On November 4, 2025, Baul singer Abul Sarkar—known locally as “Baul Samrat”—performed a bichargan at the Khala Pagli mela in Jabra village, Manikganj district. The performance would lead to his arrest under sections 295A and 295 of the Penal Code for “hurting religious sentiments.” By November 23, masked assailants had attacked his supporters, and 321 Baul performances had been forcibly canceled across Bangladesh. The conventional narrative frames this as “religious fundamentalism” versus “secular modernity.” But such framing obscures more than it reveals.
What if the persecution of Bauls, bichargan singers, and syncretic performance traditions reveals not a conflict between religious and secular orders but the inherent violence of the modern state itself—whether it calls itself Islamic or secular? What if Michel Foucault was right to see in Iran’s 1979 revolution not an embrace of medievalism but an attempt to imagine “political spirituality” as an alternative to both secular authoritarianism and religious orthodoxy? What if scholars like Wael Hallaq and Ovamir Anjum are correct that the modern state, by its very structure, is fundamentally incompatible with forms of Islamic governance that thrived for centuries—and that this incompatibility is not Islam’s failure but modernity’s?
The Khala Pagli mela offers a singular vantage point for excavating these questions. It is not simply a Baul gathering but a site where multiple performance traditions converge: Hindus know it as the Manasa mela, Muslims participate in its bichargan debates on cosmogony and prophecy, and the region’s Muharram observances share its performative epistemology. All three traditions—bichargan, Manasa worship, and Muharram mourning—enact rather than merely represent their truths. This shared commitment to embodied knowledge, reaching back to the fifteenth century, suggests a genealogy of resistance to precisely the kinds of fixed boundaries, textual authorities, and bureaucratic controls that the modern state requires.
Beyond Fundamentalism: The Modern State’s Taxonomic Violence
To call Abul Sarkar’s persecution an example of “fundamentalism” is to misunderstand what is at stake. The violence that erupted after August 2024—following Sheikh Hasina’s fall—cannot be reduced to religious fanaticism. It involves complex factors: political vendettas, struggles over post-revolutionary legitimacy, contests between interim authorities and various factions, economic interests threatened by syncretism’s refusal of communal boundaries. “Fundamentalism” names only the discourse through which deeper structural conflicts express themselves.
Consider what Wael Hallaq argues in The Impossible State: the modern state, by any standard definition, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory when attempting to instantiate Islamic governance. The modern state’s technologies—its deep penetration of populations, its separation of powers that never quite separates, its privileging of the political over the ethical—contradicts the very structure of what he calls “Islamic governance.” Pre-modern Islamic polities organized themselves around divine sovereignty expressed through Sharia as moral code, with executive rulers (sultans, caliphs) remaining external to the tight embrace between jurists (ulama) and community. The care of the self—the individual Muslim’s fashioning of moral subjectivity according to Sharia—was the organizing principle.
The modern state, whether it declares itself Islamic or secular, destroys this architecture. It must classify, enumerate, bureaucratize, territorialize. It requires fixed identities amenable to census, taxation, conscription. It demands a monopoly on legitimate violence and cannot tolerate competing sources of authority—whether religious scholars independent of state apparatus or wandering singers whose very mobility marks them ungovernable.
This is why the Bauls, the bichargan singers, the syncretic Manasa worshippers, and the participants in hybrid Muharram processions pose such profound threats. Not because they advocate heretical doctrines but because their existence demonstrates the possibility of religious and social life organized on entirely different principles. They show that boundaries between Hindu and Muslim, text and performance, sacred and profane, individual and communal, are not natural givens but constructions requiring continuous violent enforcement.
Foucault, Iran, and the Critique of Secular Modernity
When Michel Foucault traveled to Iran in 1978, shortly before the revolution, he was accused—both then and later—of being seduced by Islamism, of naively romanticizing Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement. His critics, particularly after the Islamic Republic’s brutalities became evident, condemned his writings as examples of Orientalist fantasy and anti-modern prejudice. But Foucault identified the Iranian revolution as a “political will,” a will for “political spirituality” that yearns for the end of dependency, the disappearance of the police, the redistribution of resources, an attack on corruption, the reactivation of Islam as “another way of life.” This “reactivation” did not mean returning to medieval society but rather a political experiment to overcome secular modernity’s rigid separation between religion and politics.
