyday mundane worlds of subsistence and livelihood. My thesis, through a detailed ethnographic exploration of village deities' worship systems among Purba Bardhaman’s agricultural communities, aims to explore the diverse ways in which the natural and cultural realms intrinsically interact with one another. The thesis argues that both the natural worlds of these farming communities—in which monsoon is of supreme importance—and their cultural worlds, where religious mediations in the form of local village deities are central, together drive their everyday livelihoods. I conceptualize gramdevatas (village deities) as primary embodiments of nature-culture enmeshment, upon which experiences of land, subsistence, human-animal relations, and climate change conditions, fold into one another, in people’s mundane cultivating practices. Such inhabitation involves peculiar forms of divinizing the landscape through human-animal-sacred relations, marked by both fecund and organic holistic syncretism and differentiated modes of relationalities. The first part of the thesis deconstructs the idea of Purba Bardhaman as a farming utopia, and rather thinks of it also as a sacred landscape, arguing that place-experiences are always also religious embodied. This is exemplified particularly by rethinking Bardhaman’s status as a secure ‘mainland’, and instead showing the varying perceptions of people’s vulnerability, ritual assertions, territorial identities, and rain-enmeshed festivals, as important ways of relating to lands and their climatic histories. Gramdevatas’ intimacy to human lives, their organicist, material and tangible existence in physical landscapes, constitute important symbiotic relations among human agricultural labour, monsoonal topographies and notions of sacrality. The second part demonstrates village deities’ intricate mediations of ecological and cultural affects, and argues that their embodiments take diverse forms— of animal deification, subsistence-oriented syncretism, and bloody sacrificial traditions. While gramdevatas as sacred snakes primarily depict natural dimensions of worship, as subsumptions of classicized religious deities, they also uphold major syncretistic cultural ideals. However, Bardhaman’s subsistence economy, human agricultural labour practices, and climatic considerations in village deity worship, depicts such cultural assimilation as especially foregrounded in its physical, organic landscapes. Further, blood sacrifice rituals in honour of gramdevatas mark the culmination point of nature-culture interfaces, since material dimensions of sacrificial traditions—including the animal body and the ritual blood—grants a distinctive organic aspect to such religious icons. Blood as materially present in sacrifice rites, and symbolically invoked within hierarchical caste relations, ties diverse cultural dimensions of cohabitation and differentiation, in human-animal-divine relations. Thus, attending closely to Bardhaman’s agricultural landscapes, my thesis explores how the categories of nature, culture, human, animal, and divinity, intertwine through mundane cultivating experiences, embodying permeable boundaries between the transcendental and the material realms, the abstract and the specific, ecology and culture, global crises and everyday rural life.