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Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the
‘Folk Performance’ in India Brahma

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Title Pages
Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk

Performance' in India
Brahma Prakash
Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490813
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2020
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490813.001.0001
Title Pages
Brahma Prakash
(p.i) Cultural Labour (p.ii)
(p.iii) Cultural Labour
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Preface

Brahma Prakash

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490813
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490813.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface
Brahma Prakash
names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of

struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.
A place I remember from my childhood is an abode of the deity on the outskirts

of my village. I remember there was a huge peepal in
its cave and its branches spreading out. The tree had a terrifying effect, as we
children would imagine spirits hovering over it. The memory of it still makes me
shiver. As soon as I would reach that place, I would chant the name of Dihvar,
the village deity, who was supposed to save us. I wished to run away but could
not as I was afraid that it would wake the sleeping spirits. Of course, once they
woke up, one could not run faster than them. They could have stuck to our
clothes. They could have spread like smoke. They would have strong body odour.
It was the scent that used to announce its presence. Only a few people
possessed the power to see and smell them. It was a folk world of beliefs. It was
an animated world of spirits and energies. Places had stories, the tree had
spirits, and the spirits had names. The names had spirited qualities associated
with them. It was a forest of signs and symbols! It was an incredibly complex
network of stories. It was a terrifying world of spirits, deities, shamans and
witches. Spirits were oppressed, (p.viii) deities were victims, witches were the
weakest and shamans were the powerful healers. It was a world of deformed
deities and displaced souls trying to find their own solace in human imagination.
These beliefs were often enslaving.
Page 1 of 8

Preface
On the one side the spirit world was frightening and enslaving, on the other side
it was also empowering and enabling. One who believed in that world also
accumulated immense power. They could see forests moving and mountains
dancing. They could mobilize the symbols at will. It enables people to fight the
higher enemies. It enables members to cooperate and work as a community.
With such animated power, Dina and Bhadri, two Dalit brothers, could fight big
feudal lords in Bihar in stories and ballads. It may not be in real life but in
imagination. I would make figures from terracota or clay and believe that one
day they will fire at my enemy camp. I would imagine they are flying in the air
and showering bows and arrows on the enemy camp. If we were not in the
position to fight the powerful, we would indulge in shadow boxing. Beliefs mixed
with imagination would create a reality that was more than real. It would work
as an escape, it would work as a utopia, it was leaning in the past, it was a
projection in the future. It was here and now with its presence. It was a livid,
vivid experience of feeling and imagination. The folk world is full of such
portrayals and imaginative praxis.
Unlike the institutionalized religions, such cultural practices are viewed as

superstitious and irrational beliefs. Studies also show how such ideas are
enslaving and self-defeating for the subaltern communities. There is no denying
of such criticisms, particularly in the Indian context where caste and gender
oppression exist in various ritualized forms. But besides these criticisms, the
and artistic activities. It is important because telling and creating affective

stories is not easy. When it succeeds it gives believers immense power, it enables
Apart from the critical analysis of the cultural practices, this work aims to
explore the creative potential of such practices. While the work aims to analyse
shows the power of performances (p.ix) and their transformative potential. The
performance can be politically problematic, but creatively powerful. We have
examples of the use of Greek myths in secular theatre. The Noh theatre of Japan
has been using ghosts and spirit worlds to create characters and express
unfulfilled desires. We have examples to show how Dalit artists transformed the
meanings of gestures and the role of instruments (such as dappu) to resist
traditional oppression. Can we think and bring the spirits to tell their stories to
discuss the injustices done? I approach the world from the perspective of one
himself by commenting on it. I do not have any option but to continually vacillate
narrative. My intention here is not to bridge the gaps but to create holes in
which the spirits can breathe and make their presence felt on the landscape as
de
Castro (2015)
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Preface
engaging with the world, which models a different conceptual universe than
ours.
Ritualized in structure and flexible in operation, folk performance creates an