Foucault recognized that Iranians have a profoundly ambivalent relationship to modernity: what Europeans experienced as self-determination, Iranians had to wrest from colonial occupiers. Modernity and imperialism were hopelessly intertwined. The Shah’s “modernization” was experienced not as liberation but as a form of archaic authoritarianism wrapped in secular-developmentalist rhetoric. His regime deployed surveillance, torture, secret police—all the technologies of modern biopolitics—while claiming to drag Iran into secular enlightenment.
What drew Foucault to the Iranian movement was precisely its ambiguity, its refusal to fit into normative progressive narratives. He saw an event that did not conform to the scripts provided by either liberal democracy or Marxist revolution. The critics who condemned him were, as one reviewer noted, injecting their own Eurocentric secular biases into Foucault’s writings, producing highly misleading readings that attribute to Foucault views his texts explicitly deny.
Foucault’s insight remains crucial: the modern secular state is not neutral. It is a specific historical formation arising from Europe’s particular trajectory, one premised on particular conceptions of the political, the religious, the subjective. To demand that all societies conform to this model—to insist that religion must be privatized, that law must be positivist, that authority must be bureaucratic-rational—is not universal reason but cultural imperialism.
This critique does not justify theocratic brutality. It does, however, force us to ask different questions. Rather than presuming the modern state is the solution and asking only whether it should be secular or Islamic, we might ask: What if the modern state itself—with its inherent need to territorialize, classify, monopolize violence, and separate ethics from governance—is the problem? What forms of political and religious life did the modern state destroy, and what possibilities did it foreclose?
Islamic Political Theology and the State’s Impossibility
Ovamir Anjum’s work on Ibn Taymiyya and medieval Islamic political thought illuminates what was lost. The central idea within Islamic political theology is that sovereignty belongs to God. The Quran teaches that after Muhammad, the last prophet, God no longer governs through a spokesperson. Hence the question: who could possibly succeed the Prophet? For Sunni majorities, the answer was the Umma—the community of believers governed by a caliph chosen from among them. This was neither theocracy (rule by priests claiming divine authority) nor democracy (sovereignty residing in the people as abstract individuals) but something else: a community bound by shared submission to divine law, with political authority subordinate to juridical-ethical authority distributed among ulama scholars.
The key point is that executive political power—the sultan or caliph—was never meant to absorb all functions of governance. The ulama, operating somewhat independently, adjudicated disputes, interpreted law, maintained educational institutions, managed charitable endowments. The political ruler taxed, organized armies, and regulated at the margins, but the deep structure of social order arose from the community’s internalized commitment to ethical-religious principles. This is what Hallaq means when he says the modern state “fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim.” The modern state’s technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance—they produce subjects oriented toward utilitarian state purposes rather than ethical self-cultivation.
When Bangladesh declares itself an “Islamic state” while adopting the complete apparatus of the modern nation-state—territorial sovereignty, bureaucratic administration, positive law enacted by legislative bodies, police powers, census classification—it does not restore Islamic governance. It creates a hybrid monstrosity that combines the modern state’s totalizing reach with religious rhetoric, resulting in precisely the kind of persecution we witness. The state must classify: Are you Baul or Muslim? Hindu or Muslim? Sufi or Sunni? These classifications enable governance but destroy the fluid, overlapping, ambiguous identities that syncretic traditions embody.
The irony is profound: both “secular” and “Islamic” modern states in South Asia persecute Bauls and syncretic traditions because both require the same thing—fixed, enumerable, governable subjects. The colonial state classified Bauls as “criminal tribes.” The postcolonial secular state celebrates them as “cultural heritage” while denying them agency. The Islamist-influenced state condemns them as heretics. All three share the same deep structure: the need to make populations legible, territories bounded, identities fixed.
Syncretic Knowledge Production: Performance as Epistemology
Why does performance matter so profoundly to these traditions? Because performance enacts an epistemology fundamentally incompatible with both modern secularism and modern Islamism. Let me explicate three dimensions:
First, syncretic knowledge production. In textual traditions, orthodoxy and heresy are easily identified. A written proposition can be examined, judged, condemned. Deviations from authorized interpretations become visible, subject to correction through censorship or force. But performance is evanescent, participatory, interpretively open. When the bichargan singer at Jabra debates questions of srishtitattva (cosmogony), nabitattva (prophetic doctrine), and marifat-shariyat (esoteric versus exoteric knowledge), the debate’s outcome is not determined by reference to authoritative texts but by audience judgment based on aesthetic appeal, logical coherence, and experiential resonance.
