Khandoker, Nasrin

To Bengalis, Bhawaiya is one of the most popular folk song genres . While all Bangla folk songs express the emotions and the stories of the most marginal people, Bhawaiya is significant for expressing female passion grounded in day to day material reality through the stories of the female subjects of the songs. The passionate lyrics of Bhawaiya, when expressing love and desire for a woman’s lover, are not always bound to marital or ‘legitimate’ sexual relations. In this paper, through the lens of these songs, I wanted to locate those emotions that are often deviant and defiant of normative control, as voiced by the female subjects of the songs. Although the lyrics express female suffering, resistance, and desire, it is often assumed that most of the songs are written by men. Here, challenging the gender boundary, I deconstruct the idea of the ‘male author’ by looking at the performative and embodied process of ‘becoming the woman’ of Bhawaiya. This ‘becoming woman’ is temporal and fluid and connects bodies of performers, listeners and researchers in an emotional atmosphere. With the conceptual frame of Sara Ahmed’s sticky and circulating emotions and Rosi Braidotti’s proposition of ‘becoming woman’, I argue that the emotions of these folk songs work in between fixed gendered being. While the singers, performers and listeners sing, the deviant and defiant emotions change and move through the creative process of becoming the woman of Bhawaiya.

Nasrin Khandoker is currently on study leave since 2013 from her job as an associate professor of Anthropology in Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. Alongside a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh in 2000, she was awarded another MA in Gender Studies from the Central European University in 2014. She submitted her PhD dissertation on the 31st of October 2019 to the Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University, Ireland, and is currently waiting for the viva. Her PhD was funded by the Wenner-Gren Wadsworth fellowship and the John and Pat Hume scholarship. The title of the PhD thesis is: “Songs of Deviance and Defiance: Subjectivity, Emotion and Authenticity in Bhawaiya folk songs”. This paper is unpublished and taken from one of the chapters of her PhD dissertation. Besides her academic involvement, she is also a social activist in several feminist and anti-sexual violence groups in Bangladesh.

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