«Giocare con i morti». Note storiche ed etnografiche su di una cerimonia di fine anno nel Bengala rurale

The article examines maṛā khelā («playing with corpses»), a ritual dance which signals the end of the Gājan, a major festival of northeastern India. The tradition, which seems limited to a cluster of villages in Pūrba Bardhamān, is dedicated to the gods Dharmarāj or Śiva and requires devotees to dance and play with human heads or with the bodies of children on occasion of the end of the agricultural year and the beginning of Spring. The study is based on an ethnography of maṛā khelā and an analysis of texts in Middle-Bengali. “Playing with corpses” – and more generally the Gājan – is here discussed as a form of Indian Carnival featured by ritual and social inversion. This reading, which moves from a theoretical model applied to the analysis of the crowd in mass festivals, allows a rereading of the Gājan from a little-know, and problematic, ritual performance.