Gastvortrag
Ratul Ghosh, M.A.
Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal College, Cooch Behar
Baiṣṇabs, Bāuls and the Bhadralok:
Religion, Sexuality, and Gender Anxiety
in Nineteenth-Century Bengal
Datum: Montag, 28. Oktober 2024
Beginn: 14:15 Uhr
Ort: Brühler Str. 7, 4. Etage, Raum 4.013
There have been few academic studies on the development of sexuality in colonial Bengal, and those that exist generally focus on the exploits of the upper-class bhadralok in the wake of print capitalism and an emerging intellectual public sphere. This lecture will highlight the development of a non-bhadralok discourse on religious sexuality in the wake of modernism in Bengal, where the recusant folk religions and their non-canonical doctrinal discourses played a crucial role. To illustrate the Bengali bhadralok’s reservations and anxieties when engaging with this alternative discourse of religious sexuality, the lecture will look into the curious case of Rabindranath Tagore and unfold his quandary in addressing the issues of sexuality and gender transgression in Bāuldom and Bengal Vaiṣṇavism.
Ratul Ghosh is an assistant professor for Bengali in the West Bengal Education Service, posted at the Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal College, Cooch Behar, as the head of the Post-Graduate Department of Bengali. He has recently submitted his doctoral dissertation on the Bāuls of Bengal at the South Asia Seminar of the Oriental Institute of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His area of research is religion, culture, and literature of Bengal; gender and sexuality in South Asian religion and culture; and modern Bengali poetry.