Mourner-confessors: The masala intercommunity of women in Rudaali and Hamlet
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Mourner-confessors: The masala intercommunity of women in Rudaali and Hamlet
Tr i p t h i P i l l a i Department of English, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, USA.
Abstract This essay adopts critical impurity or masala as theoretical methodology and ethical practice to offer an affective reading of the mourner-confessor women in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali, the film adaptation of Mahashweta Devi’s story about mercenary women wailers designated to mourn the deaths of upper caste men of their rural community in northern India. While ritual mourning offers Shanichari, Bhikni, Ophelia, and Gertrude conventional opportunities to articulate their own or others’ losses within contained environments, the women encroach on the spaces and practices of confession to re-signify grief as a critique of institutional structures that liminalize their affective experiences of injustice. By amalgamating mourning and confession, the women of Hamlet and Rudaali publicly claim their positionality as marked and remarkable beings co-constituted also in their affective resistance of the state’s purity politics that strives to sequester (by rendering inarticulable) their subjects’ collective experiences of suffering and marginalization. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 243–252. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00178-5
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 243–252
Pillai
A Confession on Masala as Ethics, Method, and Practice
1 In contextualizing scholarship within purity and impurity practices and hierarchies, I follow the ethical politics of relationality Shotwell draws out in Against Purity. Shotwell notes the isolationist ideology of purity politics and states, ‘[p]urism is a decollectivizing, demobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair’ (2016, 9). By contrast, ‘to be against purity’ is ‘to be against the rhetorical or conceptual attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogenous’ (Shotwell, 2016, 15). 2 For figurative uses of the word masala in the English language and the term’s connection to Indian cinema, see the OED’s entries, especially 1b and 2. 244
I read Shakespeare differently, now that I live in a mid-sized town in South Carolina. I moved here from Chicago nearly a decade back to take up a tenure track position in English at a regional, public university with an emphasis on undergraduate teaching. For researchers, resources are limited in the region. Faculty receive a modest annual ‘professional development’ budget: mine affords me one, sometimes two conferences a year, or a partially paid research trip between semesters. Any dreams I might have had of pursuing scholarly purism vanished soon after I took up my job. For a few years I worried: can I be a ‘true’ Shakespearean, living and working here? The fact is I am a Shakespearean working in an environment representative of the vast majority of higher education in
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