animated world. They are often full of animistic and mythical beliefs. The
every animal, every plant, and every natural phenomenon has awareness and
feelings, and can communicate directly with humans gives it advantage in the
creative contexts. These cultural practices may offer us a conceptual model to
think how object and materials in theatre and performance, with feeling,
awareness, potency, and agency, can subvert our world of thoughts however with
a question as to what happens to this animated world in a caste society. This
aspect is intricately connected to the aesthetic question of the distribution of
sensibilities. The change in our conceptual thinking can enrich our artistic and
creative engagements.
Folk world is a world of animated beliefs. They think through an animated world.
From stones to forests, objects and materials acquire deeper meanings and
complex thinking. Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and
other beings. They can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance,
(p.x) and ceremony. While we need to recognize the problems associated with
the performance culture, the idea is not necessarily to believe in ghosts or
create a forest but create ghost-like sensations and to bring theatre under what
Sontag 1976: 215).
The flock of crows would come in the morning. They would fill the soundscape
with their cawing orchestras. Many times, we would get irritated; many times,
we would read them as messengers. Some would ask them to jump and tell who
is coming. By seeing how the crow jumped, they would decipher the movement
of the guest; in the sound, they would find the message. But a dark black crow
would be a bad omen, a signal that someone has died or someone is going to die.
Birds would have castes, animals would have names, and trees would have
figures. Not only living beings, but ordinary objects were also supposed to
possess lives and spirits. The broom deity had to be kept properly or else she
would get angry, the kitchenware would gossip once people went to sleep, the
sickle would sing, and the trowel would go dancing in the fields. It was an
animated world, a world of sensorium, wherein senses could have mobilized at
As the crows caw-cawed

We opened our doors to speak to them
Tell us who is coming,
We stand waiting
Will you come as crows, our children?1
Page 3 of 8

Preface
I could see from where he is drawing this connection in his revolutionary songs.
The treatment of broom gives me a sense of materiality and caste relationship in
Indian society. Not only is performance at the centre of the community, but it is
the performance that creates this set of connection and affective values around
dances, songs, music, and activates (p.xi) memory. Though the performance
constitutes an extremely imaginative understanding of the world, they are also
part of the hegemonic social structure. Often, they are the product of those
social relations that absorb those structures in their manifestations.
If that was the world of flow of spirits, then it was also a world of slavery. It was
the world of violent acts and imaginations. There was no space for individual
freedom and thinking. There was no distinction between nature and culture. It
was a fatalistic world in which every other explanation would end in the name of
fate. Spirits would speak the language of power. It was a terrifying world of
ghosts and spirits with fatalistic beliefs in which any imagination of social
transformation would appear impossible.
I am no longer part of that world, but those people are there, a world is there, a
world of belief is there. The world was a sensual and animated world where cats
meowing, dogs crying, and foxes howling expressed signs that had meanings.
They have something to say, something to share. That world needs to be
engaged, whether we like it or not. It has a mobilizing power, whether we
believe it or not. Either we want to counter it or reclaim it, we cannot merely
escape that perceptual world. But can we think of this world without
performance? So much in this society depends on performance that our world
appears to be an extra-performative world. There is a kind of performativity all
around. We must engage with this popular culture with its tastes and tendencies
and with its morality and sensibility, even if it is backward, conventional, and
oppressive.
This work tries to understand the conceptions of the folk world and its presence
in the marginalized sections of the caste-based society of India. Most
importantly, it tries to understand how these cultural practices produce values?
people think, believe, and act. It can be hegemonic, but it also has radical
potential. What is interesting about this mode of conceptualization is its
immediacy with community life. It is not simply a spirit world, but materiality is
baggage and (p.xii) has emerged as a problematic term in an academic world; I
term. Unfortunately, we do not have any other term that can capture the specific
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Preface
with this inherent problematic.
weapon wielded and unleashed against collective defiance of the people (1986:
3). This attack is carried out through market, religion, language, education, and
the media. Once the cultural bomb is planted, it can be easily internalized and
executed by the victims themselves. Whether through imperialism or caste-
based colonization, colonialism in all forms has continuously annihilated the
creative power of the individual as well as of the collective. A cultural bomb
creates a chain of reactions and a cycle of violence whose patterns are
everywhere but is difficult to pin down. This can be found in our behaviour,
practices, and education. It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of us
While modern education works as an emancipatory tool, it also has a colonizing

