Department of Sociology
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Item Dance and the Dancer : Performance and Pedagogy in KolkataBhattacharya, NiloshreeIn this thesis, I am trying to look at dancers, practices of dance pedagogy, and performances in the city of Kolkata since 1990 economic reforms. I aim to do this by perceiving dance as a synecdoche of the city. Studying through the prism of dance practices gives one a way of understanding the transformations in urban culture three decades after globalisation. This leads to constructing a triad relationship between the city, dance and identity which can be used to map a shift in the culture of the city of Kolkata by understanding the changes in dance pedagogy and performances since new economic reforms. Most of my dancer respondents are contributing towards deconstructing and reconstructing the culture of the city by ‘dancing a difference.’ They are co-constructing the changing culture of the city, which is closely linked to economic opportunities and, in turn are also constructing their own identities through their dance practices and performances. Such practices and performances represent the interaction of myriad dance forms, styles and pedagogies. This is seen in various other cultural dimensions of urban life, such as culinary cultures offering different cuisines in restaurants across the city and practices of music and theatre, where urban cultures, economies and identities conjoin to transform cultural landscapes of the city. While discussing dance practices in the city of Kolkata since liberalization of the economy, I ponder upon the relationship that gets established between people who are dwelling in the city and the city that they are constructing and re-constructing through their experience of it as a lived place and space. I conceive of practices of dance as constantly mediating between lived experiences in the city, urban spaces and associated cultural memories and meanings, and urban cultures. I follow Appadurai’s (1996) notion of the ‘scape’ by which he meant a space which is fluid, representing disjunctive and hybrid nature of culture, economy and media in a global modern world which is always under construction. I conceptualize a ‘dance-scape’ to understand the triad relationship of dance, city and identity and how there is a continuum of space-place and culture. This work is based on dance practices in Kolkata. Much like many other cities in the country, there are various dance forms practiced in the city, classical and contemporary. The unique feature of Kolkata is that it has not been a site of emergence of any particular dance form, but dance has been a prominent feature in the cultural landscape of the city. However, Kolkata has been the home of Uday Shankar, pioneer of modern dance in India, and Rabindranath Tagore, whose influence is evident in music, dance and theatre practices in the city. In the past three decades there has been a shift in practices of dance in the city indicated by the proliferation of dance schools which teach forms like Jamaican street dances of dancehall, Dominion Republic’s national dance form like Merengue, Western contemporary, break dance in the styles of hip hop, popping and locking, whacking and so on. What intrigued me in this work initially was how to explain this shift in practices of dance and what does that say about the city? How is it that Jamaican street dances are being taught and learnt and performed, besides already existing classical dances, Rabindra Nritya and other creative forms? Thus, this work is focused on understanding the practice of these new forms being taught in the city. This further leads to an understanding of the changing urban culture through changing dance practices mediated by identity de construction and re construction of the people of the city. People, place and culture thus get entangled with each other to form an interdisciplinary prism of dance studies and urban studies.Item Muslim Women Entrepreneurs of Kolkata : Exploring Aspirations and IdentitySaha, SuhritaIn the past one decade there has been an emergence of many Muslim business-women in the city of Kolkata. This observation drove me to conduct my Ph.D. research on Muslim women entrepreneurs of Kolkata using ethnography as the research method. The research is titled as ‘Muslim Women Entrepreneurs of Kolkata: Exploring Aspirations and Identity’. The primary objective of this research has been to explore aspiration building among these women and to analyse how it shapes their identity. While doing so the research looks into their journey as an entrepreneur highlighting their source of motivation, the challenges faced, the strategies used and the support received. It further investigates how their identity as an entrepreneur intersects with their gender, socioeconomic position and religious beliefs. Going into the specificities of their products and services, my research tries to unfold the multiple facets of their identity. I have used purposive and snowball sampling to select my respondents. Observation, in-depth