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Vernacular performance, memory construction, and emotions: warrior epics, Akhārās, and giant Jinas in Gwalior
South Asian History and Culture ( IF 0.9 ) Pub Date : 2020-01-02 , DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2020.1719318
Heidi Pauwels 1
Affiliation  

Scholars of contemporary South Asia have highlighted the role of performance in the production of political violence. They have shown how this takes place against a discursive framework that involves the active construction of memory, among others in history books and pamphlets, which highlights selected wrongs in the past. Such narratives of outrage are linked with current events and disseminated and rehearsed in particular in vernacular media. At crucial moments, the constructed memories are activated in staged performances that embody historical or mythical characters to further emotional outrage. This strengthens group identities, which can then be mobilized as voting blocks. Every election cycle vividly demonstrates the centrality of such enactments in strategically chosen spaces to reconfigure and redeploy mytho-historical narratives of identity. An obvious example is the BJP’s 1989 procession, called Rath Yatra, led by L.K. Advani who embodied Rāma, with the stated goal to reclaim the god’s birthplace in Ayodhya, where a temple is believed to have been destroyed to make way for a mosque. Significantly, the Rath Yatra started in front of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, which in the past similarly had been raided by another ‘Muslim invader’. This flattening of history in contemporary politics to emphasize Hindu narratives of temple destruction has been well researched. So has its counterpart, the ‘making of Islamic Heritage’, e.g., regarding portrayals of the 1857 uprising. Is this a phenomenon of modernity, similar to how the religious identifier ‘Hindu’ has come to be understood? Or should these insights gleaned from contemporary scenarios also be applied to the past? If so, what can we learn from such past occasions and their real-life mobilization for violence, or conversely where such was thwarted and peace prevailed? As it turns out, very little is known about the processes involved in the formation of emotional regimes in South Asian vernaculars, whereas it would appear that one could fruitfully research the role of language use, in particular the employment of vernaculars in the creation of religious identity and generation or prevention of animosity. One wonders whether the roots of such identities are tied up with the very emergence of vernacular literature in the past five hundred years or so? In some respects this volume is a prequel to an earlier special issue of South Asian History and Culture (2.2) which focused on Religious Cultures in Early Modern India, in particular during the Mughal imperial formation. Here, we focus on the last phase of the ‘Sultanate period’, as we seek to historicize the use of vernacular performance for identity construction and concomitant violence. The chapters of this volume converge on one place and one moment in time that has been argued to be decisive for the rise of Classical Hindi. We do so in order to analyse how at that point in time too, vernacular performances would ‘suture received information to the concerns of the times in which they were produced’. The site we focus on is Gwalior because arguably the first attested complete retellings of the Classical Hindi warrior epics were composed there, and the time is that of their composition, the fifteenth century. We investigate this from the point of view of the history of

中文翻译:

言语表现,记忆建构和情感:战士史诗,Akhārās和瓜廖尔的巨型Jinas

当代南亚的学者强调表演在政治暴力产生中的作用。他们展示了这种情况是如何在一个涉及积极构造记忆的话语框架下发生的,尤其是在历史书籍和小册子中,突出了过去所选择的错误。这种暴行的叙述与时事有关,尤其是在白话媒体中进行传播和演练。在关键时刻,所构造的记忆会在舞台表演中被激活,这些表演体现了历史或神话人物的特征,从而进一步激怒了人们。这加强了群体身份,然后可以动员他们参加投票。每个选举周期都生动地证明了这些成文法则在战略性选择的空间中的中心地位,以重新配置和重新部署关于身份的神话-历史叙事。一个明显的例子是人民党在1989年的游行,由LK Advani率领拉玛(Rāma)领导的游行名为拉特·雅特拉(Rath Yatra),其既定目标是夺回阿约提亚(Ayodhya)神的出生地,据说那里的一座寺庙已被破坏以供清真寺使用。值得一提的是,拉斯·雅特拉(Rath Yatra)始于古吉拉特邦(Gujarat)的Somnath庙宇之前,该庙宇在过去同样遭到另一位“穆斯林入侵者”的袭击。人们对当代政治中历史的扁平化以强调印度教对庙宇毁灭的叙述进行了深入研究。相应的“伊斯兰遗产的制作”也是如此,例如关于1857年起义的描述。这是现代性的现象吗?类似于如何识别宗教标识“印度”?还是应该将从现代情况中收集到的这些见解也应用于过去?如果是这样,我们可以从过去的事件中及其在现实生活中为暴力动员中学到什么,或者相反,在挫败和和平得以盛行的情况下,我们能学到什么呢?事实证明,人们对南亚白话中的情绪体系形成所涉及的过程知之甚少,而似乎人们可以卓有成效地研究语言使用的作用,特别是白话在宗教创作中的作用。身份,产生或防止仇恨。一个人想知道,这种身份的根源是否与近五百年来白话文学的兴起联系在一起?在某些方面,该卷是《南亚历史与文化》(2.2)早期专刊的前传,该专刊侧重于近代印度特别是莫卧儿帝国形成时期的宗教文化。在这里,我们着眼于“苏丹国时期”的最后阶段,因为我们试图历史化使用白话表演来进行身份建构和伴随的暴力。该书的各章集中在一个地方和某一时刻,这被认为对古典印地语的兴起具有决定性作用。我们这样做是为了分析当时的情况,乡土演出将“把收到的信息缝合到制作的时间上”。我们关注的站点是Gwalior,因为可以说那里是第一个经过验证的古典北印度武士史诗的完整重述,而时间是其组成的15世纪。我们从历史的角度对此进行调查
更新日期:2020-01-02
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