Complexity & agency in ‘Kobigaan’ need to be understood to know why gender gap continues in the art form: Priyanka Basu

This photograph of a Kobigaan performance was taken at the Sundarban Kristi Mela O Loko Sanskriti Utsab (December 20 to 29, 2015), organised by the Kultali Milon Tirtha Society at Kultali village, Narayantala, Basanti, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal. Photo credit: Biswarup Ganguly via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0

South Asia or the Indian subcontinent, like any other region of the world, has its fair share of classical and folk performing arts.

While South Asian elites have been patrons of classical music and dance, folk and popular arts were sources of entertainment for the masses.

One of the many folk-art forms of South Asia is Kobigaan from the Bengal region, now divided into West Bengal and Bangladesh.

The art form first found mention in British-ruled Bengal in the 1800s. What makes it unique (although regional variations are found across the subcontinent) is its dialogical nature, incorporating a number of elements.

Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London has just come out with a book on Kobigaan titled, The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia.

The book is based on extensive research and fieldwork in both, West Bengal and Bangladesh as well as archival documents.

Basu, who spent a number of years researching the book, told Down To Earth (DTE) that the work explores the changes that the art form has undergone over the years and the current challenges it faces. She also explores various questions related to agency as well as identities of caste, class, religion, ethnicity and gender. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): An art form where two bards leading their troupes duel each other musically & vocally — that would, in short, describe Kobigaan. Would one find similar art forms in the subcontinent?

 

Priyanka Basu (PB): Kobigaan is part of a genre specifically rooted in verse duelling song contests. It is not specific to Bengal alone. There are other manifestations and forms which we find across South Asia.

For instance, there is Jarigaan which are Muslim epic songs and Gambhira in Bangladesh. The late Mary Frances Dunham’s 1997 book, Jarigan: Muslim Epic Songs of Bangladesh, is a seminal work on the art form. Gambhira is also a type of song contest. Aniket Dey’s 2022 book, The Boundary of Laughter: Popular performances across Borders in South Asia, talks about Gambhira.

There are also art forms such as Rasiya in Rajasthan; Akhada in Madhya Pradesh; Dugola in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which Brahma Prakash has written about in his book Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India; Ladishah in Kashmir; Dohori in Nepal and Virindu in Sri Lanka.

All of these forms are quite similar to Kobigaan in the way they portray a kind of subversive content. There is a political intent in these forms and they have very complex folk identities.

Dialogical singing and witty exchange between performers set to a kind of rhythmic format and rhyming couplets is very much common to all these forms. But they also speak about larger political issues such as ideas of the nation-state and intersections between caste, class and gender. They throw socio-political jibes at structures of power. All this is quite common in the forms that we find across South Asia.

RG: Do we find such forms outside South Asia as well?

PB: Yes, there most definitely are similar forms outside South Asia. For instance, when I started working on Kobigaan, a common perception here in the Global North would be to identify it with rap battles. Even hip-hop.

I would say the dialogical character of this art form is primary. Songs are infused. There are prose explanations and rhyming couplets.

When you sit through an overnight Kobigaan performance (8-10 hours), you would see that it is a kind of assemblage genre. Different kinds of elements have come into this genre. But the verse duelling or contest part has come to signify Kobigaan. So, when we say ‘Kobigaan’, it is the song battle which becomes a kind of synecdoche for the genre itself.

Yes, there are other elements as well. For example, an invocation or a final duet between the two performers. But the mainstay is the contest through which the topic of the battle, which is often impromptu and given on the spot, is expanded.

RG: Researching on the origins of Kobigaan, I found that it goes back to the 1600s or 1700s. That was a time of great change in the region, with major European nations like the Portuguese, Dutch, French and the British establishing a presence in the province and vying for power with local powers including the Mughals and Marathas. How did Kobigaan begin in these circumstances?

PB: Basically, I refute the whole perspective of finding origins for performance genres. The question of origins comes because we look at performance genres through their literary history.

But if you go through the vast corpus of Bangla literature, you will find only a few paragraphs reserved for forms like Kobigaan. There is no definite way of understanding what they were. They are placed between oral culture and written forms like novels or poetry.

But as I said in my previous response, the way of understanding these genres is more as an assemblage and also something intermedial between oral and written.