interviews and focussed group discussions have been my primary research tools. Considering that Muslim women are not a homogenous category of individuals, my research incorporates an intersection of feminist theory, standpoint theory and identity theories within a structuralfunctionalist paradigm.Item Fertility worship and monsoon among agricultural communities of BardhamanSarbadhikary, SukanyaReligious 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.Item The ‘Ayah’ and the Elderly: Illness, Nursing and Intimate Labour in Kolkata’s Domestic SpacesSaha, SumitaDemographic transition, global population ageing and restructuring of family has inflected questions on the appropriate care arrangement and care management in later-life adulthood. These co-evolving and intersecting trends have drawn attention to the context and setting of care. South Asian cultures rooted in the principle of seva, filial piety and moral indebtedness towards the elders view intergenerational care as a duty, responsibility and expression of normative practice. With the rise in exigencies and contingences related to care in late modernity, navigating homecare practices, solicitude politics and brokering of care within it became the epicenter of this study. Efforts are made to understand the modalities through which an ayah becomes part of the ageing, and resuscitation and dying process of older people. Drawing on feminist gerontology and critical gerontology and cultural gerontological ontology, this study deploys micro-ethnography, 16 family case studies and in-depth qualitative interviewing with 30 ayahs in South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas and Kolkata Municipal Corporation. In response to the interconnecting trends discussed earlier, dependence on the cheap and affordable labour of paid careworkers can be witnessed in urban India. Locally known as ayahs, these are women grappling with the multiple disadvantages of lower caste-lower class and the gender penalty of low remuneration, devaluation and stigma. Unlike the professional nurses, ayahs are not trained and unlike the ASHA workers there is no effort at capacity building of the ayahs. Despite such overt shortcomings, ayahs have developed a vocabulary to typify and categorize patients according to their plight, difficulty level in dealing such patients, and the degree of dependency of the older adults in care. Through experiential knowledge they could fathom the advantages and disadvantages of working in different shifts, attending to children vs. older population, and caring for patients in different stages of illness. This clarity of the ayahs enables them to survive in carework in the absence of training and professionalization. Ayahs are aware of the stakes of intimate body care labour and have identified certain strategies to manage dirt, stigma and repugnance. These strategies are internalization and routinization of disgust, desensitization towards the gross elements of the body, and acceptance of their status-quo in a socially graded world. To negotiate the difficulties of carework, deeming the patients as parental figures and empathizing with the pangs of old-age is not only a coping mechanism but a modality of cementing solidarity. Dealing with older patients can be challenging especially those with dementia onset, highly-dependence or intransigence. Carework involves understanding the life course of the patient, and ayahs acknowledge that amelioration of intergenerational and interpersonal tensions promotes well-being. Their willingness to go beyond their immediate tasks, treat the client’s family as her own and exercising agency integrates and knits them to the client’s family. The element of proximity and close-contact in carework creates possibilities of moral ambiguities, emotional stress and facilitation of a filial tie between the caregiver and the older adult. Ayahs are the lynchpin in the homecare model and their situated knowledge of ‘culture-centric care’ needs to be harnessed for sustainable elderly care practices. This can be referred to as the ‘ayah-centred’ approach to care and this ayah habitus is important for designing policies that resonates with NPHCE (National Programme for Health Care of Elderly). The study foregrounds the solicitude politics and contested narratives of care, older peoples’ difficulty in coming to terms with their fractured self, erosion of autonomy and patienthood, emotional distress and coping of caregivers in attending to such patients, and what it means to deal with the recalcitrant aspects of body carework.Item A School for all A Study of Children with special needs in KolkataSaha, SumitaThe present study aims to explore the inclusion of the Children with Special Needs (CWSN) in government run schools of Kolkata. The world has been consistently trying to build an inclusive society, where initiating inclusive education has been a foundational pillar. Post the Jomtien Declaration of 1990, inclusive education assumed to be a forthcoming realty, since the Declaration stressed on ‘Education for All’, with an exclusive focus