becoming-woman: exploring decolonial feminist possibilities with Bhawaiya folk songs of Bengal

This article explores the possibilities of decolonial subjectivity constructed through the lyrics, performances and tunes of a Bangla folk song genre, Bhawaiya, through the concept of ‘becoming-woman’. Postcolonial scholars have shown that new gender norms for Bengali women were made by the political, religious and cultural encounter between British colonial mechanisms and the nationalist collective struggle of reconstructing the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. While marriage was established as one of the most potent social contracts through that encounter, in Bengal, the words of the embodied or sensual love of ‘illicit’ relations beyond the marital boundary expressed through many lyrics of the Bhawaiya songs show the existence of sexual desire beyond this heteropatriarchal norm. The female subject of Bhawaiya lyrics expressing ‘illicit’ desire is fictional but symbolises the permissiveness of real women’s defiant and deviant emotions. Moreover, the emotions of Bhawaiya folk songs not only connect singers, performers and listeners with the instruments and environments but also create the embodied-atmospheric environment, process and experience of ‘becoming-woman’. In between the colonial and nationalist binary narratives, Bhawaiya exists with sexually subversive emotional elements and with the emotional atmosphere of ‘becoming-woman of Bhawaiya’. The decolonial feminist political potential of this ‘becoming’ challenges the coloniality of gender by evoking ‘female’ emotions that exceed the logic of categorical binaries. This article examines that subversive female subjectivity for a decolonial disjuncture from existing colonial and national narratives.