[Urbanstudy] Posting

[manoj jha]

  Dear friends, 
  My work is concerned with the ways people look at madness and make sense of it. Vast body of litterature has been produced on psychological dimension of madness from antiquity to modern times trying to explain it in various ways from physiological malfunctioning (so the words like Hysteria, Melanecholia etc. are etymologically connected with assumption of wanderinq uterus, excess of black bile etc.) to high -minded theories of psychoanalyses and 'existential givens and ulitimate concerns' articulated by existentialism to neurobehavioural complexities. But , reqardless of their utimate cause, the ways in which aberrant behaviour or psychiatric symptoms come to be recognised by the individuals affected, their families and friends or the wider community; pathways into tretament; societal reaction and labelling; the space of mentally ill in the collective memory of the society are decidedly social in nature. My work is concerned with the same social aspects. I'll try to
 dwelve into these processes with the help of a cluster of narratives in which one narrative is about Lawani wala bataha (the madman of Lawani) who wandered in hundreds of villages and the nearby town Darbhanga where people considered him a brahmin and only after his death people came to know his genuine caste, the keut, and the another is about Saleembhai who ran a successful business in Kathmandu, later settled in Darbhanga where people started to consider him mentally disturbed,he took some medical advices and now considers himself totally sound, runs a small shop and tells interesting stories about 'people's mischieves to turn him mad'.There are many more tales to be told but before going into them it will be interesting to look upon a tale situated in thirteenth century Vidarbha and to think how ambience of the tale can get restructered in accordance with the modes of behaviour and the social forms produced by contemporary city-life.
  This is the story of Gundam Raul who, with Chakradhar, is regarded as founder of Mahanubhav sect. The text is originally written in Marathi (translated in English by Anne Feldhaus and published by O.U.P.). It's a religious biography but this biography doesn't seek to idealise him or present him as a model for the faithful. Rather, it shows him as rude,greedy, petulant, childish, crazy and funny, as well as, occasionally and arbitrarily, helpful and kind. He is especially obnoxious about food, which he even steals on occasion; and he does not hesitate to criticise his devotees' cooking. Sometimes Gundam Raul threatens- or even does-physical harm to people, at other times, he is kind and helpful as when he helps housewives and mothers with their tasks.
  We find madliness and godliness interwoven in this tale and madliness more often becoming more dominant but that doesn't belittle the reverence for the protaganist; on the contrary, no work of sanitisation was thought to be necessary for considiring him a reverred figure as it is often done with the personalities of our times (like Nash's portrayal in The Beautiful Mind.) Of course, all the prominent personalities belonging to traditional cultures were not so erratic and inconsistent in their behaviour, but as many writers have pointed out, contact with mentally ill in traditional cultures was often thought to be a mode of access to a spiritual experience and even to divine truth. Such contact is hardly likely to produce such sentiments today. On the other hand, mental illness, particularly the various kinds of schizophrenia, reminds us of the fragility of the day-to-day conventions by which our experience both of social reality and basic parameters of existence is
 ordered. Certainly, the calculative exactness, punctuality, efffeciency and consistency demanded by our contemporary existence will make the colour, content and the fate of the tale, like that of Gundam Raul, metamorphised. 
  
  Namestay 
  Manoj 

		
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