Announcements
10 February 2023, 2:00 pm, room 130.00.03
Department for Modern South Asian Languages and Literature is cordially inviting you to a talk by Dr. Priyanka Basu.
Dr. Priyanka Basu is a Lecturer in Performing Arts in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her first monograph, The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia is forthcoming from Routledge (South Asian History and Culture series).
Kobigaan (lit. song of the poet) is a verse-duelling and song-theatre genre practiced across the India-Bangladesh border. It is one of the many dialogic genres in South Asia highlighting the verbal virtuosity, bricolage, and storytelling abilities of performers (kobiyaals). While rural performances of this genre (most often tied with religious rituals and village fairs) can last as long as overnight sessions, Kobigaan’s other manifestations are often truncated and adapted according to diverse venues, audience tastes and artistic choices. This talk focusses on the questions of authenticity of Kobigaan as ‘folk’ genre while travelling with the performers as well as in and out of the literary archive. Caste, class, and gender, and identity politics intertwine with the larger cultural politics of ‘folk’ in the cross-border contemporary practices of Kobigaan. Consequently, several performing groups become ‘claimants’ of authentic Kobigaan as it travels from rural settings to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and the new media. Over time, the element of debate (kobir loraai) has become a synecdoche for Kobigaan. It has also come to signify people’s songs, national culture, folk heritage and even sound chronotopes (in cinema). Conflictingly, the perception of Kobigaan in Bengali cultural memory also relies on its status as ‘decadent’, ‘extinct’ or ‘obsolete’. This talk considers such varied conceptions of Kobigaan as a performance genre as it traverses local, national, and trans-national diasporic communities.
More information here.
