Abstract
The book under review seeks to explore the folk art form Chho of Purulia. It tries to see how this unique art form ‘has been harnessed to objectives of strengthening feudal hierarchy, promoting social ascent, boosting national or regional self-esteem or ensuring appropriation of orality in self-reflective intellectual or semiotic discourse’ (p. vii).
Breaking the boundary between performance and folklore studies, Chatterji problematises the Purulia Chho dance, Jhumur songs and Bhadu puja as a construction of communities and their identities. Critiquing folklorist Ashutosh Bhattacharya, who in the 1960s, claimed that the Chho dance is ‘the primitive war dance’ (p. 11) of West Bengal, Chatterji writes against his ideas of ‘representational stability’ (p. xii).
In the first chapter, Chatterji explores the discourses in which Chho is inscribed in relation to a search for a representation of the ‘authentic tradition’. She describes the ways in which academic, activist and performative discourses are built around the question of authenticity and how they build notions of ‘tribe’ into the dance itself. She critiques purist Bengali folklorists for their appropriation of Hinduism in Chho and cites, on the other hand, folklorists who situated the dance form as a continuum between an ancient pan-Indian and regional/folk tradition that bypasses both the medieval as well as colonial era. In similar explorations, Chatterji also looks at scholar–activists’ constructions of the Chho dance which contain distinctive Jharkhandi and Odia identity traits of Purulia’s culture. Looking at the Chho’s location in different territorially bounded spaces, she explores the emergence of a new public sphere. The dichotomy of acculturation and appropriation, the search for authenticity of the mask dance in its original form and the dancer’s contention of dance as an evolving entity—these are the issues delineated clearly in Chatterji’s chapter. The author views the dance itself as a heterogeneous piece while looking at the overall structure of the performative tradition. While this distinctive dance form is embedded in a bounded community, she locates the process by which the dance form circulates in a public sphere via the written discourses of Ashutosh Bhattacharya. Chatterji distances herself from the discourses of authenticity and looks at the reconstitution of the tradition of folk culture and its new innovations. She situates the Chho dance in the context of the bourgeois print culture for creating a new public not at the expense of the traditional audience, but due to its polyphonic structure and its royal patronage. She establishes a link between popular representations of the dance in print culture and the changing aesthetics of the form.
In her critical exploration of the search for authenticity, Chatterji interestingly ventures into folk myths and links with history, for instance, in the making of a goddess tradition, the search for a gendered and caste-specific nature of worship. The local goddesses, Bhadu and Tushu of Chorida, are considered as the incarnation of the Hindu high-caste goddess, Durga. The aboriginal goddesses acquire the status of pan-Indian goddesses so as to ‘counter dominant images of India as predominantly spiritual and other-worldly’ (p. 26). Thus, Chatterji is concerned with the textualisation of the goddess tradition where history becomes a source of ‘original truth’ and is seen as embedded as ‘symbols’. Through song narratives to understand the ‘origin’ myth of the Bhadu goddess—‘the voice of subaltern femininity’ (p. 73)—Chatterji juxtaposes two feminine representations. One, as a goddess and the other, as a woman who represents the voice of people. She attempts to deconstruct the Bengali folklorist discourse and traverses the discrete spaces of myths as part of present reality.
Coming back to the art forms in her third section, she addresses a women’s song genre called Jhumur and its autonomous status as a cultural symbol of Chho. The atypical structure of the song genre, Jhumur is capable of being incorporated into varied genres across time and is also scattered in different sites. Chatterji takes up feminine voices like Bhadu and their significance in the understanding of folk culture as shaped within patriarchal structures and genres. Continuing the arguments that emerged from her analysis of Jhumur songs as a form that subverts the gender opposition, she takes up the question of feminine representations. In this chapter, she explores the subversive potential of the feminine voice and its significance for (our) understanding of folk culture. This is significant because she analyses the social imaginary in kahanis (fictional stories), kathas (sacred stories) and jan kahanis (riddles) to probe the patriarchal normative structure of that society. The motif of death is configured in understanding the feminine figures in the three different narratives mentioned earlier. The key theme of kahanis is a depiction of a relationship between the self and other in its relation to the social world. In kathas, she explains that the sacred quality of the world comes from the replication of the myths in everyday life. Finally, in jan kahanis, the riddle of sacrifice and death is explored to understand the self in relation to the social world.
Embedded patriarchal structure, archetypical characters and listeners are the main constituents of these narrative forms as they have an intimate relationship with everyday life. Contrary to its simple depiction, demonstrating folk life as a complex phenomenon, Chatterji presents the archetypical women in all narratives as the voice of scepticism that is associated with death. In every narrative, the authoritative voice of the male is represented.
In writing, researching and interpreting the oral stories and honouring people’s own interpretations of folklore, Chatterji has not only formulated folklore theory but also pioneered an important sociological understanding of performing arts. Her contribution to knowledge in this field of Indian sociology is noticeable in her work in categorising and conceptualising the term ‘folk’. She has problematised the term folklore in order to understand the identity of Purulia as a domain of folklore during nationalist movements. The neglected aspect of gender/subversive feminine voices in performing arts from a sociological perspective is well delineated in this book. Her desire to explore the embedded voices in ‘other’ cultural tradition is settled in a site of ‘folk expressivity’ (p. 86) that is articulated through a conjunction between cultural creativity and political domination. To conclude, her thesis throughout the book is to establish folklore as always open to the forces of change.