Introduction

Queering Assamese Bihu Festival Performance

“…5 Assam's Hindu dance-drama tradition called Bhaona, codified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, incorporates a prominent practice of men performing female characters, whether they be amateur performers in village and urban communities, or bhokot (monk) residents in Assamese sattra monasteries (Sarma and Dutta, 2009;Chatterjee, 2020). The longstanding tradition of cisgender men performing as women in many Indian performance traditions raises important questions about how queer individuals navigate these spaces (Hansen, 2002;Prakash, 2016;Dost, 2017;Kamath and Lothspeich, 2022).…”