ABSTRACT
The chapter offers an exegesis of the spectacle of faith as an ‘event’ that is enacted and interpreted within competing religious discourses. It marks out the place offered to actresses through the devotional paradigm offered by Bhakti – when actress Binodini Dasi plays the medieval Vaishnav saint Chaitanya in Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s and is blessed by Ramakrishna, the living saint of contemporary Calcutta. An alternate theoretical approach to ‘cross-gendering’ is offered by taking into account Vaishnav aesthetic theology and role-playing in the androgyny of Binodini Dasi playing Chaitanya. The benediction scene is also analysed as visual text and as spectacle from the playtexts of Nati Binodini staged almost a century later, in the 1970s-1990s. The specific melodramatic mode within which gender roles are framed in the three-tiered re-presentation of ‘Nati Binodini’ in late 20th century also subsumes the tercentenary celebrations of Calcutta, the once imperial city. The chapter suggests that it was the circulation of jatra palas in the 1970s that ensured the appeal of the actress as an erotic model of embourgeoisement. Jatra reinforced the discourse of redemption, iconising the sinner-saint paradigm with regional markers of cultural identity.
