Writing the Divine: Reading the Kathamrita text(s) as a Performance
Abstract:
Performance studies as a critical perspective views and analyses any human act as a performance.No act, thus, can remain innocent on its own. Such analysis resists any homogenising attempt employed to nullify
politically loaded, planned and enacted performances; and brings out their
inner dynamics, dialectics and dichotomies without any bias.Kathamrita
is primarily a printed text that holds within its corpus both the orally
transmitted knowledge of the guru and its written depiction by the
scriptocentric recipient author.The essay views the author of the
Kathamrita as a performer by attempting an exploration of the narrative
strategies employed by him to 'construct' the text. The politics of mediation
plays a crucial role in this creation which itself becomes a performance in
that process. Following a brief outline of the history of the work's
publication, this paper explores how the text itself becomes an act of
narratorial performativity where the author function does not remain an
innocent recorder of the guru's daily events but also builds up a repository
of autobiographical elements. From the point of view of narratology, the
essay tries to find the nuanced moments in the narrative that can establish
the text as a conglomerating point of time, memory, desire and
representation of the author himself. Also, certain critique of the text like
that of Sen and Kripal are taken up to provide alternative readings from the
perspective of performance theory.
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