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In the liquid borderlands between South and Southeast Asia, where refugees from East Bengal were resettled after the massive Partition-induced displacement, the god Ram is narrated as a great model of filial piety but also as the murderer of a low-caste ascetic. The Vaishnava saint Chaitanya is a divine character but also a reproachable renunciate who abandoned his mother and forced her to beg from door to door. The crocodile is an ideal devotee who caught fish to bring as offering for the religious congregation, justifying the introduction of an otherwise forbidden substance on the altar. Drawing on both ethnographic and literary sources, I use recurrent "bundles of stories" such as these, transmitted and performed by the Matua community on the Andaman Islands, to discuss narratives as a way of knowing and to describe "bricolage thinking" in borderland selves. I interpret the aesthetics and the literary devices used in these narratives as strategies to shape borderland community values. These rely upon past memories and provide for present articulations of resistance. This article suggests that Matua narratives contest political borders by traveling between and connecting fragmented sections of the displaced community through the voices of itinerant preachers, performers, and pilgrims. At the same time, they trespass onto other kinds of borderlands, such as those created by unequal positions of socioeconomic power and those marking the center and periphery of religious hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realizing the constructed nature of gender is often described as a twentieth-century 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]