One of the ways in which we can think of Kobigaan as a dialogical form or performance genre is to go back to a genre that spread throughout Bengal between the 13th and 18th centuries, called the mangal kavya. These were epic poems of benediction, constituting a mix of Vedic and folk culture.

When one looks at these mangal kavya texts, one finds that they talk a lot about performance. While poring through a mangal kavya on Manasa, the serpent goddess who is revered through several performance cults across South Asia, I came across rhythmic meters, sounds and choric singing.

With the arrival of European colonial powers — Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danes and the British — to Bengal and South Asia, a lot of acculturation took place. The 19th century in Bengal was also a period of early urbanisation, coming of the city of Calcutta. There was migration from the villages to the city in search of work and livelihood.

We find newer modes of entertainment at this time, much before the advent of proscenium theatre. So, while there was English theatre in Calcutta, there were also these forms which were coming from villages into the city.

We thus do not really know what form Kobigaan was before the 19th century. That is because it only came to be documented in print from the 1850s onwards. That is when Ishwar Chandra Gupta, a poet and a newspaper editor, started collecting Kobigaan and writing about the lives of certain kobiyaals in the columns of his Bangla newspaper called Sambad Prabhakar.

That is the first printed documentation of what Kobigaan is. But before that, if we try to gauge what Kobigaan would have been, we need to look beyond print — at visual and oral culture.

‘Verse duelling song contest’ is quite a ubiquitous umbrella term. We cannot say that Koibgaan is just very water-tight in the way it is performed. There are lots of exchanges between different folk performances.

In a contemporary Kobigaan performance, you will often see a performer breaking into a Baul song or a song from a Bangla film, which the audience remembers. The idea of assemblage, of bringing together multiple elements, thus has always been true for these genres.

What I do in my book, is not to follow the teleological understanding of trying to find the root or origin of the genre but to see how this whole idea of authentic Kobigaan has shifted over time and what it has come to signify right now when it is being performed across the border.

RG: Some of the most famous kobiyaals like Bhola Moira and Anthony Firingee have been men. What does that say about agency as well as representation?

PB: Something which I have tried to do in my book and which merits even deeper attention, is to look at the figures of the 19th century kobiyaals. I have travelled with performers in my book. The method that I have employed is situated between performance ethnography and the archive and looking at the print culture as well.

I have looked at Kobigaan in village rituals, which are very long performances, in urban fairs and festivals (much shorter formats), and in Bengali cinema. In cinema I explore how folk sound is represented and becomes a prototype, however I also look at renditions of Kobigaan in television and the new media.

My final chapter is about women kobiyaals. The accounts of male kobiyaals that we find in the 19th century show that most came from agrarian classes and were also engaged in different forms of manual labour. They were thus from marginal caste and class backgrounds. This is true to this day.

Take Bhola Moira for instance. The word ‘Moira’ in Bangla means a person who makes sweetmeats. One of the ways of looking at Kobigaan as a profession is to see how these two forms of livelihood come together: The main profession of making sweetmeats, or barbery or cobbling — and we do come across such accounts from the 19th century — and that of a kobiyaal. How caste and class backgrounds shape the performance is one of the ways of approaching male kobiyaals.

Having said that, we have relatively more material on male kobiyaals but very little on female ones. This is the point from where I start my final chapter titled Writing Sisterhood, where I am listening to, writing for and with female kobiyaals.

I could find only five women kobiyaals in West Bengal. There must be women kobiyaals in Bangladesh too. But I could not locate any during my research for this project.

One of the five women kobiyaals in West Bengal has published her biography. That is a mode of empowerment for her. The women kobiyaals had different caste, class, religious and ethnic identities.

One of the questions for me was: Is a sisterhood possible given these diverse positionings? This takes us to the 19th century archive where we can find a lone recurrence of a woman kobiyaal called Jogeshwari. Every woman kobiyaals who sings now, often goes back to that one lone figure. This says a lot about the lack of documentation and representation.

Photo courtesy: @BPriyanka_KCL / X (Formerly Twitter)

The other insight was that despite there being women kobiyaals in the nineteenth century, they were usually associated with a male performer and often looked at as sex workers. This also shows why there are still very few women performers in Kobigaan, which is a very patriarchal profession.

There are, thus, many complexities within the current practices of Kobigaan and the agencies of male and female kobiyaals, as I have looked at in my book, are different. But they need to be brought together to understand where the gender gap is and why it is still continuing.

