Endurance, Aesthetics and the Everyday: Chhou in Purulia

Abstract

Aesthetic experience, built upon a discursive striving for achieving a transcendental state through formal techniques and processes of bodily refinement, is generally conceptualized as detached from the mundane world of earthly passions, emotions, and interests. My thesis, through a detailed ethnographic exploration of the discursive, subjective, and social registers of Chhou, a popular masked epical dance drama from Purulia (West Bengal), aims at exploring the diverse ways in which the aesthetic and the mundane realms interact with each other. I conceptualize the sensuous human body as the primary ontological ground where the experiences of transcendental pleasures and immanent pain, suffering, and endurance fold into each other in course of the everyday practices of dance and labour. My thesis is broadly divided into two interrelated sections, focusing respectively on dance and everyday life. The first part primarily discusses Chhou’s discursive structure, including music, gesture, and movement patterns and embodied training procedures, and dancers’ own subjective appreciation of spontaneous sensory immersion. Chhou’s openness to change and diversification has given birth to two prominent practising formats: the traditional and the contemporary. While the former emphasizes a classicized discipline of aesthetic transcendence, the latter attempts at modifying traditional discursive structure by incorporating populist cultural elements and upholding the aesthetic importance of a natural human body. The second part of the thesis explores in detail, how dancers’ everyday life is constituted of an interesting symbiotic relationship between everyday labour, dance, and environment. Purulia’s adverse climatic conditions constitute a constant source of threat and anxiety for Chhou dancers, whose primary occupation is agriculture. However, the sensuous process of long-term, compulsory labour is considered by dancers as pleasurable and liberating. I illustrate the details of dancers’ work ethics, which emphasizes the socio-moral significances of pain, suffering, and endurance, and also explore the ways in which sensory embeddedness in an exacting work culture creates scopes for experiencing pleasure, well-being, self-worth, and social subversion. This somatic culture is integrally tied to the dancers’ experiences and understanding of corporeal-orificial openness to and entanglement with natural environment, which determines the overall rural lifestyles, dietary habits, clothing patterns, etc.