I wrote this piece as a way to make sense of a short story I was working on. The story itself used jatra (street theater in Bengal) as a theme, and worked itself through the myth of Durga slaying Mahishasur.
This theme of Durga stabbing Mahishasur to death with her trishul kept cropping up in my personal life in ways I wasn’t quite prepared for, but definitely welcomed. For us Hindu Bengalis, Durga Pujo is that opportunity to vanguish all that is evil in our lives, and give ourselves a chance to start anew. But of course, this is done along with the five days (starting on the sixth day of the ten day festival) of gorging on food, mingling with close family and friends, and just celebrating… Some would say Bengalis, especially the ones still in West Bengal, structure their entire years around these five days of celebration. It’s our Christmas, or whatever.
I had banished Durga pujo to the annals of childhood memories, picked at only at times of loneliness, or rising unbidden, as I hadn’t really enjoyed the festival in Calcutta in the way it’s meant to since I left the city at nine. It has only been in the last few years that I have been tempted to bridge those memories to something memorable in this Canadian space; a “new public culture” as Gayatri Gopinath would say.
This audio-visual piece that I came up with for The New Quarterly‘s Wild Writers Lit Fest has been years in the making. The short story happened first, written at the Lambda Retreat in the summer of 2018. Then, a performance piece using two excerpts from the short story along with the video featured in this piece for Buddies in Bad Times Theater’s QueerCab in May 2019. And finally, this piece, a combination of my voice reading the text, the jatra video, and childhood photos. And as I keep engaging with the myth from my childhood that still wraps me in its embrace, as I keep returning to the myth each time I want to stand up to an asshole, I will keep revisiting this piece, making something new each and every time.
For now, you can access the current piece (with transcript) as linked here, or the video linked directly below:
South Asian in the Diaspora: Sanchari Sur 