RG: During the course of your research on the book, what changes did you find in the genre, on both sides of the Radcliffe Line?

PB: In pre-independence West Bengal, the influence of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) was quite strong. The nationalist movement, starting from the late 19th century, also had a lot to contribute to folk genres.

Eventually a lot of folk forms became platforms for voicing sentiments against colonial powers, speaking about fascism and also contributing to the movement for self-determination and independence.

With Partition and the mobility of a large number of performers across the border, forms like Kobigaan have come to represent a certain kind of national, cultural heritage. There is institutional endorsement in the form of the Dhaka Bangla Academy, which is instrumental in collecting, preserving and writing on folk genres.

In West Bengal, we do have an institution like the Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre. But given the strong association of these folk forms with the Communist movement and the 34 years of Left rule in the state, there is a certain element of protest that has informed and shaped these folk performances.

I would not say this is something that is completely novel. Folk genres have always been vocal about injustices and have spoken about people coming from marginal communities. Along with education and entertainment, such genres are also platforms for protest.

These are the two distinct strands that I can see across the border. But in my book, I also talk about a third group of kobiyaals who come from the Dalit Matua-Namasudra community of West Bengal. I have tried to understand them as ‘borderland kobiyaals’, who have an affinity with kobiyaals in Bangladesh.

The fraternity is interesting. The minority Dalit community in Bangladesh as well as the Dalits in southern West Bengal are coming together and using Kobigaan to foreground a caste-based identity. That becomes significant in the way and the topics they perform as well as in the way they have demanded a Kobigaan Academy, an institute that will endorse and affiliate the existing kobiyaals.  

RG: What about Muslim kobiyaals in Bangladesh?

PB: We do find a lot of writings about Muslim kobiyaals. But eventually, the way Kobigaan has been written about in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, the Dalit or Hindu identity has been very strong. Although in West Bengal, we do get accounts of Muslim kobiyaals.

For example, I wrote about two kobiyaals — a non-Muslim Leftist kobiyaal called Ramesh Shil from Chattogram, Bangladesh and a Muslim kobiyaal, Gumani Dewan, from Murshidabad in West Bengal. They were both part of the IPTA and participated in Kobigaan contests themselves. 

There have been exchanges between Hindu and Muslim kobiyaals. But one phenomenon that I have noticed on both sides of the border is that kobiyaals are not just well-versed in Kobigaan. They are very adept in various forms of singing.

For example, I met Saidur Rahman Boyati in Bangladesh. Boyatis sing Jarigaan, epic songs on the Battle of Karbala. I found that the Boyatis could skilfully sing Kobigaan too. So, there is this flexibility within genres which is not a new phenomenon and has been present historically. This also points of a certain syncretism which has always existed in Bengal.

Instead of talking about Hindu and Muslim kobiyaals, what we can try and understand is the idea of religious piety, secularism and foregrounding of a community identity that forms like Kobigaan allow us to think about.

For instance, Shil was initiated into the ways of the Sufi Maijbhandari tariqah (order), whereas Dewan was very conversant with the Vaishnava and Shakta traditions. They brought this religious training into their practices.

RG: What would be your summation of Kobigaan so far? 

PB: My book is about the cultural politics of folk in South Asia. The cultural politics is a determining factor in the way these forms will continue to grow, change and develop in whichever way.

I have shown in my book how cinema, television, and new media such as video CDs have become ways of archiving and disseminating Kobigaan.

In 2019, I also saw a veteran female kobiyaal I had interviewed during my research, come on a reality show on Bengali television and perform a 3-minute Kobigaan.

The life of Kobigaan will continue through festivals and fairs which are the main sites of its performances now. There has been a renewed interest in non-academic writing as well.

One of the important strands of research which I have to pursue is the life of Kobigaan and kobiyaals post-pandemic. What is happening to their livelihood? What new forms of work are they participating in?

What has been their mobility like post-pandemic? I know a lot of kobiyaals from Bangladesh have moved into India. How are these factors influencing not just Kobigaan but also similar genres?

Also, one of the larger questions post-pandemic and with the ongoing climate crisis is how do we understand the traditional way of labour and work, with performance which we understand as leisure, but it is cultural work at the end of the day? And where does it lead the performance?