on eradicating all forms of discrimination in accessing education. In the present day, education is recognized as a primary agent of mobility and empowerment, hence making education accessible to all is seen as an important step towards promoting an inclusive society. In congruence with the Salamanca Conference, India launched its inclusive education programme with the RTE Act of 2009, which mandated free and compulsory elementary education. As a consequence, India’s government run schools followed ‘admission for all’ irrespective of any stratification. Children with Special Needs were granted admission in all the government run schools where the philosophy of inclusive education voiced for inclusive school where needs of the diverse learners will be taken care of. In spite of all such policy imperatives, theoretical discourses often concluded that Children with Special Needs were often made aware about their exceptionalities, where disabled students are often subjected to marginalization as well as isolation. The present thesis aims to uncover the process of inclusion of Children with Special Needs in government run schools of Kolkata, where the study primarily tries to be inclusive by prioritizing the voices of the CWSN, who are acknowledged as the central characters of the inclusive education policy. The present study followed a critical ethnographic method to understand the culture of inclusive school through the lens of the stakeholders, including teachers, parents, special educators as well as students. Accommodating the diverse needs of the learners requires developing an inclusive environment which will enhance the participation rate of the students involved. Furthermore, an inclusive environment of the school also involves inclusive friendly infrastructure which will help in self-reliance and empowerment of the CWSN. Hence, practicing inclusion in schools is a complex phenomenon which involves multicharacter as well as other dynamics. The present thesis aims to explore the inclusion of Children with Special Needs in government run schools of Kolkata. Here the government run schools follow a ‘resource room model’ based inclusion of special needs children, where special educators help them to cope with the teaching learning process. Thus, resource rooms served to be one of the significant places where I interacted with the special needs children as well as their parents, since the study wanted to capture the voices of special needs children and their interpretation of the process of inclusion in regular schools.Item Endurance, Aesthetics and the Everyday: Chhou in PuruliaSarbadhikary, SukanyaAesthetic 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.Item Staging An Oral Tradition: Studying contemporary Baul Performances in BengalSaha, SumitaThe term Baul has been used by various scholars to denote among other things, a syncretic marginal sect, a tradition, a community, a cult, an order of singers, a spirit, and a class of mystics or a religion- positioned within a specific landscape. The colonial representations of the Bauls of Bengal, with respect to the bradralok discourses, mentioned that Bauls were uninformed, ignorant, unsophisticated, nomadic, and non-analytic entertainers. Baul Gaan (the songs of the Bauls) in sondhya bhasha- a linguistic strategy of secrecy in their songs- not only concealed their esoteric beliefs and practices but, the songs replete with metaphors—grounded in the exigencies of their immediate reality—were also drawn from and mediated by the Bauls’ position as a member of the larger rural society, their resistance and negotiations with the structure of domination and their socio-historic experiences. The 21st century records a huge repertoire of Baul Gaan performances and concerts all over the world. Baul Gaan as a process, therefore, has largely dealt with adaptation to changing circumstances, generational struggles, governmental intervention and tendencies of universalization. Baul songs as the folklore of communication, and not as material facts, therefore constantly negotiates with its overlapping companions—-the individuals, the venues, the patrons, the music, and the contextual identity of the song in performance. Therefore instead of looking at the corpus of the songs through an exclusive interrogation of their esoteric beliefs and practices, my thesis aims to enquire about the negotiations of Baul composer—Baul performer—the audiences and their patrons by a multi-local analysis of the multitude of performative settings of Baul songs. My thesis sensitises the readers to locate Baul songs texts through an author function instead of traversing the slippery path of individualism, authenticism, or divine revelations. It also deals with the socioeconomic profiles of the performing Bauls from the ethnographic field, and separately deal with the notion of gender—Baul women, their voices, their expectation and experiences. My intention throughout the thesis, thus, had been a constant effort to re-insert Bauls and their songs within a flexible socio-economic and performative framework.