https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.048
Bodies Out of Proportion: Fatness, Grotesque Embodiment, and the Politics of Nonsense in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol and Rabindranath Tagore’s Khāpchhāṛā
DR. ABU FARAH HOQUE
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Maharani Kasiswari College, Kolkata, West Bengal
Affiliated to the University of Calcutta, India
ORCID ID: 0009-0008-6127-9654
Email: abu.fh@mkc.ac.in
Abstract: This paper looks at bodily disproportion in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol (1923) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Khāpchhāṛā (1936) from an interdisciplinary perspective that encompasses Fat Studies, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body, Disability Studies, Sianne Ngai’s account of the zany, Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of orientation, and major theories of literary nonsense. It suggests that the “oversized, voracious, mixed sexed, malformed, or otherwise out-of-place bodies of Bengali nonsense” are not just “embellishing eccentricities. They reveal the cultural work necessary to create “normal” embodiment as coherent, bounded, proportionate, disciplined, and easily classifiable. Here, Fat Studies is neither a diagnosis of the characters as fat nor a disability diagnosis of fatness, but rather analysis of the moralization of appetite, size, excess and body-visibility. The grotesque body, which is open, unfinished, relational and in process, is the theoretical heart of the paper, illuminating Ray’s impossible creatures and Tagore’s mismatched figures. Disability Studies helps to clarify how visual difference can turn into spectacle; Ahmed can help to clarify how bodies that don’t fit the lines can be disorienting; and Ngai’s zany can help to clarify the exhausting comic energy of bodies and actions that go beyond the stable lines. The other theory, nonsense theory (Elizabeth Sewell and Wim Tigges, Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Michael Heyman), demonstrates that there is no lack of order in the absurd; it is another organization of sense. The paper thus locates ‘laughter’ as politically ‘un-stable’ – that is, capable of producing stigma by making bodies ridiculous; as also ‘reflecting’ stigma back on the ‘rules’ of classification by which bodies are decided ‘right’. The politics of nonsense is in the instability of both Ray and Tagore. The out-of-proportion body is a way to develop the out-of-proportion proportions.
Keywords: Fat Studies, Fat Embodiment, Body Normativity, Corporeal Excess, Grotesque Body, Nonsense Literature, Non-Normative Embodiment
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