by Sujaan Mukherjee
“What do you remember of your grandfather’s meeting with Gurusaday Dutt?”, one of our team members had asked Madhab Pramanik, a Raibenshe practitioner, then in his late-50s. We were interviewing him as part of a project titled “Physical Cultures of Bengal”, undertaken by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University.[1] There was scant material available on the martial dance at the time and, for our preliminary research, we had had to rely on a book from the 1930s by Indian Civil Servant and pioneering “folk art” revivalist, Gurusaday Dutt (1882-1941). The first meeting with the Raibenshe, according to Dutt, had taken place at a mela, where he had invited them to perform. He had hoped to see a martial, “manly” dance, that would support his claim, contra-colonial stereotypes, that Bengalis were not intrinsically “effeminate”; what they staged, instead, resembled popular theatre performances with tacky costumes, makeup and accessories. Dutt did not take kindly to this “degeneration”. To pacify him, one of the members of the troupe, took off his costume and started performing the palot, a whirlwind routine, which covered the mela ground in a cloud of the red dust synonymous with Birbhum (district in West Bengal). “This is the correct form,” an overjoyed Dutt had exclaimed. The Raibenshe were to perform only this from that day forth and never to don those degenerate costumes ever again—it was their responsibility to uphold the tradition they had inherited.
As students of English literature, we had read a good deal about elite cultural politics in colonial Bengal, about the tussle between history and memory, and about subalternity. Naturally, when we came across the grandson of the very person Dutt had met, we were sure that Madhab-da’s narrative would differ, at least in some telling details, from Dutt’s version. “Oh, I can tell you exactly what happened,” Madhab-da (“da” is a suffix used for an older brother but applied more generally as well) replied, bringing us to the edges of our seats. He disappeared for a while, rifled through his things, and emerged triumphantly with a battered photocopy of Banglar bir joddha Raibenshe [Raibenshe, the brave warriors of Bengal], the very book by Dutt we had consulted for our research. He opened the section where Dutt describes the meeting and started reading it out loud, not waiting for us to recover from this heavy blow of irony to our theoretical assumptions. We had long given up hope of finding written documentation on the Raibenshe to begin with but, at that moment, our naïve optimism about “recovering” the memory of this poignant and transformative encounter dissolved forever. Dutt’s history had supplanted community memory. To me, this signalled the need to shift the focus of my inquiry. Rather than attempting a (revisionist) history of Raibenshe, if we were to situate ourselves in this elusive moment of encounter and use it as a vantage point, what could it reveal about the implications of elite interventions in the life of a folk form?
The Folk Revival in Bengal
All three nouns in the subheading require annotation. As a category of cultural practices, “folk” has come under considerable scrutiny in recent decades. Frank J. Korom, who has worked extensively on Bengal, writes, “Folk culture has a long history of being manipulated for ideological purposes by nationalists to establish what Benedict Anderson has called imagined communities” (257). He traces the origin of the idea of “folk” to the German phrase and concept das Volk, coined by Johann Gottfried von Herder. Predictably, there are multiple perspectives on what folk culture is and, conversely, on what to call the range of cultural practices for which folk culture is a stand-in term. It has been defined as a “weapon of the weak,” when “a bounded region sharing a linguistic and ethnic identity attempts to redefine its culture in the process of distancing itself from a dominant ruling force” (258). Others have alleged that the instrumentalization of folk culture betrays a defensive posture of “a national inferiority complex,” which prompts nationalists to “romanticize remnants of a national patrimony.” When a dominant group—in this case the nationalist ideologues—come in contact with subaltern practices, there is considerable imbalance in terms of power, often leading to appropriations or museification of traditional cultural practices.
The second term, “revival”—used here as a shorthand—did not sit well with Dutt. By many accounts, Bengal witnessed a cultural “renaissance” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (The term here is not used in a value-laden sense but to refer to a paradigm of cultural practice founded on revivalism and rediscovery.) Visual artists, for instance, would visit the caves at Ajanta to make copies of murals, which would then inform the aesthetics of the Bengal School artists. Bharata’s ancient treatise on the performing arts, the Natya Shastra, after its “discovery” in 1874, became a cultural touchstone in the revival and formalization of dance forms. For Dutt, these were all dead cultural relics of the past. By attaching cultural value to their revival—perhaps in a spirit of competition with Eurocentric ideas of classicism—Indians were ignoring those traditions which, being closely interwoven with everyday practices, had survived waves of incursion. Even in Europe, Dutt claimed, people have recognized a distinction between “revival” or a “re-enactment of the past” and the impulse to “preserve” (sangrakshan) those ancient rhythms and “forms” (swa-rup, lit. one’s true form) that have continually flowed within people across the centuries. It is not easy, however, to classify Dutt’s work as either “revival” or “preservation”, particularly when we consider the range of art forms he mapped, documented and collected. The implications of the encounter for these cultural practices were too variegated, as folk idioms became dispersed and reinterpreted in myriad ways.
