The Performers Who Play With The Notion of Time: Reading The Socio-Economic Inscriptions on The Membranophone Bādyakar of Bangladesh

This essay seeks to demonstrate how the socio-economic determinants, i.e., the determinants ‘of, relating to, or involving a combination of social and economic factors’ (Merriam-Webster), impinge on the sign of the membranophone bādyakar (instrumentalist), more specifically, the traditional drummer in Bangladesh, to significantly affect the capacity of a nation to be interpretatively ambiguous regarding its playful engagement with the fluxing, pulsing notion of time. In delving into this question, this empirical study proceeds in four stages. The first of these delineates the social significance of the act of drumming in performative contexts of Bangladesh; the second and the third draw on field-level investigations on folklore to examine the socio-economics of the bādyakar at the community and the individual levels, respectively, and the fourth reads the significance of the sign of bādyakar against the contemporary macro socio-economics of Bangladesh.