Paper short abstract:

Commemoration becomes a pretext for certain revisions of history and its inherent quality in affecting the participant makes it a celebration of the cultural coordinates of a community. In Hul commemoration, we see how adivasi history is enforced into the minds of the consenting subjects.

Paper long abstract:

The memory-content of Santali Insurrection is imprinted with narratives of sufferance and violence. These narratives have their own representational qualities which render them believable and affable. What is left as residue in/through the practice is what renders them significant. The residue is the quality of pleasure that affects the participant associated with the commemorative practice's. In my paper, I would take the question of pleasure vis-à-vis sufferance and violence that are ubiquitous in the narratives of the insurrection and how they feature in the practice of recollection that makes them so significant. We will see how forms of pleasure are cultivated through the performatives of commemoration and are subverted (being compensated) with an enforced sense/responsibility of pain by the machineries (State and/or otherwise) governing the concerned commemorative practice. This dialectics between celebration and sufferance which is symptomatic of all the institutions of martyrdom allow a fertile ground of the appropriation of the celebration into pedadogic practices. Based on my field work conducted in parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal, I would show how the commemoration emerges through appropriation of various forms of histories and cultures, displacements of power and history to establish various relations of power and reverse certain claims of history.