1. Gajan: Fertility, Feminity, Freud and Futility.
- Author
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Bandyopadhyay, Modhura
- Subjects
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FESTIVALS , *FERTILITY , *FEMINISM , *NAMASUDRAS - Abstract
Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity." — Michel Foucault (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews). Gajan is a Bengali festival which is a combination of Foucauldian concept of multidirectional functioning of power structure, transgression and Bakhtinian concept of Carnival. This festival gives the subaltern masses the power of subverting every establishment, institutions of superstructures, order of hierarchy, and every form of classification possible- in terms of gender, caste, race, dialect, religion and law. It invokes the surreal state of mind were all barriers that separate the rational from the irrational collapses, leading to a random state of mind. It is the liberation of the libido, trapped desire for the 'Other' and an open display of the Freudian 'unconscious'. Gajan generally deals with the liberation of two kinds of marginalized groups: the namasudra (the caste of untouchables) and women. It portrays a woman who can be angry, thirsty, ferocious, warrior like almost giving men an 'anti-penis envy'. The aim of my paper is to deconstruct the fertility rites an its association with the castration complex, the various fissures and silences in the mythmaking of Gajan, its rites evolving gradually as a taboo, the issue of transgenderism, the eruption of the unconscious, its gradual marginalization and disappearance from a psychoanalytical, political anthropological matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012