Themes and Techniques in Mahasweta Devi`S Rudali

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|1. Kapoor, Priya. "Rudali (The Lamenter): Mourning as Cultural Practice" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the             |
|International Communication Association, New Orleans Sheraton, New Orleans, LA, May 27, 2004 Online . 2011-01-05           |
|                                                                             |
|Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript                                                                         |
|Review Method: Peer Reviewed                                                                                                     |
|Abstract: In this paper I employ a critical intercultural communication frame to study the creative practice of public mourning   |
|or lamenting, among women known as rudaali’s in rural India. Their public performance and location in village hierarchy is best   |
|understood as subaltern since they are unable to represent the pain and poverty in their daily lives more broadly within creative|
|media that urban upper class women might have access to. Rudaali’s lamentations are rarely understood as art or creative         |
|practice. Not only are they invisible in the national arena, or in any public discussion of gender and creativity, but the       |
|commercialization of art, music, and theatre avenues have not developed the idiom to recognize their valuable embodied           |
|contribution to community and society, or their reasons to practice the art.                                                     |
|In examining this very public, cultural practice of a very private emotional experience—grief, I study the interconnections in   |
|implicit binary oppositions of public and private, community and society, male and female, nature and culture (Chakravarty,       |
|1999). This subject is provided by a text, titled Rudaali, written by Bengali woman writer, Mahasweta Devi, and made into a...