Those Folk Memes

From Baul Songs To Lavani, To Old Rites Of Passage, Red Is Positive And Life-Affirming

- Arshia Dhar

THE earth itself menstruates. So does the goddess…. Pause on those images, let them sink in. It doesn’t always take a revolution—a cognitive one or a bloody one—to slip out of a way of seeing, and into another one. Sometimes it’s a mere question of recovering what was there, of excavating our own subsoil. The earth menstruating? You find the idea in age-old, once-a-year festivals in eastern India to mark the onset of the sowing season, or to invoke rain. It connects, as metaphor and as a cue for practical living, the circadian rhythms of the worklife of early agrarian communities, the mensual rhythms of the body and the annual cyclical arrival of the seasons. A metaphorical web that gives us something even contemporary global cultures are struggling to attain: a cleanly positive valuation of menstruation, one that unfussily links it to fertility, to life and its rhythms, to sustenance.

There’s no trace of stigma in these cultures of holism that link human biology to nature. That’s why women once felt no shame while dancing naked around trees, often in erotic postures, for Hudum—an annual raininv oking event one finds in an ethnic span between the Koch-Rajbongshi belt in north Bengal to Dhubri in Assam. The Raja Parba in Odisha, similarly, was about the earth being ready for sowing. (‘Raja’, pronounced ‘rOjo’, derives from the Sanskrit ‘rajaswala’ for menstruation). Ironically, it’s the overlaying of mainstream cultures and modernity, trapped in its nature/culture divide, that brought on the shame. So the allusions to earth’s menstruation now have to be teased out from the old Raja songs. The people have been largely wrenched away from ‘animism’.