Where is Rama in Bengali folk songs? A case of devapolitik, mythopoetic dissonance, or performative abstention in bhakti federalism of Bengal

Abstract This article examines the striking marginality of Lord Rama in Bengali-language folk songs and performance-based devotional repertoires, reading this absence not as a simple omission but as a culturally patterned silence shaped by regional aesthetics, vernacular religiosity, and historical power formations. Rather than presuming a uniform pan-Indian bhakti field, the article focuses on Hindu devotional song-worlds in Bengal—especially Vaishnava-inflected oral and performative contexts—where Krishna emerges as the dominant affective deity: intimate, plural, and theatrically adaptable. Rama, by contrast, appears as comparatively distant, associated with moral restraint and epic discipline that often resist the emotional grammar of folk performance. Drawing on folkloristics, performance theory, and critical approaches to discourse and cultural hegemony, the article argues that devotional absence can function as a mode of cultural agency: what is not sung may still carry ideological weight. Concepts such as devapolitik, mythopoetic dissonance, bhakti federalism, performative abstention, and scriptural decentring are deployed as interpretive tools to illuminate how regional devotional cultures selectively remember, transform, or sideline divine figures, thereby producing a distinctive devotional geography within Bengal’s plural religious landscape.