Search

A Bengali Dalit religion called Matua emerged in the nineteenth century in East Bengal. It counts tens of millions of followers across the Bay of Bengal and the Indo–Bangladesh border. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Matua religious gatherings were shifted online. This paper asks what happened to multisensory and sonic-haptic religious engagements of the Matua community once ritual gatherings were transported to the cyberspace of digital media. Using data collected through remote ethnography and digital ethnography with the Matua community in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that the increased online visibility of the Matua community (1) contributed to reshaping Matua identity narratives as a global diasporic network, downplaying previous self-definitions of untouchability and displacement; (2) exacerbated inequalities along class and gender lines; and (3) shifted the sensoryscape of Matua ritual experiences, with important repercussions in the domains of embodiment, ritual authority and authenticity. As Matua experiences of increased online visibility clashed with their traditional aesthetics of resistance through shared sonic commingling, we argue, more broadly, that understandings of visibility must take into consideration culturally informed articulations of the senses and sense hierarchies, and how sensory ideology can manifest following the affordances of different media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practitioners' notebooks and personal letters are neglected items that deserve attention in the study of ritual and performance traditions, especially if these can be complemented with oral–aural sources. This article presents some features of an unexplored archive of new sources for the study of Baul songs and popular religious movements in Bengal by introducing and complementing the data contained in the digital archive called 'Songs of the Old Madmen' (EAP1247, British Library), comprising notebooks of Baul songs and correspondence between an influential Bengali guru and his disciple. I highlight three aspects. (i) The notebook as archive and metadata of Baul performances. (ii) Emic notions of authorship and cultural ownership. (iii) The contextualisation of the digital archive within the history of representation of the Baul tradition. Embedded in such context, this digital archive provides a nuanced and intimate picture where Baul practitioners emerge as neither the lonely minstrels lauded by Rabindranath Tagore, nor as the antinomian materialists portrayed in more recent scholarship on Bauls. Questioning the politics of cultural representation of digital archives, this article integrates oral histories and ethnographic sources collected during fieldwork in West Bengal that are inextricably part of the material digitised through remote capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Songs are knowledge" (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How 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 adopts Bengali 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 as method 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Festivals have often been described as ritual occasions in which members of a community 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. [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]

This article analyzes the contemporary repertoire of a very popular genre of Bengali folk songs, performed by itinerant singers and practitioners of an esoteric cult known as Bauls. Considering the recent popularization and commercialization of Baul songs and their interference with the urban milieu, the discourse on the authenticity of Baul songs is explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective that embraces orality-literacy studies as well as social studies on cultural tourism, underlining the limits of previous academic works on the subject. This article offers, as an original contribution, the first results of ongoing fieldwork among the disciples of śākta saint and composer of Baul songs known as Bhaba Pagla. Through discussion of the lyrics of songs performed in contemporary Baul festivals, this article argues that the contamination of Baul songs by urban élites and middle-class audiences, far from deteriorating the oral tradition, may enrich the vocabulary of the compositions and reinforce the underlying belief system. Contrarily to the popular and academic view of today's Bauls, that labels the entertaining performer as a corrupted ally of show business, the priority of gānsādhanā (singing as a practice for self-realization) may be interpreted as an efficient way to conceal heterodox esoteric rituals vis-à-vis the increasing interest of cultural tourists in Baul culture and performances, protecting the secrecy of the tradition through an innovative and negotiated version of sandhyā-bhāṣā (twilight-language), the literary device that has accompanied Bengali esoteric songs since their origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the verse chosen as a title for this article emblematically shows, esoteric movements have consistently used secrecy as a literary topos in their oral and written cultural expressions for a number of purposes. Scholars of South Asian religions, especially those in field of Tantric studies, have been scrutinizing for decades the need for secretive doctrines and a secret code-language (sandhyā bhāṣā), mostly interrogating textual sources and neglecting the contemporary experience and exegetical authority of living lineages. In this paper, I firstly address ethical and epistemological problems in the study of esoteric religious movements in order to propose innovative methodological strategies. Then, I offer numerous examples drawn from extensive field-work and in-depth literary study of contemporary esoteric lineages of West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh, in order to discuss the local discourse on secrecy. Finally, I review previously assumed notions on secrecy in South Asian religions, and I suggest to take into serious consideration local perspectives on the accessibility of esoteric knowledge, leading to a more nuanced idea of secrecy, constantly subjected to temporal and situational negotiations between silence and disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]