The third term—the geographical marker, “Bengal”—is no less significant. At the time when Dutt was writing, the Presidency of Bengal had already undergone the 1905 partition under the viceroyalty of George Nathaniel Curzon—a territorial reorganization along religious lines, thinly-veiled by a rhetoric of administrative efficiency. Dutt, who was born in Birasri, Sylhet, in present-day Bangladesh, would reminisce about the spirit of syncretism prevailing in Bengal at the level of the common people: “At deeper levels of the life of the masses this spirit of synthesis even admitted a synthesis in religion, fusing together Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist elements into a harmonious ideology” (31). This gave birth, in his view, to the songs of Bauls and Fakirs, and “in a more crude manner, in the cults of Satyapir and Satyanarayan.” Dutt preferred to speak of the “national art of the Bengali people,” a racial identification as opposed to the political entity of the Indian nation. While he conceded that “the different races inhabiting the Indian continent are pervaded by a common culture and common outlook on life,” art and culture developed along lines of “race.” Thus, Indian art is “but the sum total of the art contributions of the different races inhabiting the country”, each with its “own distinctive character.” And the defining spirit of a nation was to be found in its folk art, “the sincerest and most spontaneous collective expression of its essential philosophy of, and outlook on, life of the distinctive moral and spiritual ideals of the race,” holding the potential for “the renewal of national inspiration and for the resuscitation of national culture.”
It was during his 1928 visit to England that Gurusaday Dutt became acquainted with the English Folk Dance Society and the pioneering work done by Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), who had set out to create a “careful, systematic and scientific record” of the song and dance traditions of the “simple unlettered folk in the English countryside”. Dutt returned to India and in the autumn of 1929, serving as District Officer of Mymensingh district, he “discovered” the dance form Jari, which was practised by the Muslim community. Thereafter, in Birbhum district, he encountered Raibenshe and Kathi, among a host of folk practices. He formed the Rural Heritage Preservation Society of Bengal in January 1932 with the purpose of researching and taking steps for “the conservation and furtherance of the living traditions” of folk art, song and music. Eventually, he would incorporate elements of these folk dances in the curriculum of the Bratachari movement, a spiritual and social programme for young people, similar in some respects to Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts. Dutt sought in dance that elusive quality, which he believed was not captured in the visual arts or languages of a race, that is, the “rhythmic mould” or “rhythmic wave-length in which its [the race] spirit finds special scope for its self-expression.” Only in this, he argued, resides “the spirit of pure and simple joy or anandam,” a quality of aesthetic experience absent in “the cultivated art of a people.”
The Raibenshe dance—and its possible appropriation by the Bratachari curriculum—could not only provide this elusive aesthetic experience, it was also a potent argument against the colonial stereotyping of the Bengali as “effeminate.” Attempts to counter this negative stereotype had been underway from the late-nineteenth century, with centres of physical culture mushrooming in many parts of Bengal—and, over time, becoming spaces for revolutionary nationalist activity. Marking a break from the anti-colonial temper of organizations like the Anushilan Samiti or the numerous akharas (gymnasium), Dutt searched among the living folk tradition of Bengal for clues to the Bengali people’s “masculine” spirit. When he found it, he was quick to retroactively construct a literary archive that would support the historical, even mythological lineage he proposed for the Raibenshe, going as far back as Alexander’s invasion in 326 BCE. Up until the sixteenth century, Dutt claimed, the Raibenshe had served in the armies of Hindu and Muslim rulers in Bengal. After the Battle of Plassey (1757), where the English East India Company won a decisive victory over the Nawab of Murshidabad, the practice of enlisting Bengali soldiers came to an end. Consequently, Dutt surmised with surprising conviction, martial communities like the Raibenshe had to seek employment with local landlords, rajas and zamindars. Even these opportunities started to fade at the close of the 18th century. The martial repertoire, rendered relatively useless, was channelled into a dance form, performed at weddings and other social occasions. Eventually, having to cater to the “debased” tastes of “bhadra-samaj” (genteel society) and urbane modernity, the dance morphed into a “licentious”, “effeminate” display, similar to Bai-naach (court dance performed by women in the late-Mughal and colonial periods, with a fraught history). That is when Gurusaday Dutt encountered them in Birbhum at the Barabagan Mela in Suri.
