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...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Ghosh, Ujaan (Author) ; Chowdhury, Amrita (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press [2020]
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
IxTheo Classification:BK Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism
KBM Asia
TJ Modern history
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Volltext (doi)
Description
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.
ISSN:1477-4585
Contains:Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfz100