The Fleeting Taste of Mazaa: From Embodied Philology to an Alegropolitics for South Asia

Abstract

Through a methodology that I term ‘embodied philology’, I trace a genealogy of mazaa as an understanding of enjoyment calibrated through the indices of taste and time. Using this genealogy to mark out an ‘alegropolitics’, or a politics of happiness, I extract its political potential in two ways: first, by assessing it through scholarship on the archive, repertoire, and what Spanish calls sabor, and, second, by applying these ideas, gleaned largely through scholarship from Latin America, to the assessment of Bollywood’s masala repertoire and film star Govinda’s role therein. Govinda’s subscription to a Bhojpuri performativity leads me to relocate mazaa within a decolonising agenda for pleasure formed through transnational and cross-border communities united by an embodied memory of collective enjoyment. A vignette from the 2018–19 Kochi-Muziris Biennale allows me to demonstrate how such memory may be activated to transform the present.