BODY, LAND AND DISPLACEMENT: Songs and Rituals of Embodiment among the Bengali settlers on the Andaman Islands 1 Carola Erika Lorea University of Heidelberg carola.lorea@gmail.com This article is about a particular aspect of the oral traditions and the popular religion of the Bengali community inhabiting the Andaman Islands. It aims to reflect upon some traditional repertoires of songs on the devotional and physical body called dehatattva and the ways in which they are connected to local perspectives on the land, the soil, and territorial belonging. I will share some reflections on the migrated body as it appears in the traditional performances of the Bengali settlers on the Andaman Islands and I will discuss instances of 'embodiment of the territory' through bodily practices and through metaphors, tropes and recurrent imaginaries, in the corpus of dehatattva songs. 2 In the heart of the Bay of Bengal, some seventy years ago, thousands of uprooted, landless agriculturists were asked to transform a jungle into their new home. They were given a free plot of land, free agricultural tools, manure, and some construction materials. 3 They kept alive the songs composed by their gurus, which transmit teachings of dignity and resistance: 4 'learn how to read, so that landlords cannot exploit you further'; 'find sacredness in your manual labor'; 'without education, there is no revolution'. Since 1949, refugees from East Bengal started to populate the islands, either under governmental “Colonization Schemes”, which gave them the right to own some acres of land, or through informal channels. The latter are still known as people “without” 5 : they often chose to occupy Forest Land or Revenue Land, creating so-called encroachment villages, or squatting parts of remote islands. Through a constant flow of both legally assisted as well as informal migration, the Bengali speaking community is now the largest social group on the Andaman islands. 6 1 In July 2017, I participated in a panel as part of ICAS (International Conference of Asian Scholars, Chiang Mai) about the body and migration, seeking to unravel how migration provides different experiences of perception and interpretation of the physical body. This short article derives from the paper presented at the conference in Chiang Mai and it has been developed and refined thanks to the valuable feedback received at the ICAS presentation as well as at the Colloquium of the Department of South Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Heidelberg. 2 Dehatattva songs are based on the doctrinal premise that liberation is achieved with and through the body. The lyrics contain an encyclopedia of traditional knowledge concerning the body, health, longevity, reproduction and sexuality. Based on the assumption that the body works as a microcosm that contains and mirrors the macrocosm, dehatattva songs reflect a Bengali esoteric stream which has been referred to as “sacred biology” (McDaniel, June. 1989. “The Indwelling God: Sacred Biology Among the Bauls and Sahajiẏās”. In Shaping Bengali Worlds: Public and Private, edited by T. Stewart, 23–29. East Lansing: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University), as well as “cosmophysiological soteriology” (Hayes, Glen A. 1989. “Boating Upon the Crooked River: Cosmophysiological Soteriologies in the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiẏā Tradition of Medieval Bengal”. Ibid. p. 29-35). On dehatattva songs see Cakrabarti, Sudhir. 1990. Bāṅlā Dehatattver Gān. Kolkata: Pustak Bipani. 3 On the oral histories and the relocation of Bengali refugees on the Andaman Islands see Sen, Ud iti. 2011. “Dissident memories: Exploring Bengali refugee narratives in the Andaman Islands”. In Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, edited by Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee, 219- 244. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 4 For a systematic attempt to collect this corpus of sacred songs see Bairagya, Birat. 1999. Matuyā Sāhitya Parikramā. Kolkata: Pustak Bipani. 5 Or “non-settlers” (see also Som, Sujit. 1994. “Ecological and Cultural Adaptation in Little Andaman”. PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University, p. vii). 6 The Bengali speakers were estimated to be 91582 (about 25% of the Andamans' population) according to the Census of India 2001.