aspect. As figures of contradictions, we have cops in our heads and bombs in our
and cultures, but also annihilate themselves in the process.
While growing up in a north Indian village in the 1980s and 1990s, I strongly felt
the impact of the cultural bomb. I would like to critically reflect on that situation
and draw some connections. I started attending primary school from the fourth
standard. I believed in magic, spirits, fairytales, and ancestor worship. I believed
in totemic figures and hoped that they would perform real magical acts some
day. I would arm them with bows and arrows in the hope that they would fire at
reached the eighth standard, the Hindu deities were dominantly becoming a part
of my cultural and religious beliefs. I would consider spirit cults to be
(p.xiii)
practices. At that stage, the most important lesson I internalized was the
worshippers. My mother would often ask me to go and seek blessings from the
bhagat (the village shaman). I would ridicule her belief as irrational and
unscientific. But oddly, I would perform the aarti of goddess Saraswati for the
same blessings. Education was creating a divide, not between rational and
irrational beliefs or traditional and modern culture. Instead, it was working on
the basis of social hierarchies and cultural divisions.
Education, supposed to be a liberating force, was perpetuating hegemonic

values. It was instilling the sense of inferiority in our minds. Coming from an
agricultural family, it was common for us to work in agricultural fields. But I was
Page 5 of 8

Preface
gradually developing a sense of shame and disgust for it. My new education did
not consider agrarian labour dignified enough. While cutting grass for fodder, if I
would see an educated person approaching, I would hide in the fields. What
would he think about me? I was developing a sense of insecurity and was trying
to become somebody else. In school, I would avoid sitting next to Dalit and
lower-caste students and would try to befriend students from upper castes. That
would give me a sense of superiority, and I would try to display that attitude
among students from my own caste. The alienation was further getting
consolidated as I was growing up and getting ahead in studies. In the tenth
standard, I would feel ashamed seeing my mother and sisters working in the
fields. My concern had nothing to do with their labour and exploitation, rather
the shame and disgust attached to that labour. The idea of shame, disgust, and
status was intensely shaping my cultural sensibility and political consciousness.
Occasions like weddings and festivals were the time of social gatherings. Bidesia
and orchestra party would come to the village to perform. Students would feel
dizzy and sleepy in class after watching days and nights of performance. The
teachers would make a sarcastic remark, raat bhar nach dekh rahe hoge (must
(p.xiv)
nach
distancing myself from the performance culture. What I am indicating is a

broader phenomenon in which land, labour, materiality, and the cultures
associated with subaltern communities was getting disparaged. Though there
could have been several other reasons to hate that society, my hatred was
precisely coming from my newly acquired social and cultural status.
This book is a personal journey, a passage of time in which I get transformed

several times. The centrality of labouring bodies defines the aesthetics and
politics of this performance world. The performance produces a set of values and
in nature, wherein art, culture, and aesthetic values are invested in labour.
Cultural Labour offers a conceptual framework to examine various ways in which
This conceptual framework does not place culture against labour, but labour as a
culture, and culture as labour in performance practices. It examines the way
cultural labour presents an affective and aestheticized labour and laboured
to bring the tensions and fissures present in the community-based culture and
performance.
I delineate five significant tropes from the theories of theatre and performance
studies to draw a conceptual framework: landscape, materiality, viscerality and
(syn)aesthetics, performativity, and choreopolitics, to analyse this connection
Page 6 of 8

Preface
and explore the politics and aesthetics of the folk performance with a focus on
Bihar and Telangana. I do not claim that this work offers the last reading and
understanding of such performances. This is one of the several ways of
approaching the folk performances as part of a strategy for a new culture.
the University of London, in 2013. It is based on an extensive fieldwork of 15

