カリガト絵(ポト)の読解から得られるサバルタン世界の景観
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概要
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In 1873 a young Brahmin killed his wife by cutting her throat with a fish knife because of her adultery with the Mohanto of the famous place of pilgrim-age at Tarakeswar inWest Bengal. Right after it ensued two law suits which concluded within the same year. The first case was prosecuted against the killer-husband and the second one was brought against the Mohanto for committing adultery by the wife-killer Brahmin who had already been in jail. In the first case whole proceeding was conducted in English because Barrister W. C.Bonnerjee on the defense side demanded its use for his convenience. As is well-known, Bonnerjee became the first president of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The law-court was predominantly elitist as it was packed with English-knowing attendants. Yet outside it the whole affair was successively reproduced in native Bengali dramas and finally represented as folk paintings sold near famous Kalighat temple in the southern suburbs of Calcutta(presently Kolkata). A series of pictures depicting the scandal were definitely drawn from the folk angle. While native elites were boisterous for the release of Nabin, the Brahmin killer. Kalight painters were mute about him but showed their unusual interest in the secret love-affair and consequent fall of the Mohanto. The opulent and powerful Mohanto, after the judgment of three years' rigorous imprisonment, degenerated into the status of a lower caste menial and even a cow turning an oil presser. We can see the unequivocal sign of folk imagination in their liking for topsy-turvy. Commercial theatres, which tided over their initial commercial crisis by staging the Mohanto dramas, formed a place of transaction between the elite and the subaltern just because the stage was a meeting place of the written language of the former and the spoken one of the latter. In the first chapter the position of Kalighat painters in the folk arts of Bengal and the comparative study of Kalighat painting and Otsue or similar folk painting in Japan will be discussed. The second chapter gives the outline of the affair in the first section and our reading of each scene of the Mohanto series of pictures in the second. The former section of the final chapter deals with the peculiarities of Bengali society in 1870s while the latter tries to locate the folk representation of the Mohanto Affair in subaltern studies.
- 2003-09-30
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関連論文
- カリガト絵(ポト)の読解から得られるサバルタン世界の景観
- Historical Evolution of a Talukdari Village in Southern Bangladesh-3-
- Historical Evolution of a Talukdari Village in Southern Bangladesh-2-