This is radically democratic epistemology. It presumes that any member of the community possesses the capacity to evaluate religious truth through reason, experience, and aesthetic discernment. It refuses the monopoly of authorized interpreters—whether ulama scholars, brahmin priests, or secular experts. The bichargan debates questions that Sufi philosophy, Vaishnava sahajiya practice, and Shakta tantra had been negotiating for centuries: What is the relationship between outward ritual law (shariyat) and inward spiritual knowledge (marifat)? Are the prophets fully human or partially divine? How did creation emerge from divine unity?
These are precisely the questions that orthodoxies of all types must foreclose. To allow them to remain open, subject to continuous debate and multiple interpretations, is to deny that any institution holds final authority. The Manasa worship tradition, narrated through Manasa Mangal Kavyas composed between the 14th and 17th centuries, was never simply read but performed—sung as palagaan where professional troupes enacted the goddess’s stories. The entire narrative is a bichar, a judgment, about which deity deserves veneration. The merchant Chand eventually submits to Manasa but offers flowers with his left hand and turns his face away. The goddess accepts this grudging recognition. The performance allows for ambivalence, for coexistence-in-tension rather than doctrinal purity.
Similarly, the jarigan performances of Muharram took the Karbala narrative and transformed it into village theater where boundaries between performer and audience, Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Hindu, blurred through shared mourning. The ta’zieh tradition that arrived in India in the fourteenth century developed into elaborate processions featuring painted bamboo and paper mausoleums, accompanied by marsiya songs and dramatic reenactments. In Bengal, this synthesized with local forms—jarigan singing of Karbala tales in narrative style with leader and chorus, performed mostly by Sunni Muslims but with Hindu musicians providing instrumental accompaniment.
Second, resistance to bureaucratic capture. Foucault showed that modern power operates not only through sovereign command but through techniques of normalization—census, examination, surveillance, classification. The modern state governs by dividing populations into categories amenable to administration. When Bauls refuse caste identification, when they wander without fixed residence, when they practice spiritual partnerships that bypass family structures, they render themselves ungovernable. Their very bodies and practices resist the state’s taxonomic violence.
This resistance is not merely negative—refusing classification. It is also positive—demonstrating alternative modes of social organization. The bichargan debates at Jabra occur in an akhra, a gathering place organized not bureaucratically but through guru-disciple lineages, through networks of patronage and appreciation, through community participation. Authority derives not from institutional position but from demonstrated knowledge and performative skill. The akhra creates a temporary autonomous zone where normal hierarchies of caste, class, gender, and religious affiliation lose their organizing power. During performance, the audience judges based on aesthetic and logical criteria, not on the singers’ social status.
Manasa worship, particularly powerful in riverine Bengal, emerged from communities that colonial census-takers tried unsuccessfully to classify—tribals gradually Hinduizing, lower castes accessing the divine without brahmanical mediation, women performing Manasa Brata rituals and singing Brata-Gaan without male priestly authority. The goddess herself occupies an ambiguous position—incorporated into the Hindu pantheon but never fully domesticated, associated with snakes and the margins, worshipped especially by those whom the caste system marginalizes.
Muharram observances in Bengal likewise evaded simple classification. Were they Shia or Sunni? The processions included both, along with Hindu participants. Were they religious or cultural? The distinction collapsed. Local communities competed not on sectarian grounds but to build the grandest tazia and demonstrate the most impressive martial arts. The performance superseded the doctrine, creating solidarity through shared practice rather than shared belief.
Third, alternative temporalities. Walter Benjamin distinguished between homogeneous empty time—the linear, progressive time of modernity where each moment is exchangeable, measured by clocks and calendars—and messianic time, where past and present and future collapse into a revolutionary Now. The performance traditions of Bengal encode precisely this messianic temporality.
The bichargan treats questions of creation and prophecy as present concerns, not historical doctrines to be passively received. Singers debate cosmogony—how did the world begin, what is the relationship between divine unity and manifest plurality—as if these questions require answering now, as if the audience’s understanding matters, as if truth is generated collectively through dialogical performance rather than handed down from authoritative interpreters. This refuses the modern temporal structure where revelation belongs to the past and the present merely interprets inherited texts.