months on (p.xv) bhuiyan puja (a
land worship celebration), bidesia (the theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-
Chuharmal (a Dalit ballad), and dugola (singer-duels) in the north Indian state of
Bihar. I have also included the performances of Gaddar and Jana Natya Mandali
from the southern Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Unless
otherwise indicated, all translations in this book are mine. The project was
supported by the Reid Research Scholarship, the Central Research Fund of the
University of London and a research grant from the Charles Wallace Trust India.
It would be difficult to recall all those people who helped me in carrying out this
research. Too many people have helped me in too many ways. I cannot recall all
the names but I would like to express my gratitude to all of them. Foremost, I
directly and indirectly helped me in this research. I thank my PhD thesis

supervisor, Helen Gilbert, for her invaluable support, more so beyond any
academic expectation. Her erudite knowledge, insightful comments appreciation
of works helped in many ways. I would also like to thank Professor Matthew
Cohen for being my co-supervisor and for encouraging me to write in critical,
creative ways. I am indebted to my thesis examiners, Francesca Orsini (SOAS)
and Sudipto Chatterjee for their in valuable comments and for enriching this
work in various ways. I thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments have
greatly improved this work. I am grateful to the team at Oxford University Press
for their immense cooperation and meticulous work in production of this book.
Thank you Sudheesh Kottembram and Oxford University Press for the cover
design and Seetharamulu and Govinda for helping me with Telugu language
transcripts.
At crucial stages of the research, I received invaluable supports from friends: R.
Dhivya Janarthanan, and Pradeep Shinde. I owe my thanks and deep gratitude to
my teachers and colleagues at JNU: Bishnupriya Dutt, H.S. Shiva Prakash,
Urmimala Sarkar, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Rustom Bharucha, Y.S. Alone and
RK. Rajarajan for their immense love and support (p.xvi) and for nurturing me
in my academic life. I also thank faculty members and staff at the School of Arts
and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi, for their unforgettable sharing of ideas and
experiences. Words are always insufficient to thank my mentors and friends
Page 7 of 8

Preface
Vijay Kumar Yadavendu, Santosh Raut, Nilanjana Sengupta, and Bikaramaditya

Choudhary for inspiring me and shaping my life and ideas. I do not think I would
have been able to come so far without you people. I express my deep gratitude
to Mritunjay, Varunika Saraf, Ashish, Kalaiyarasan, Shashank Yadav, Chandrika,
Sushma, Vinay, and other friends in Delhi for being such wonderful friends at
every juncture. Academic life would have really boring without them. Thank you
again Tuni, for introducing me to JNU and shaping my ideas and feelings. I
express my special love and thanks to my students and co-travellers at the SAA
who always offered me more than what I could offer them.
I am indebted to my family members and friends from village. Thanks to Mantu,

Mangal, Alok, Komal, Kranti, Anupama, Tanu, and Manu for tolerating my
carelessness. Above all, I cannot express my gratitude in words for my best
friend and companion, Sharmistha, for her immense love and warmth and for
immersing me in the music of life. I would also like to thank her family and
friends for being a great support at every juncture.
I dedicate this work to my mother who had to work and struggle hard to send us
to school. She has been an immense support but the biggest critic of this work.
She is the one whose stories have inspired me to take up this work, but she is
the one who refuses to accept my authority on this subject.
Notes:
(1
Rao and Antara Dev Sen. The Little Magazine, 2007.
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Page 8 of 8

Introduction

Brahma Prakash

Print ISBN-13: 9780199490813
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199490813.001.0001
Introduction
Brahma Prakash
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199490813.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

The introduction foregrounds the field of study and introduces the concepts and
specific contexts in which the study is undertaken. It problematizes the existing
binaries that remain between culture and labour and uncovers the uncanny
relationship between them. The chapter asks what happens to culture and
in India when labour becomes a performance, performance becomes labour. The

irreducibility of such practices to culture or labour demands the formulation of
some other category, and I designate it as cultural labour. Cultural labour is the
core of the folk performance in South Asia and therefore the chapter argues that
it can also work as a framework to study the performance cultures of subaltern
communities. The chapter also discusses research method and methodology and
introduces the five performances which have been undertaken in this work.
Keywords: Cultural labour, performance studies, methodology, affective and performative turn,
aesthetics
[I]n order to achieve the desired end, the spirit of folklore studies should
be changed, as well as deepened and extended. Folklore must not be
considered an eccentricity, an oddity or picturesque elements, but as
something which is very serious and is taken seriously. Only in this way will
the teaching of folklore be more efficient and really bring about the birth
of a new culture among the broad popular masses.
Antonio Gramsci (2014b:362)
Page 1 of 40

