Voices from the Margins: Folklore, Decolonial Memory, and the Politics of Identity in Postcolonial Bangladesh

Abstract

This article examines folklore as resistance and cultural memory and identity reclamation in the context of post‐colonial Bangladesh. One of the most valuable insights that came out was the idea of oral traditions, rituals, songs, and specifically women embroidering performance art not as heritage or 'traditional' / folkloric, but counter narrative that is, subaltern/marginalized interventions in their resistance strategies against colonial and patriarchal systems. The study grounds narratives on six elaborate case studies: Baul songs, Mymensingh Geetika ballads, the Nabanna harvest ritual, Nakshi Kantha embroidery, rural proverbs, and Jatra folk theatre – in a range of literatures relevant to postcolonial theory, cultural memory studies, and indigenous epistemologies. Using a combined methodology of discourse analysis and cultural semiotics, the research interprets these folklore processes as an ongoing archive of defiance. In each instance, I illustrate how piecemeal voices (especially the voices of women, peasants, and marginal religious sects) have found it increasingly difficult to preserve dissent and recreate subaltern agency based on textual utterances through both oral and symbolic acts while claiming cultural sovereignty. It also situates folklore in the larger ambience produced by theorists like Spivak, Bhabha, Chakrabarty, and Mignolo (with whom some of the contributors argue too), while decolonial knowledge productions and memory politics. These results suggest that Bangladeshi folklore is at once an element of cultural heritage and a vital life force in postcolonial worldmaking. They practice the decolonization of the intellect found in folklore by offering alternative perspectives on knowledge, history, and relationship ethics. This has implications for folklore studies in the national curriculum, with a summary of one region's archiving initiatives followed by suggestions for policy and practice. This article speaks to the increasingly cosmopolitan literature on indigenous resistance and epistemic justice in colonial and postcolonial lands by situating folklore within the frameworks of aesthetic resistance and political dialogue.