ABSTRACT
On 25 September 1937, a group of faculty members at the University of Calcutta organised a gathering in the Ashutosh Bhavan. The chief attraction of the event was a Kobigaan performance between Rajendranath Sarkar and Bijoy Krishna Adhikari, both from erstwhile eastern Bengal (current Bangladesh). However, folklore itself covers a range of meanings and attitudes to the ‘folk’ or lok. In the 1940s Leftist cultural movements, such as the IPTA, saw in Kobigaan an instrument for mass mobilisation. Following that in the 1950s, cultural institutes, first in West Bengal and after the Liberation War in Bangladesh, have continued to sponsor research on and documentation of Kobigaan as ‘folklore’. The proliferation of the printing industry and an expansion in indigenous readership in mid-nineteenth Bengal witnessed remarkable developments in the nexus between print and performance cultures. Bidyasundar had numerous lives in print and performance cultures and had a strong influence on Kobigaan practices in colonial Bengal.
