Kobigaan (lit. ‘the poet’s song’) is a ‘folk’ genre in verse-duelling and impromptu music compositions found across the border between India and Bangladesh. The cultural politics of Kobigaan is visible through live and mediated performances and include questions of class, caste, gender and authenticity. This talk focusses on the long history of the ‘making’ of ‘folk’ genres like Kobigaan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Considering the ‘afterlives’ of Kobigaan in print and through institutionalisation, I take a literary historical approach to go back to the key texts of the nineteenth-century archive and understand them through the lens of performance. I consider key figures (such as Ishwarchandra Gupta, Kaliprasanna Sinha and Manomohan Basu in nineteenth century Calcutta) and historical moments in the process of institutionalising Kobigaan and thus the formation of its literary canon. This was further taken up in the ‘making’ of ‘folk’ genre by people like Rabindranath Tagore, institutions such as the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, and Marxist cultural move­ments like the IPTA. However, I also point to the politics of censure, ambiguity, and exclusion that have informed the way twentieth-century individual and collective perceptions of Kobigaan have informed its contemporary practices. In contrast to such perceptions, I discuss figures like the rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, and performers such Ramesh Shil, and Gumani Dewan who were instrumental to the transformation of Kobigaan from ‘folk’ practice to people’s song and songs of mass mobilisation. I end by tracing the institutional endorsement of Kobigaan by the Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre in Kolkata and the Bangla Academy in Dhaka in the context of post-Independence, post-Partition, and post-Bangladesh Liberation War. In this sense, this talk indicates some of the continuing trends of archival, institutional, and identity politics in the establishment of the most recent Kobigaan Academy in West Bengal and what that means for the afterlives of ‘folk’ performances.

Speaker:

Dr Priyanka Basu is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London. Her research interests include cultural histories of theatre and performance in South Asia and the intermediality of print and performance. Her first monograph, The Poet’s Song: ‘Folk’ and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Routledge, 2024) was shortlisted for the David Bradby Monograph Award 2024, where it received special mention. She has recently published a co-edited volume from Routledge, titled ‘Performing’ Nature: Ecology and the Arts in South Asia. She is currently researching the impact of climate catastrophes on India’s folk festivals for which she received the KCL Impact Fellowship in 2025.