The Manasa narrative’s cycle of death and resurrection—Behula’s river journey with her dead husband’s corpse, her dance before the gods, the restoration of life—mirrors the annual flood cycle of riverine Bengal. Rivers give life through irrigation and fish but bring death through drowning and disease. The snake goddess offers not transcendence beyond this cycle but negotiation within it. Her worship occurs during the rainy season when snakes are most active, when death by snakebite is most common. The ritual does not promise escape from precarity but provides practices for living within it. This is eternal return rather than linear progress, cyclical time attuned to ecological rhythms rather than developmental narratives.
Muharram commemorates a seventh-century martyrdom but makes it perpetually present through annual reenactment. The mourning is not for something that happened in the past but something that happens again each year, each performance. And in Bengal, Muharram observances extended beyond prescribed calendar boundaries—processions occurred when community need required them, not only in the month of Muharram. This suggests that sacred time cannot be bureaucratically confined. The modern state wants religions to operate on schedule, to confine their public presence to designated holidays. The Bengal syncretic traditions insist that sacred time erupts according to its own logic.
The Rivers and the Snake: Topology of Syncretism
Why did these traditions particularly flourish in Manikganj? Geography matters profoundly. The district sits at the confluence of major rivers—the Jamuna, Padma, Dhaleshwari (a branch of the Jamuna extending 160 kilometers), Ichamati, Kaliganga. This is an ecology that resists permanent settlement, fixed boundaries, stable agriculture. The rivers shift courses. Floods reshape the land annually. Chars—temporary islands formed by silt deposits—appear and disappear with monsoons.
This riverine precarity shaped religious imagination. Manasa, the snake goddess, is worshipped especially in waterlogged regions where snakes proliferate and snakebite was common and lethal. The Manasa Mangal narratives center on Behula, who floats downriver on a raft with her dead husband’s corpse, reaching heaven where she dances before the gods to restore his life. This is not allegory. It is instruction. In a flood-prone delta where death by drowning or snakebite is routine, the goddess offers not transcendence but negotiation through performance. Behula’s dance—not prayer, not sacrifice, but aesthetic performance—becomes the mechanism for resurrection.
The Sufi saints who entered Bengal from the thirteenth century recognized something crucial about this landscape. They did not arrive with abstract theology demanding assent. They settled near rivers, near margins where established authority was weak, and they taught through poetry, song, embodied practice. Their notion of marifat—inner knowledge of the divine—resonated with the Vaishnava bhakti emphasis on direct experiential devotion. Both traditions valued performance—Sufi sama (spiritual concert), Vaishnava kirtan (call-and-response devotional singing)—as primary vehicles for truth.
When these currents met in riverine Bengal, they discovered themselves already speaking cognate languages. Both privileged direct experience over textual authority. Both used music and poetry as epistemological tools. Both created temporary communities where rigid social boundaries dissolved through collective aesthetic-spiritual experience. The result was traditions like jarigan, which retained something of earlier kirtan and kobigan (debate song) forms while narrating Islamic content. Performers were mostly Sunni Muslim farmers, but Hindu musicians provided instrumental accompaniment. The boundaries between Muslim and Hindu, Sunni and Shia, performer and audience, became permeable through performance.
The bichargan tradition that Abul Sarkar performed crystallizes these convergences. As documented in Banglapedia, bichargan deals with srishtitattva (creation mysteries), nabitattva (prophetic doctrine), and marifat-shariyat (inner knowledge versus outer law). These are precisely the questions that Sufi philosophy, Vaishnava sahajiya, and Shakta tantra had been negotiating. The form itself—two singers debating through song, with audience as judge—embodies negotiation through performance rather than imposition through authority.
The Postcolonial Trap: Neither Secular Nor Islamic State
Here we confront Bangladesh’s cruel paradox. The Liberation War of 1971 was fought ostensibly for Bengali cultural nationalism against Pakistani Islamic fundamentalism. Rabindranath Tagore’s songs became the national anthem. Lalon Fakir was celebrated as cultural heritage. UNESCO recognized Baul songs as intangible cultural heritage. Yet in independent Bangladesh, persecution intensified.
When Islam became the state religion in 1988, this signaled ideological reorientation. But the problem is deeper than choosing between secular or Islamic identity. As Partha Chatterjee argues, postcolonial nationalism is inherently contradictory: it must simultaneously claim modernity (requiring secular, rational-bureaucratic governance) and authenticity (requiring invocation of particularistic traditions). The nation-state, consolidating legitimacy, increasingly relies on precisely the kind of fixed communal identities that syncretic traditions dissolve.
