Abstract
This essay adopts critical impurity or masala as theoretical methodology and ethical practice to offer an affective reading of the mourner-confessor women in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali, the film adaptation of Mahashweta Devi’s story about mercenary women wailers designated to mourn the deaths of upper caste men of their rural community in northern India. While ritual mourning offers Shanichari, Bhikni, Ophelia, and Gertrude conventional opportunities to articulate their own or others’ losses within contained environments, the women encroach on the spaces and practices of confession to re-signify grief as a critique of institutional structures that liminalize their affective experiences of injustice. By amalgamating mourning and confession, the women of Hamlet and Rudaali publicly claim their positionality as marked and remarkable beings co-constituted also in their affective resistance of the state’s purity politics that strives to sequester (by rendering inarticulable) their subjects’ collective experiences of suffering and marginalization.
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Notes
In contextualizing scholarship within purity and impurity practices and hierarchies, I follow the ethical politics of relationality Shotwell draws out in Against Purity. Shotwell notes the isolationist ideology of purity politics and states, ‘[p]urism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair’ (2016, 9). By contrast, ‘to be against purity’ is ‘to be against the rhetorical or conceptual attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogenous’ (Shotwell, 2016, 15).
For figurative uses of the word masala in the English language and the term’s connection to Indian cinema, see the OED’s entries, especially 1b and 2.
Although by no means a typical Bollywood film that follows formulaic plot structures and generic tropes of box-office hits, Rudaali nonetheless incorporates crucial elements of Bollywood cinematic practice – hit songs and performances by mainstream actors. Lajmi’s directorial practice may be defined as a defiant blending of traditional Bollywood and independent/art-house aesthetics.
There are important differences between the short story and the film. Among them is the texts’ treatment of the geopolitics of Tahad, the village setting for both narratives. While the film flattens the nuances of Tahad’s class and caste oppression to highlight Shanichari’s suffering and endurance, the short story insists on contextualizing her experiences within the larger environment, so the oppressive energies and entitlements of the upper caste men are central to the narrative. Likewise, while the film selectively romanticizes Shanichari’s relationship with members of elite society, the story is unsentimental in its depiction of antagonistic caste and class relations in rural north India. The two narratives also treat the rituals of public mourning differently: while the story features rudaalis ‘wailing, rolling on the ground and beating [their] head’ and ‘breast’ ceremonially at the deaths of wealthy men (Devi, 1997, 97), the film adopts Bollywood conventions by turning the public mourning rituals into mellifluous musical performances. For the differences between the texts, see Gupta (2008) and Kapoor (2005). Acknowledging these distinctions, I adopt a masala method of combining the texts’ overarching understanding of liminalized women’s appropriative power as public mourners.
The studies, which include the memorialization practices of women wailers in Yemen, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Armenia, focus on the women’s abilities to blend together their personal losses with narratives of the deaths of female martyrs, the collective suffering of mothers, and the loss of home and homeland. See Claassens (2010, 67) and de la Bretèque (2016, 46–51).
As mourner-confessors Shanichari and Bhikni’s practices share the activist logics of black women’s public mourning rituals from recent decades, pointing to global connections among marginalized women’s gestural and sonic demands that the dominant sections of society confess to their role in the causation and perpetuation of communal suffering. See Celeste (2018) for the confessional activism of African-American women mourners in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Romanska (2005) offers an in-depth history of the critical and theatrical neglect/omission of Ophelia from the ‘To be or not to be’ scene, for example, as well as of the visual fetishization of Ophelia’s drowned body.
All references to Hamlet are to Shakespeare (2016).
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Pillai, T. Mourner-confessors: The masala intercommunity of women in Rudaali and Hamlet. Postmedieval 11, 243–252 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00178-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00178-5