The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia by Aniket De lays out an intriguing ethnographic and dramaturgical research into the Bengali tradition of Gambhira performance. Situated mostly in the West Bengal region of Malda on the Indian side of the border and the Bangladeshi area of Chapai Nawabganj, De’s account of Gambhira performers and their lives rechart the course of the tradition’s divergence in the two countries. Therefore it is a history of performance alongside major events leading up to the Partition of 1947 between India and Pakistan, unearthing the surprising commonality in the lives of “poor, low-caste men from Malda and Chapai” and their shared “imaginations, as recorded in their songs and plays” (8). Grounded in the geographical theories of Doreen Massey, De’s exploration of the shared space of Gambhira performers charts the way space as a concept is navigated and how different social actors layer competing concepts onto places, bifurcating them into nation-states, territories, borders, and other political assemblages (10). De’s work therefore incorporates the embodied theorizing of Gambhira performers, before Partition and after, to make sense of this shared space, where the livelihoods of these singer-actors was constantly appealing or belittling those in power (13).
Aniket De primarily argues that laughter, serving as a unifying affective force, reveals how the shared struggles for daily essentials bring together Gambhira audiences. Meanwhile, different currents of anti-colonial, nationalist, and post-colonial social changes have led to modifications in the two traditions of Gambhira. In West Bengal, for instance, the main performers are rural peasants making complaints to Shiva, who appears for local audiences in the guise of a lazy farmer. De charts this set of relationships, between the local instantiation of Shiva in Bengal and his puranic counterpart throughout South Asia, in chapter 1. The arrangement of territory in Shiva’s travels in Gambhira, however, is not across the border (east to west), but instead north to south along the Mahananda River, where upland and lowland communities share workers and families along the estuary (19-20). Older Hindu temples were located on the more northerly route near Dinajpur, while Muslim settlements were further south, closer to Murshidabad.
Colonial attempts at capturing the complexity instead settled on an east-west divide, rather than this arterial route connecting labor and the flow of goods along the river (23). Likewise, the relation between people doing the labor and the landlords is central to Gambhira. Bargaining (dardam) is the mediating force of the performance’s affective form. Good-natured complaints and haggling are central to the relationship between Shiva and villagers and allow constructive conflict. Rather than implore a higher power, worshipers accept help but threaten Shiva to come back if his remedy fails and beat him (33).
On the other hand, the history of Gambhira—as it has been interpreted outside of the area—has been constructed by the bhadralok (middle-class, educated scholars who arose after the British founding of Calcutta). Views on the “folk” practices of lower-caste groups among Indian academics, for instance, tend to filtered through political lenses, at times colored by reformist impulses (49) and shaped by colonial discourses as interpreted locally by elites. The rest of De’s argument builds off this tension within elite approaches to Gambhira. Performer’s attempt to bargain with the authority in local life becomes Aesopian at times in anticolonial critiques of the British Raj by local Bengali theorists (chapter 2) and then by the self-rule (swadeshi) movement (chapter 3). The failure of the Indian state to help local conditions improve after Partition in 1947 extends Gambhira’s critique of governement (chapter 4), and even the co-opting of Gambhira by NGO’s and by Bangladesh in the 1970s when its practices were seen as establishing the bona fides of a new nation-state with its own folkloric history (chapter 5).
This approach to authority was also practiced in the Bangladeshi version of the grandfather and grandson (nana-nati) and was developed by pioneering artists, such as Sufi Master, who moved to Chapai during the swadeshi era (155). Sufi Master, and not some particular social force, deliberately introduced the grandfather-grandson duo to carry the affects of the relationship over to East Pakistan (157). Since Shiva was seen as a doddering, drunk grandfather by the people in Malda, this image facilitated the audience’s “casual, jocular” relationship with him. In fact, De’s fine attention to the affective commonalities of each region and the relationships between performers and the larger social forces at work speaks to his careful and precise interpretation of performances, both historically and in terms of the conditions of living performers on the ground. His tearful epilogue, moreover, hints at the heart of his message.
When a performer in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal committed suicide due to the consequences of the all-India National Register of Citizens (NRC) attempting to remove the citizenship of Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, the real stakes of the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s policies on the ground became eminently visible (222). Yet De saves the final piece of his title until his epilogue, where two performers, Hakim and Sisir, mourn their friend in song, claiming that the territorial border between India and Bangladesh will be long forgotten in the future: “We saw it for what it was // We only laughed at it // For it was the boundary of laughter.” (229) Implicit in De’s argument is a hint that laughter not only holds communities with shared experiences together in times of grief, but also allows the ephemeral nature of everyday concerns to become viewed in different registers of time. Laughter, in other words, spatializes emergent forms of time that can negotiate the contours of life—with its losses, daily toil, and small joys in the face of adversity from multiple sides—and carry something powerful at play in its current. De’s kind attention to the lives of his interlocutors buttresses his work as an exemplary piece of performance studies and history of the West Bengal/Bangladeshi border and suggests how other liminal spaces and times might interact with similar cross-national affects as well.
Jeremy Hanes is an independent scholar specializing in South Asian religions and performance studies.
Jeremy Hanes
Date Of Review:
December 30, 2023