We witness what might be called the autoimmune disorder of nationalism. The state, attempting to protect itself by defining authentic national identity, attacks the very traditions that constitute its vitality. The Bauls, the bichargan singers, the syncretic Muharram observers are celebrated as museum pieces, UNESCO heritage, tourist attractions—while living practitioners face persecution. The state wants the aesthetics without the epistemology, the songs without the questions they ask, the performance emptied of its transformative potential.
Following Sheikh Hasina’s fall in August 2024, persecution intensified not because “fundamentalists” suddenly gained power but because the interim authorities’ weakness created a vacuum. Various factions competed to define post-revolutionary identity. Some deployed Islamic rhetoric. But many attacks involved local vendettas, property disputes, political score-settling. The discourse of religious purity provided cover for multiple agendas. To call this simply “fundamentalism” misses how political instability, economic interests, and identity politics intertwine.
The destruction of the Lady Justice statue at the Supreme Court, attacks on statues of tribal heroes Sidhu and Kanhu, vandalization of Sufi shrines—these form a pattern not of consistent Islamic orthodoxy but of contest over symbolic capital. Different factions attempt to mark the landscape, to establish which version of Bangladesh will be legitimate. In this struggle, Bauls become convenient scapegoats because they refuse to fit the categories through which power must organize reality.
Women, Performance, and Double Silencing
The persecution of women in these traditions reveals additional dimensions. When Rita Dewan was forced in 2020 to issue a public apology alongside her two daughters, this was not only religious persecution but gendered humiliation. A mother before her children, publicly compelled to denounce her beliefs and practice—the scene performs patriarchal authority’s reassertion. Yet women historically found in these traditions spaces of relative autonomy.
Manasa worship traditionally involved women performing Manasa Brata rituals and singing Brata-Gaan. In possession dances associated with the goddess, male dancers were possessed by female deities and female dancers enacted masculine roles, profoundly subverting conventional gender identities. The sadhana-sangini or paired spiritual practice in Baul philosophy, where male and female practitioners engage in tantric-influenced rituals, offered women direct access to spiritual knowledge without male priestly mediation.
These were revolutionary possibilities in eighteenth-nineteenth century Bengal and remain radical today. The persecution of women practitioners thus represents not only religious orthodoxy’s reassertion but patriarchy’s foreclosure of alternative social possibilities. When women Bauls like Radharani, Rita Dewan, and Rashida Begum—who was attacked with machetes in 2016 in Chuadanga—are specifically targeted, we witness the subaltern’s double silencing that Gayatri Spivak described: first as practitioners of marginal traditions, second as women within patriarchal structures crossing religious lines.
The Semiotics of Hair and Sonic Violence
The forced cutting of Bauls’ hair—documented from 1890s Murshidabad through 2016 Bogra to 2021’s assault on adolescent Baul Mehedi Hasan—carries semiotic significance demanding attention. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault showed how modern power inscribes itself upon bodies through surveillance and normalization. But hair-cutting represents older sovereign power—direct bodily marking, public humiliation as spectacle.
For Bauls, hair marks initiation, signals guru-devotion, represents different temporality—patient, organic, resistant to market time. To cut it forcibly performs multiple acts: de-sanctification (declaring Baul spirituality illegitimate), re-normalization (imposing dominant aesthetics), territorial marking (asserting the body belongs to social order, not individual). Judith Butler’s performativity theory illuminates this: identity is constructed through repeated performances. Bauls daily maintain distinctive appearance, performing alternative identity. Hair-cutting constitutes forced counter-performance, disrupting identity’s daily enactment.
Similarly, sonic violence—stopping songs, breaking ektaras, canceling performances—attacks acoustic space. The 321 canceled performances after 2024 represent not only economic loss but cultural silencing. Bichargan songs traditionally occurred in public spaces—markets, fairs, village squares. This public acoustic presence was key to their existence. When denied, Bauls are erased from public consciousness. Jacques Attali argues in Noise: The Political Economy of Music that controlling music powerfully controls society. Bichargan censorship is thus political act, not aesthetic preference.
Yet oral transmission proves remarkably resilient. Because songs pass from guru to disciple through memory rather than texts, they resist erasure. A book can be burned, but a song existing in thousands of throats proves harder to extinguish. When Ranesh Thakur’s ashar ghar in Sunamganj burned in 2020, destroying forty years of accumulated books and instruments, this attempted epistemicide—destroying not individual performances but social frameworks enabling tradition’s persistence. But the tradition survives through decentralized distribution among countless practitioners.
