Paper short abstract:

This paper will look at the cultural politics of Kobigaan, a performance genre in West Bengal and Bangladesh by considering the aspects of text and its communication, and contextualizing the urban-rural social framework within which the performance is historicized and nurtured.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will look at the cultural politics of Kobigaan, a performance genre (within the broader form of verse-duelling or poetic contests) in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh by considering the aspects of text and its communication, and contextualizing the urban-rural social framework within which the performance is historicized and nurtured.

Postcolonial writings of performance have often been blurred by the colonial binaries of the "modern" and the "non-modern". The negation of such binaries (Latour, 1991) and the proposition of looking at "hybrid" categories instead, within the networks of time and space allow one to challenge the existing ways of looking at performance. One of the major focuses in this paper is to re-locate the performer-audience dynamic within the shifts of space and time. The "acceleration of memory" (Nora, 1989) involves playing with the vestiges, ordering them in the process of "forgetting" (actual memory) and "un-forgetting" (documentations, memoirs, films, photographs, interviews, and so on). The aim in this paper is to situate Kobigaan within the folds of these variants of memory and analyse how the performer's memory of/in the act of the performing gets merged with the audiences' memory of the performance. While the cultural memory of the performance aligns directly with the obtained historical data—memoirs, historical sketches, song-texts etc.—the performance memory underlines the singularity of a performer and performance. This paper will look at case studies of documented Kobigaan performances in West Bengal and Bangladesh, both urban and rural, in order to foreground this relational performer-audience-memory dynamic.