Images, fantasy and violence: Woman in North Indian performance tradition svang

Abstract

ABSTRACT The performative space of svang is primarily located within a prison house of male values, perspectives and judgments. In these performances, females are often revealed through male guts, literally and metaphorically, in their androgynous transformations wherein less of a woman and more of a man, they become a specimen of collective male consciousness on the stage. One important pattern of these representations is idealization of females as mothers/sisters and their devaluation as wife/beloved, revealing a significant ideological drive towards a dualistic image construction. The play of violence in these dramatic representations becomes manifest through a representational ideology, demarcating the feminine from the masculine in a set of attributes which become instrumental in constructing an on-stage image of females as unreliable and primitive. These popular dramatic representations constitute a space which largely remains in contrast to the practical and physically active world of the rural women and imagine a fantasy land where the male imagination cuts and fits females into fixed parameters of a make-believe world. Controlled and created by male imagination, watched by a male audience and often represented by males themselves, these representational spaces produce a curious impression of a group-controlled male fantasy in which females become a victim of a concerted psychological violence. The present paper seeks to dwell on the imaginative violence which is produced by these representations on the popular performative space of North India by focusing on examples from dramatic performances of svangs on the rural stages of North Indian states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.