Supervisors: Jr. Prof. Carola Lorea and Prof. Isabel Laak

The thesis takes Bengali devotional instrument as not merely cultural artefacts but objects imbued with a sonic and sacred existance The thesis aims to trace the lifecycle of the instrument-body to look at the social interaction between the instrument-body and the maker’s body in the South Asian social context based on caste realities embedded in notions of  ritual purity and pollution. It proposes to look at the ways in which the body boundaries of the maker and the instrument continuously blur and subvert the hyper-anxious guarding of the body-boundaries of the Brahmanical body schema. The blurring of body boundaries also takes place through the sound emitted from the instrument body as well as the practitioners’ in collective singing, chanting and dancing rituals among the esoteric lineages in Bengal. Most of these lineages reject the caste system of mainstream Hinduism and use sonic rituals and other bodily practices to reach a state of divine ecstasy or non-duality. The thesis then, proposes to trace the life cycle of the instrument to map the blurring of bodies- human and non-human- in a highly hierarchised caste society where body-openings are guarded and association to certain bodies are considered polluting. It is to be based on ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork in West Bengal, India and will also employ sonic ethnography as a method, along with traditional tools like unstructured or semi-structured interviews and participant observation