Introduction
Time: 10:30 pm, Birpur, a remote village in Bihar Situation: To announce the play
of the night, the USTAD (DIRECTOR-MANAGER) of the theatre party came on
stage. He began a conversation with the joker, a comic character in Bidesia. A
performance of cultural labour then commenced.
USTAD:
[to the joker] who are you? Are you a (political) leader or an artist?
JOKER:
khadi kurta. I think I am an artist.

USTAD:
you know how to sing and dance?

JOKER:
How stupid of you to ask! Of course, I know how to sing and dance! Otherwise,
how would I be an artist? [Singing and dancing are considered as the
fundamental skills of these artists] (p.2)
USTAD:
Can you sing something?

JOKER:
Of course, I will sing even if you do not ask me. This is what I love and what I
have devoted myself to ... [The joker takes a round on stage. He walks around
the stage and sings]
Sagro umar ham nachahun mein bitayali
The life I spent in dancing.

So my father forced me
To get married to a girl
I got married, but I continued to dance
So my wife ran away with someone else
But I am not any less a fucker
But I continued to dance

My [new] wife bore a bastard kid
The fucking kid also died
USTAD:
What else happened?

JOKER:
I had two acres of paddy field

And an ancestral mud house
All have been washed away in the rains
Page 2 of 40

Introduction

USTAD:
What happened then?

JOKER:
[laughs
Lata Singh interviews a woman tamasha artist, Shantabai, who narrates her
passion for the art:
Many a time, my sisters and parents have requested me to give up this life
nasha
cigarettes. An empty day without a programme makes me sad. A show not

only brings us daily bread but also provides recreation for both our body
and mind. While on stage, during performance, we have continuous
communication with the audience, which gives us enjoyment and
satisfaction. Their whistles and claps take away all our stress and strain.
(p.3) we see our audience enjoying our
show, it brings joy to our life. At the end of the day, this profession gives
me both my livelihood and happiness. (Singh 2017
It is the sense and enactment of intense, passionate, ritualized, and aestheticized

forms of production of values in specific cultural contexts that I call cultural
labour. Cultural labour is a creative economy placed in a hegemonic local
context. Like immaterial labour, which maintains its global networks, cultural
labour maintains its local networks. In this background, Cultural Labour is an
attempt to bring culture and labour both in its entwined as well as in intertwined
performative mediation. It postulates that the question of aesthetics is
bondage between culture and labour that aestheticize labouring bodies in their
exhaustive work environment and performance context. The society produces a
condition of performativity in which the body and work can only be realized
through cultural performances. While the body becomes an actor, work becomes
Workers have to play their roles or assigned caste roles to get the production
values of their works recognized. In other words, the merit of their works do not
exist outside their assigned roles. While caste society as a whole habitually
functions in a performative context, it is only in the performance context that
one can imagine and think of reversal or subversion of these roles. The
performances of cultural labour are potentially so double-edged in their
Page 3 of 40

Introduction
consequences that they can neither be appreciated and nor can be escaped in
the production of new culture.
Sagro umar ham nachahun mein bitayali (the life I spent in dancing) is a self-
India. The above skit is an excerpt of a comedy scene enacted by bidesia artistes
in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The excerpt conveys some of the key concerns this
work explores. Likewise, the interview of tamasha artist Shantabai reveals the
nature and intricacies of performance embodied in culture and labour. Such
performances produce labouring bodies if not always in an empirical sense but
very much conceptually (p.4) so. Who are these artistes and what is their
background? What do they perform, for instance, what do singers and drummers
produce in a ritual worship of bhuiyan puja or what do the performers produce
they affect their self, environment, and society at large? And, what do the
performers invest and for whom do they perform? For example, what does the
balladeer Gaddar invest and produce in his singing of revolutionary songs? What
are their idea, conception, and the world of performance? And, what is the
labour of such performance which produces such an animated, affective and a
real world of beliefs? This work asks several such questions at the most
fundamental level.
folk performance encompasses a diverse range of enactments ranging from