Conclusion: The Crisis Belongs to Modernity
Abul Sarkar remains imprisoned as I write. Across Bangladesh, artists flee, go silent, issue forced apologies. Younger generations distance themselves from traditions now marked dangerous. The social frameworks maintaining collective memory disintegrate when gatherings are forbidden, akhras destroyed, performance criminalized. Maurice Halbwachs showed that memory is maintained not only in individual minds but through social frameworks—rituals, gatherings, storytelling. When these frameworks collapse, memory itself erodes.
Yet the tradition endures through patient persistence resembling Behula’s river journey—carrying death toward resurrection, sustained by nothing more than will and song rhythms. It endures because oral transmission, decentralized organization, and performative enactment prove more resilient than written archives when order’s forces seek erasure.
But we must reframe the question. This is not a problem of “fundamentalism” versus “secularism.” Both fundamentalist Islamism and secular nationalism, when organized through the modern state, require the same thing: fixed, enumerable, governable subjects. Both destroy the fluid, ambiguous, syncretic traditions that bichargan, Manasa worship, and Bengali Muharram embody. The persecution reveals not Islam’s incompatibility with modernity but the modern state’s incompatibility with forms of religious and social life that refuse its taxonomic violence.
When Foucault saw in Iran’s revolution an attempt to imagine “political spirituality,” he recognized something crucial: the reactivation of Islam as “another way of life” does not mean returning to medieval society but rather a political experiment to overcome secular modernity’s rigid separation between religion and politics. That experiment failed, degenerating into theocratic brutality. But the aspiration remains valid: Can we imagine political orders not premised on the modern state’s structural requirements? Can religious and social life organize themselves without requiring the state’s deep penetration of populations, its insistence on fixed identities, its monopoly on legitimate violence?
The performance traditions of Bengal suggest one answer. They demonstrate that boundaries between Hindu and Muslim, text and performance, sacred and profane, individual and communal are not natural givens but constructions requiring continuous violent maintenance. They show that religious knowledge can be produced collectively through participatory performance rather than received from authorized interpreters. They prove that communities can organize around shared practices rather than shared beliefs, around aesthetic-spiritual experiences rather than doctrinal agreements.
The modern state—whether it declares itself secular or Islamic, socialist or liberal—finds such possibilities intolerable because they reveal the state’s contingency. They demonstrate that the architecture of modern power is not necessary but chosen, not natural but constructed, not inevitable but subject to dissolution through song and dance and collective ritual.
The mystery that demands excavation is not why these traditions face persecution. The mystery is why performance itself became the site where power must continuously reassert itself. The answer, I suggest, is that performance enacts a truth the modern state cannot acknowledge: that its boundaries are permeable, its classifications provisional, its monopoly on violence contestable. Every bichargan debate, every Manasa dance, every Muharram lamentation demonstrates this anew. They show that the cage—the structures of religious and political authority—was never as solid as it seemed.
Lalon Fakir asked: “Inside the cage, the unknown bird—how does it come and go?” The bird is freedom itself, the human capacity for transcendence, the divine spark no institution can contain. The question is not posed to celebrate this uncageability but to recognize its vulnerability. Each generation must defend anew the conditions allowing the bird to fly—or allow the cage to close.
The crisis belongs not to Islam or to Bangladesh but to modernity itself. The modern state, with its techniques of governmentality and technologies of normalization, its need to classify and territorialize and monopolize violence, is fundamentally incompatible with the syncretic, performative, ambiguous forms of religious and social life that thrived in Bengal for centuries. This incompatibility manifests as persecution when orthodoxies—whether Islamist or secularist—attempt to stabilize identities the state requires.
The performance traditions invite us not to sympathy but to transformation. They ask whether we can live within questions rather than demanding answers, whether we can dwell in mystery rather than resolving it, whether we can recognize the divine not in scripture or institution but in the human heart—the maner manush—uncageable and free, present whenever voices gather to sing dangerous songs that reveal the emperor’s nakedness: power has no ground. It rests on nothing but the violence through which it continuously re-establishes itself. And every performance that refuses this violence, every gathering that enacts alternative possibilities, every song that asks forbidden questions, makes visible what power must conceal—that the bars were never real, that the cage is maintained only through our continuous acquiescence, that the unknown bird could always fly. We have only to recognize this.