http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
popular performances across borders in South Asia
1 online resource (xiii, 255 pages) : illustrations (black and white), map (black and white)
"The Boundary of Laughter explores the historical transformation of popular imagination and performance in relation to the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, it analyses how peasants and laborers presently dwelling on either side of the Indo-Bangladesh border have used the performance tradition known as Gambhira to taunt oppressors, mobilize political sentiment, frame socio-economic demands and respond to seismic political shifts since 1900. Rejecting the idea of ‘communalism', or the theory of perpetual conflict between the Hindus and Muslims, the book explores Gambhira as a shared social space, constituted through relations across national and religious boundaries. The history of Gambhira shows how the performance existed seamlessly, harnessing both Muslim and Hindu life-worlds and uniting them in the face of colonial oppression. Then came Partition: when, after a troubling process of alignment, a border was forcefully imposed on the region, aiming to place Muslims on one side and Hindus on the other; this ultimately produced two versions of Gambhira, each with their particular postcolonial histories and postcolonial performative forms (one still featuring Shiva, the other taking up the trope of the grandfather/grandson). The shared cultural space of Gambhira, in other words, have not been confined to the territorial boundaries of nation-states. The book uses Gambhira as a lens to examine how performances at South Asia's borders serve to mediate between larger political-economic changes and smaller, lived worlds of popular expression"--Publisher's description.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2021