Ki sambandha hoibe takhon he?: Locating Nachnis in the Societal Margins of Kinship in Rural Bengal
Saloka Sengupta and
Haripriya Narasimhan
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2020, vol. 27, issue 2, 282-301
Abstract:
Na_chni na_ch , a dance form of West Bengal, is going through a difficult time in its 500-year history. The woman dancer, who is known as a nachni , performs, often at night, along with her male partner, or rasik . Her life is intricately tied with that of her rasik, which includes her status as a woman performer at public events and the observance of proper rituals upon her death. Caught in a web of exploitation, the nachni essentially has no ‘kin’. Following the work by Inden and Nicholas on Bengali kinship and its categories and meanings within Bengali culture, this article looks at the amorphous pattern of kinship for the marginalized, with a special focus on the daily lives of nachnis. It explores the networks on the margins of kinship in which women performers of this crisis-ridden folk-art form survive.
Keywords: Women; India; performance; kinship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0971521520910970 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indgen:v:27:y:2020:i:2:p:282-301
DOI: 10.1177/0971521520910970
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Indian Journal of Gender Studies from Centre for Women's Development Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().