The Abject Female

Abstract

Bengali bratakathās are folk ritual tales and rhymes that women listen to and/or narrate at the time of the accomplishment of their ritual vows known as bratas (Sanskrit vratas), made for the fulfillment of worldly wishes and wants. The bratas (ritual vows) and their kathās (tales), together with chāṛās (rhymes), create a space where women apparently dominate by becoming the performers, the narrators, the transmitters, the authorities of knowledge, the agencies of socio-familial wellbeing and the protectors of moral and ideological institutions. As these tales and rhymes portray, the “female force” crucially plays the central role in determining and retaining the power structures of society which otherwise would not be sustained for long. While very often an alternative female presence is found in these bratakathās, a complex patriarchal mechanism of relentless suppression, subjugation and marginalization of the same cuts through the narrative structures. At times, it is detected and explicitly voiced against – with grief, pain, anger and bantering criticism. At other times, it is only hinted at in the spirit of pleasing submission, interpolated by the ideological (and not entirely hegemonic) structures. Very often it becomes mystically inscrutable as they appear to be honest and apparently naturalizing forces in an attempt to dilute all inner complicacies and possibilities in the con/textuality of these narratives. The femaleness in these ritual stories and rhymes continuously keeps on swinging between the subject and the object positions, blurring all such dyadic constructions (male/female, centre/margin, and so on) situating itself, as Julia Kristeva terms it, in an existentially interstitial condition/space of “abjection.”