Search

Eben Graves The Politics of Musical Time: Expanding Songs and Shrinking Markets in Bengali Devotional Performance Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hardcover, $85.00; paperback, $40.00. ISBN 9780253064370 (hardcover), 9780253064387 (paperback). I [...]

Members of the Matua religion, a displaced Dalit community from Bengal, believe that the coronavirus can affect only the upper-caste/class layers of society, those who sit in air-conditioned offices and live in the big cities. Matua devotees, on the other hand, are predominantly part of an agriculturist community inhabiting multiple fringes: the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, the peripheries of unorthodox Vaishnavism, and the social margins of untouchability. Conducting remote ethnography with Matua participants based in West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andamans, one comes across insistent narratives of immunity and recurrent interpretations of the pandemic that fit into the onto-cosmology and sociocultural imagination of the Matua religious movement. I discuss these as dissident tales of immunity that describe COVID-19 as an urban-based white-collar disease. Matua practitioners successfully prevent it through a sonic vaccine – the practice of kīrtan – and a kind of power (śakti) accumulated through physical agricultural labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]