دانلود کتاب در بین دنیاها – بازی به عنوان Bauls در عصر افراط گرایی

I quote this anonymous Baul song as it sums up what the heterogeneous group of oral performers from Bengal represents quite unanimously, despite their diverse spiritual, ritualistic, and musical practices – impermanence, travel, free¬dom, body consciousness, and liberation. While traditionally, Bauls have been associated with spiritual and ritualistic practices with the focus being on the body, their songs with layered meanings have been performed culturally as well, both in studios and in concerts, within India and internationally. Such varied performative practices have compelled me to look at the interstices of hybrid performances, which rupture the assumptions of homogeneity among this group of performers. Against the backdrop of a globalizing world, it is interesting to examine performances of Bauls, a group that still carries the label of ‘folk.’ Instead of accepting their ‘folk’ identity as a given, I question the nature of their folk-ness and even suggest that the Bauls are more than cultural, spiritual, and musical performers – they are sociopolitical performers as well, who have repeatedly interceded with their message of equality, fairness, com¬passion, peace, and love in complex social processes, in overt and covert acts of resistance.
At this moment, as I write this introduction, the social media is inundated by discourses on race, religion, radicalization, polarization, and violence, in both the American and the Indian political climates. While the US has been witness¬ing extreme xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia, especially during Trump regime, with normalization of racist rhetoric, outright racist police brutality and murders, threats of walls, and expulsion of immigrants and ‘aliens,’1 the Indian political landscape is distraught by oppressive laws and policies imple-mented the Far Right Hindu nationalist government, such as the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) and the Farm Bills, while enforcing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) delegitimizing Muslim citizenship. Anticipating horrific outcomes of such exclusionary politics of polarities, Arundhati Roy forewarns us, ‘The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India – and rear¬range its meaning and its place in the world.’2 There is a general climate of big-otry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, intolerance, and ‘us-them’ conflicts across the world. Anxieties about borders, containment, and what constitutes the ‘nation’ are not new – however, I situate my study of the Bauls in the context of con¬temporary politics, which are also shaped largely by globalization, which has, all of a sudden, undermined the notion of firm national boundaries because of the travel, migration, and dislocation it has either facilitated or necessitated. Increased travels, migration, and interaction between different communities and countries have subsequently intensified fears of contamination and appro¬priation, therefore, paranoia of the other. In the context of a post-COVID-19 world, the contagion no longer is restricted to the domain of the cultural and the metaphoric but has gained literal significance. Even though the pandemic seemingly is an equalizer as it does not discriminate on the basis of race, rank, caste, and creed, it has certainly exposed and intensified the social and cultural inequities worldwide.