Refiguring Baidehīśa Bilāsa: Reading the Queer and the Erotic in Upendra Bhanja’s Rāmāyaṇa
Baidehīśa Bilāsa is a seventeenth century Odiā erotic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa. The work is particularly pertinent today, as the political right wing in India celebrates Rāma’s abstinence and represses his conjugal life in public memory. Rāma’s leaving of Sītā for his kingdom (read the Hindu nation...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2020]
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2020, Volume: 88, Issue: 2, Pages: 569-593 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Upendrabhañja 1670-1720, Baidehīśa biḷāsa
/ Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa
/ Recounting
/ Erotic literature
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| IxTheo Classification: | BK Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism KBM Asia TJ Modern history |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Baidehīśa Bilāsa is a seventeenth century Odiā erotic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa. The work is particularly pertinent today, as the political right wing in India celebrates Rāma’s abstinence and represses his conjugal life in public memory. Rāma’s leaving of Sītā for his kingdom (read the Hindu nation) is further highlighted as his choosing of Dharma (duty) over Kāma (pleasure). This text reorders that binary and demonstrates how preoccupied Rāma was in fulfilling his duties as a husband. It contains multiple erotic encounters between the couple and some important (and subversive) instances of queer imagination and interaction. This article is an attempt to survey and decipher the same. And, in doing so, we intend to contribute to the scholarship on Rāmāyaṇa and the literary history of pre-modern Odisha, which has received relatively little scholarly attention. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfz100 |