Folk Revivalism: The Case of Raibenshe, a Martial Dance from Bengal

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Folk Revivalism: The Case of Raibenshe, a Martial Dance from Bengal

by Sujaan Mukherjee “What do you remember of your grandfather’s meeting with Gurusaday Dutt?”, one of our team members had asked Madhab Pramanik, a Raibenshe practitioner, then in his late-50s. We were interviewing him as part of a project titled “Physical Cultures of Bengal”, undertaken by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University.[1] There was scant material available on the martial dance at the time and, for our prelimin…