• Know in brief origin of the term Carnival in Europe. Why was it introduced and when is it celebrated?

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church, there were no other Churches then, frowned upon the carnival since they saw it as sinful and as a breeding ground of vices and evil. Later, we have the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin who identifies the ‘carnival’ as an event necessary for releasing pent up human emotions. Simply put, according to Bakhtin, carnivals are helpful to ‘let off steam’. 

A carnival becomes the site where the monotony of daily life is interrupted, and revellers are permitted by society to become uninhibited for a few days. This was typically done at Venice during the European Renaissance just before the Christian period of fasting, Lent began. But one must emphasise, the Roman Church did not permit this --- according to the Church, the European carnivals then, and now, were breeding grounds of sins. Nobody respectable would attend a carnival and thus, those who participated in those carnivals, often wore masks. The carnival stood for everything that was unholy according to the Church.    

Much later, as mentioned earlier, Bakhtin made the carnival famous within literary theory --- a novel was characterised by dialogism, polyglossia and the carnivalesque. Reductively, dialogism stands for dialogues. Polyglossia indicates the many narratorial voices competing with each other within a novel’s self-contained world. Finally, the carnivalesque characterizes the novel-form as that space within narration where something akin to chaos is foregrounded. 

Without the carnivalesque, a novel would not be a novel. Thus, we see that within the sacred-profane dyad, the profanity of the carnival lends meaning to the sacred. If there was no carnival, then within the Puritan worldview of Christianity, the sacred would lose all meaning.

In the order of things, the carnival is followed by repentance and fasting, as in Lent. The carnival does not follow Lent. Lent is the extended period of abstinence leading up to Easter within Christianity. The carnival, therefore, is a very Christian trope. It is another thing that it has been appropriated by sociologists and literary theoreticians for their own scholarly ends.

One common example of the carnival today is the circus. The circus is a spectacle of freakery as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson shows in her book on ‘freakery’. 

Ultimately, the carnivalesque and freakery go hand in hand. A carnival is a celebration, finally, of freakery and all that is disharmonious in society. It proves that no matter how we would want ourselves to be seen by others, in our hearts we crave the deviant and the freakish.

Subhasis Chattopadhyay has a Ph.D. in Patristics and the Problem of Evil. He delivered the de Nobili Endowment Lecture in 2022.

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Editor Notes

B Borkar wrote from Goa, “I have always felt that “Carnaval” among the Catholics of Goa is the Christian edition of the age old Shigmo.” Source