Notes from the Field
A little over ten years after our first meeting with Madhab Pramanik, I decided to articulate and pursue the questions that had been forming in the course of my intermittent research. (I had maintained contact with a few Raibenshe groups, watched numerous performances, and helped organize a couple.) Harshita Bathwal, coordinator of the Arts Research programme at the India Foundation for the Arts—where I was considering applying for a fellowship—suggested that, if I wanted to correspond with the artists while framing the proposal, I could write it in Bangla. IFA would get it translated for their jury. The input proved to be very valuable as it helped strengthen the trust that I had built with Madhab-da over the years. When the grant came through in February 2024, I was excited to return to the field—this time working with four groups (each practising their own variant) from three districts with shared borders: Birbhum, Murshidabad, and Bankura. The project’s main focus was to understand the implications of elite intervention in the life of a “folk art” form by mapping how practitioners negotiate with questions of identity, tradition/innovation, the “market” and other cultural mediators. These closing remarks, therefore, are inconclusive: they are elaborations on some of the key questions propelling the inquiry.
The two groups based in Charkol-gram, Birbhum, claim direct lineage from the Raibenshe practitioner, Rampada Pramanik, who had met Gurusaday Dutt and worked closely with him. One of them, Madhab-da’s group, is the older one; the other group formed by breaking away sometime in the late-2010s. Madhab-da’s group is the only one that sticks to the dress (“of the simplest character”) prescribed by Gurusaday Dutt: a short dhoti and a red strip of cloth tied at the waist, tucked in at the back; otherwise, bare-bodied. With minor variations, Rakkhakar Pramanik’s group from the same village also follows the same. The other groups have started wearing sleeveless vests of varying colors, occasionally with minor accessories. I am told that this innovation was suggested by an organization that works closely with the folk arts with a view to making it more acceptable to urban as well as international audiences. Even when it comes to the repertoire of movements, forms and choreography, Madhab-da’s group chooses not to innovate, whereas a group from Sahora, Murshidabad, led by Basudeb Bhalla, has added several new moves, borrowing from gymnastics and “circus.” The point here is not to decide whether one choice is better than the other but to allow the debates to illuminate certain broader points about the “folk arts.”
Since Gurusaday Dutt’s intervention, Madhab-da’s group has been, effectively, performing a tradition that was fixed at an imagined point of authenticity. While there is honour in being the sole bearers of a nearly-extinct tradition, it has also been a burden that has prevented the form from evolving according to its own internal logic. Its value for Dutt lies in its fixity, as it served at that time an ideological point that he was trying to make. Folk art, thus, becomes a domain of creative expression where experimentation can happen only in terms of content, but not form. (Does that imply that experimentation with form is the monopolistic privilege of “modern art,” with its fetishization of the individual artist?) There is another, more problematic implication of this as well—and for this, the focus needs to shift from the form to the practitioner. While Dutt attached great value to practitioners of folk arts, their identity is reduced to and limited by their role as artists and/or craftspeople—not as economic and social subjects, who have to negotiate concerns of livelihood and caste. Particularly with government grants being given to folk artists, many forms that were practised by specific caste groups, have now been opened up to other communities as well. Raibenshe, for instance, which was traditionally practised by the Dom and Bauri castes, now has practitioners from diverse social positions. The team from Sahora occasionally performs with women who have trained with them over the years.
There was, however, one moment of “transgression” that we were privileged to witness during our last visit to Madhab-da’s village, even if it was only by way of showing us what they had moved away from. As I was trying to probe into what—if anything—they remembered of the form practised prior to Gurusaday Dutt’s intervention, Madhab-da confessed that he too had been taught the “degenerate” naach that his forefathers used to practice. After some persuasion, he took out some items of jewellery, including an anklet with bells, a frilly, pink wrap-around, and put them on one by one, as many of his neighbours from Charkol-gram stood agape. Madhab-da, a grandfather-figure and community leader to many, was transforming from the warrior-dancer to a cross-dressing tease. As the tempo of the dhaak (large percussion) picked up, his body-language changed to something more supple and tantalizingly suggestive than we had ever seen before. Are there ways, we wondered, in which artists simultaneously and secretly embody the archives of multiple possible variants of their art form, even if the audience usually encounters only one?
[1] The PI was Prof. Abhijit Gupta (Department of English, Jadavpur University) and my colleagues were Dr. Deeptanil Ray, Dr. Nikhilesh Bhattacharya, Kalpan Mitra, Tridipta Mukherjee and Antoreep Sengupta.
Sujaan Mukherjee is a researcher and translator based in Kolkata. He joined the Birla Academy of Art & Culture in 2024 as senior curator. He completed his PhD at Jadavpur University as a SYLFF fellow and was a Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Sujaan is a two-time India Foundation for the Arts awardee and has worked with numerous museums and archives in different capacities.
Edited by Dibyokomal Mitra.
Featured image: Madhab Pramanik with his team, Charkol-gram, 2013. Photograph by Kalpan Mitra.
