Event Details

Rehanna L Kheshgi is Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and the body at the intersections of popular, folk, and sacred music and dance performance in India. 

"Musical performance is a central element in ritual events associated with reproduction and regeneration in human life and the natural world in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. This presentation investigates the interaction between songs that accompany the transition of a young woman on the occasion of her first menstruation and performances that propel seasons and lovers through the cyclical patterns of life and death during the annual New Year’s festival called Bihu. Recognizing both performance contexts as integral to the construction of femininity in Assam through their connection to the concept of gabhoru (feminine body-fullness), this paper examines the material and symbolic resonances between sound and blood as they traverse the borders of the human body and the body politic. Drawing on the concept of the “dividual” in Indian society (Marriott and Inden 1977; Lamb 2000) as a way to understand the porous nature of the body and the potential creative and destructive effects of invisible substances, I investigate the extent to which sound operates as a coded substance in the context of Assamese music and dance performance. My fieldwork with performers in Assam affirms that the female body is a key site on which “tradition” and “modernity” are debated, and feminine youth in particular bears what Ritty Lukose calls the “burden of locality” in the context of “liberalizing India” (2009). This presentation articulates how the body techniques (Mauss 1979) and discursive meanings young people learn through performance and through the act of listening (Kapchan 2017) are informed by cosmological beliefs related to transgression of the borders of the gendered body as well as the geopolitical history of Assam as a frontier province at the margins of Empire."