Making Lalon go mainstream

Lalon, the mystic bard of Bengal, has little prominence in mainstream academic discussions about the body and the ways we experience it (i.e. embodiment theory) despite his profound philosophical contribution to the subject. Lalon provided us with a profound understanding of the body and its central role in shaping our spiritual and political realities centuries before postmodernists and feminists began making the "body" a central theme in social studies. Mainstream academic discussions, heavily dominated by Eurocentric philosophies, rarely refer to Lalon's theories on embodiment, despite the poet-mystic leaving a rich body of work on the topic.

But what is embodiment, and why do we need to study it?

Embodiment is a theoretical tradition that stresses the importance of the body in making sense of our lived realities. Embodiment theorists, many of whom are renowned philosophers from the West, criticise the preference for disembodied (nonphysical) explanations of our natural and social worlds and instead offer a way of knowing the world through our bodily senses. According to this theory, our bodies provide us with clues about what is happening around us and are integral in conditioning us to exhibit particular social actions. 

Why is Lalon relevant here?

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Modern European theorists like Foucault and Nietzsche brought the body back into social theory by critiquing the mind-body duality (where the mind is thought to be separate and superior to the body). However, our very own Lalon made the body an explicit canvas for social theorisation centuries before these modernists centred the body as the ultimate reality for imagining the world and our place in it. Lalon's dehotattya, literally translated as "body-theory," is a sophisticated collection of dialogues on how the body can be used to make sense of the world and establish empowering political actions. Lalon honoured the body and recognised its significance in shaping our worldview. His songs acknowledged the inherent divinity of the body and its role in helping individuals transcend class and communal divides. Class is enacted and experienced through our bodies. Therefore, it is half-hearted to attempt to understand social injustices without considering how different bodies experience social oppression differently. 

Lalon did not express his ideas using the conventional academic style of writing. He communicated his thoughts through songs and poems. In academia, the use of songs is often seen as an inadequate medium for credible theory-building. However, the point of decolonisation in academia (the process of undoing the effects of colonialism in literary theory) is to accept oral traditions (knowledge passed through songs or speeches over generations) as legitimate academic discourses. 

It is also unfair to dismiss Lalon as a mere musician simply because he heavily engaged with the spiritual and religious realms of thought. Notable academics in the Western tradition also drew their arguments by engaging with Christian theology, yet were not categorised solely as spiritual gurus. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Hobbes all extensively explored the spiritual. Yet, their discourses were accepted as credible theories for formal academic thought. It is rather colonial to discard Lalon, given the spiritual anchoring of his knowledge claims. I argue that Lalon is as important to embodiment theory as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Descartes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler. Knowledge claims are nested within power hierarchies where only Euro-American philosophers are considered entirely legitimate. The goal of decolonisation is to smash this hierarchy and bring the margins of knowledge production to the centre. 

Lalon's messages on the body could also be a potent source of theorisation for Southern feminism. Feminists have always critiqued the masculinist theory of knowledge, which discards women's bodily experiences as legitimate grounds for knowledge-building. Lalon's song valorises the female body to the point of reverence, inverting traditional gender hierarchy. According to Lalon, spiritual reunification with one's "moner manush" is only possible by embodying the feminine essence. In Lalon mysticism, "shadhona" (the bodily path towards enlightenment) can only be practised through sacred companionship with the female and the feminine. 

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Feminists have often criticised big thinkers like Karl Marx and Aristotle for treating women's bodies as either invisible or all the same. They routinely criticise Marx for his inability to account for the female body's labour. Aristotle was also critiqued for his deep-rooted gender bias. Compared to these Western scholars, Lalon, with no formal education and limited global exposure, broke the gender hierarchy and produced sophisticated knowledge claims centring the body, its gender duality, and its ability to transcend gender. He spoke of the socialised nature of our bodies and the ability of our bodies to transcend complex power structures. Michel Foucault showed us how formal institutions socialise bodies to accept oppressive power structures. Lalon showed us how bodies can also be socially and spiritually reproduced to defy oppressive, dominant social arrangements. Yet his discussions are sparsely included in mainstream feminist and embodiment theories.

Lalon's theories on embodiment could be a potent force in further decolonising social studies from the dominance of European and American philosophers. His theories on the body are as relevant, modern, sophisticated, and prolific as those proposed by prominent Western theorists. Lalon remains integral to understanding the body's role in bringing about desired social change. The time has now come to make Lalon go global!

Avia Nahreen is a PhD student at Syracuse University, US. Her areas of focus include feminist geography, postcolonial urbanism, and political ecology.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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