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History and Practices of Kabir Panthies in North India: A Sociological Enquiry
(University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Kumar, Ramesh
Kabir was a leading figure in the Bhakti movement, which revolted against the exploitative social order. It challenged the prevailing hegemony of Brahmins and Mullah and denounced other social evils like religious dogmas, exploitative caste, and immoral practices of the priests and the ruling classes. He criticises not only Hindu and Islamic religious rites that are shallow and superstitious but also the hallowed authority of religious scriptures like the Vedas, Puranas, and Quran. He also satirises high-class people’s claims of social superiority, particularly Brahmins and Kazis. After Kabir, his disciples formed Kabir Panth according to their convenience and interpreted his philosophy in their own way. The deviation of Kabir Panthies has been influenced by social setup. This article discusses the philosophy of Kabir and different strands that emerged in the practices of Kabir by different Kabir panthies. Mainly there are two different Math, i.e., Kabir Chaura of Banaras and Dhamkheda of Chhattisgarh. Hence the differences of Kabir Panth across North India, particularly the differences between the Kabir Chaura of Banaras and Dhamkheda of Chhattisgarh, are analysed and discussed in this article.
Everyday Living Body of Ma
(University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Bagchi, Keya
The female body is always the point of curiosity, the centre of attraction and a matter of contemplation and contestation from time immemorial. The public “gaze” of both males and females is always fixed on her body. There has always been an endless social discussion on how she will dress, decorate, manipulate maintain or shape her body. It is a very prevalent picture in every era as is also in a modern or post-modern world. Alongside this public opinion about the female body, a woman’s body is always considered to be seductive, enigmatic and alluring. This female body seems very often to be a “desirable other” (Thapan 1995) as depicted in magazines, cinemas, advertisements, on the catwalk and so on. When a woman’s physical beauty is appreciated, she is perceived only based on her body about her sexuality. This “objectification” of the female body is much more emphasized than anything else. The whole process of the objectification of the body is closely related to sexuality which, according to Mackinnon, is ‘a dimension along which gender occurs and through which gender is socially constituted’ (1994:260). Thus, a female body is always a subject of rigid social judgement, evaluation and scrutiny. While talking about the body in everyday life vis-à-vis gender, it can, therefore, be argued that the gendered subject is neither a biological being nor even a psychological being, rather a social being (Thapan 1995) and a woman realizes social identity through experiencing her femininity in inter-subjective relationships with other people. This experience of femininity is closely intertwined with the complex matrix of class, caste, regional and socio-economic components. How a gendered subject is constructed by herself is once again the product of the process of social construction.
In this paper, I will represent the visions of some women who have become mothers in their early thirties and living in the Malda Municipal area to explore how the physical embodiment of women is influenced by gender in everyday life with an emphasis on their realizations, wishes and imaginations.
Governance of Sleep: Story of Sleeping Bodies and Networks of Discourse
(University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Saha, Ayatree
This essay engages with the “government” of sleep that is constituted by discursive regularities as well as normative procedures. Sleep is not only regulated by the state but by different modes that involve the social as well as economic conditions. The essay uses a Foucauldian lens to look at the discourse around sleep and the technological interventions that mediate between human subjects and objects. It is in this context of neo-liberalism that this essay examines the governance of sleeper’s bodies imbricated within the nexus of power relations. With the coming of age of techno-social interaction, not only is sleep commodified but the universal necessity of it, is packaged within the 24/7 global productivity. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s concept of power and discipline, Bruno Latour’s idea of mediation via objects producing hybrids, and Simon J. William’s formulation of sleep, I argue for the kind of mediation that makes sleep a hybrid concept in itself. The essay constitutes the general conditions and problems of the “government of sleep” consisting of a more discursive and transcendental orientation to constitute the overall analytic of sleep as a field of control, mobilisation and suppression within modern capitalism. The essay lays out the specific technologies of the governance/ government of sleep that the grid of power in societies determined by conditions of capitalist production and extraction forge.
Rethinking Pain and Body in the Context of Everyday
(University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Saha, Sohini
This article seeks to interrogate the common understanding of pain as an “extraordinary” event and rethink it in the context of the everyday. By critically engaging with the idea of pain as “negative” and “exceptional” that emerged with the advent of modernity, I intend to argue for the ordinariness of pain. I do so by bringing in three distinct contexts; pain in the practice of bayam (exercise), pain in asceticism, and religious pain to argue for the place of pain in the everyday. By bringing in my ethnographic fieldwork in the bayam samitis (traditional gymnasiums) and akharas of Kolkata, India, I argue that in the practice of bayam, pain becomes an everyday engagement with the body and remains crucial to its cultivation. The ethnographic works of Patricia Lawrence and Jane Derges in the warzone of Sri Lanka, I argue, bring in the everyday means of resisting violence through the embodiment of religious pain. Lastly, by employing Peter Van De Veer‘s understanding of ascetic pain and Glucklich’s (2001) sacred or religious pain, I argue that pain remains integral to the formation of ascetic subjectivity. Thus, these three distinct contexts raise the possibilities of understanding pain outside the negative connotations it has carried since modernity and make us delve into pain in ordinary everyday lives and circumstances.
Food, Fetish and Public Display: A Sociological Analysis of the Performativity Involved in Consumption of Food
(University of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Sinha, Titasha
Food is basic, natural and private. But when it comes to “eating” it essentially intertwines the notion of “performance” as eating is the “act of having food”. It involves an attention towards the performance of the act while eating. Now when this act of having food takes place in “public” the performative notion provides a space for the individual agency to translate this mundane, bodily need of having food to the act of consuming food in turn relegating it to an altogether different status. The sites of eating transform into a single site that becomes the theatre of “action”, the action is that of consumption. The social categories that previously dictated food choices, cooking and eating were largely found to be dictated by the social categories of caste, religion, culture etc. Contemporary urban settings have emphasised the performative dimension of all the activities related to food and eating. The foci of food are seen to traverse between hunger, appetite and “appetite appeal” making people wander in a state of trance to figure out the primacy between “real” and “symbolic” values attached to food. Analysing Goffman’s concept of performance as a theoretical framework together with the concept of panopticon surveillance of Foucault we have tried in this paper to develop a deeper understanding of the theme. Among 70 Hindu, educated, urban, middle and upper-middle class youth in Kolkata questionnaire as part of the quantitative study as well as qualitative method of observation was employed to figure out and analyse the contemporary situation. Participants were found to be strongly motivated by the “performative” dimension involved in food and its related activities. Tendencies of fantasising about food by performing the act of eating are popularised among people. Food has been treated as a fetish that is manifested with the symbolic association of food that goes well beyond the realm of hunger to the realm of “social appetite”.