Beyond the Colonial Gaze: Rasa, Post-humanism, and the Metaphysics of Shrungara in Upendra Bhanja’s Labanyabati

Abstract

To demonstrate Upendra Bhanja’s work as a sophisticated site of aesthetic and philosophical synthesis, this paper offers a rigorous critical re-evaluation of the poet’s masterpiece, Labanyabati, going beyond the historically reductive ‘obscenity’ debate. Western-educated critics have often referred to Bhanja’s vivid portrayals of ‘Shrungara Rasa’ as ‘profane’ or ‘bibhatsa’ since the late 19th century due to the Victorian moral standards of the British Raj and the reformist fervour of the Brahmo Samaj. This study contends that these criticisms amount to an ‘Internalised Colonial Gaze’ that ignores the pre-colonial indigenous worldview in which the metaphysical and the biological are intricately intertwined. The study illustrates how Bhanja uses complicated Alankaras to depersonalise the physical union and turn it into a universalized aesthetic experience- a "Vaikuntha" of the senses- by utilizing ‘Rasa Theory’, particularly the idea of ‘Sadharanikarana’. Additionally, the article examines the ‘Ecology of the Body,’ where the heroine is presented as a microcosm of the Odisan environment rather than as a solitary object of love, through the prisms of postcolonialism and posthumanism. Lastly, the study presents the suffering of separation (Vipralambha) as a deep existential state through phenomenology and the concept of the ‘Lived Body.’ In the end, the study comes to the conclusion that Labanyabati serves as a ‘Transcendental Ladder,’ using the body as a sacred vehicle to attain both cultural resistance and heavenly beauty.