The politics of rhetoric: Re-membering and re-narrating ‘bodily’ resistances in Rabijita Gogoi’s plays

Abstract

Orality can be termed as a ‘live experience’ of rhetoric, which enables the listener to engage with what is being said. Within the framework of oral culture, memory can serve as a tool of potent interaction and subversive tendencies to expose exploitative urges and also to produce contrary effects. Memory supplanted with rhetoric, the power of language and arguments, can respond to the situation of the oppressed. The role of rhetoric in motivating action can also take us to a world of verbal and symbolic narratives of politics. In performances like Rongphorpi Rongbe and Gaantha: The First Text, the performative of rhetoric not only offers subversive approach to history/history-making but also provides opportunity for the evocation of the past in an animated language that delivers activism and campaigns for a political reform.