Swathi Sudhakaran1 & Milind Brahme2
1Ph.D. candidate, Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras. ORCID id: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9599-0881. Email id: ammusswathi@gmail.com
2Associate Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences department, IIT Madras
ORCHID id: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5427-4611. Email id: brahme@iitm.ac.in
Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.26
Aesthetics of Excess: The Singing and Dancing of Pey in the Folktales from Ka?isial Kadu
Abstract
The article explores the singing and dancing of pey, a dual spirit (benevolent and malevolent) found in the folktales from Ka?isial K?du (the area around Tuticorin district in southern Tamil Nadu, India) as embodying aesthetics of excess. The tales have been collected by Ki. Rajanarayanan in Na?upu?a Katai Kalañiya? (repository of folktales). Although a dual spirit, pey belongs to the sacred in Ka?isial K?du. The divine world of Ka?isial K?du populated by folk deities conceptualizes sacred differently from the scriptural religion and its pantheon of pan-Indian deities. This divide in the divine world becomes apparent in an aesthetic that characterizes the singing and dancing of the pey in these stories. As a response to and a manifestation of an excess it disturbs composure and does not fit into the controlled and transcendental aesthetics of N??ya??stra. The paper studies this deviant aesthetics associated with the singing and dancing of pey and its function in Ka?isial K?du through the lens of the Nietzchean category of the Dionysian.
Keywords: aesthetics, aesthetics of excess, folk deities, dionysian, Ka?isial K?du