ritualistic observances to theatrical performances, including storytelling, rites,
homogenous expression, the field of study is full of contradictions. These

nomenclatures tend to dehistoricize this field of studies and neglect social
hierarchies based on caste, class and gender, and inequities based on genres
and places. The existing studies around the performance have remained shallow
Even
within the field of traditional performances, the problems are more acute with
the study of the performance of the subaltern communities. Scholars have used
various methods and approaches to explore this field of study. But, in most
cases, their writings have focused on what Gramsci indicated (as quoted in the
epigraph) as the descriptive and picturesque representation. They are viewed
through stereotyped images, and as superstitious, animistic, and primitive
beliefs. Such views largely come from the upper rungs of the society. The field of
study remains insufficiently theorized and lacks a methodological and
conceptual approach at the most basic level. This lack has been one of the major
reasons for the oblivion and misrepresentation of the performance in larger (p.
5)
category, and therefore there is a need to approach the field creatively from a
Page 4 of 40

Introduction
more critical perspective. Besides, in most of the cases, existing studies with
sociological and historical perspectives focus on the representational aspects of
the performance and denies its aesthetics and performative dimensions. Using
affective (includes aesthetic as well) and performativity as two important
its production of social and cultural values in Indian caste-based society.
In most folk performances, this affective relationship is embodied. In paddy

songs, agricultural labourers sing and ask crops to follow their movements.
George Thomson (1954) gives an example of potato dance among Maori
communities of New Zealand, where young girls dance and ask potato plants to
voriselu adiginayi, basmati rice and cotton
will not ask questions; paddy and potato will not follow their movements. The
songs may not have any direct effect on the crop. But these practices have a
palpable affect on the farmers and labourers who believe that their song will
nurture their crops with great care. With this belief, they proceed to the task of
tending the crops with greater confidence and energy than before, and that does
have a real effect on production. It is obvious that this effect on the crop is made
possible through the affective dimension of performance. One can also think of
an adverse example in which this affective quality of performance becomes an
enslaving force. For example, service castes receive daan (ritual gift) from their
jajman (patrons) and produce life-long servitude in many ritual practices in
India. Receiving dan is also an act of giving consent. Gyan Prakash (1986)
examines the spirit cult practice in south Bihar to show how they produce
unequal relations between kamias (lower caste) and maliks (upper caste).
Folk performance is full of such examples in which the affective dimension is

brought forth in both affirmative and negative ways. The performance, at times,
allows the distinction between art and labour to appear and at times
accommodates the differences to produce an aestheticized labouring body by
disavowing (p.6) the sense of labour. These enactments engender passionate
labour and a radical affirmation of life, but they can be the root of ritualized
exploitation as well. Thinking through the performances of the subaltern
communities, I delineate a few key aspects of this specific cultural practice that
in my view represent the basis of the performance but ironically, also become
the reason for its marginalization. For example, materiality is the vital aspect of
the performance culture, but the same materiality leads to the performance
being marginalized in the public sphere. There is no denying that such
performances differ significantly in detail from one region to another and one
community from the other but maintains some fundamental characteristics.
Based on those aspects, I offer a conceptual framework to study these
performance traditions.
Page 5 of 40

Introduction
The performance traditions are diverse, full of differences, and wide-ranging in

terms of their locations but any claim of a single holistic approach, therefore,
would not be only tautological but also impossible. With an understanding of
these complexities, I focus on some of the very specific questions that I have
raised so far.
Folk performance can be considered as a specific kind of cultural performance

with the endowment of values. Conquergood underlines the importance of
cultural performances in the context of endowing of values and interpretation.
He elaborates,
Cultural performances, such as rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, myths,

stories, songs, jokes, carnivals, contests, games, parties, politesses, and
other expressive traditions are culturally reflexive events that focus,
interpret, punctuate, and endow meaningfulness to experience. (2013: 19)
The performance, however, is not merely a representational object, but like any
Lyotard 1991: 93). I
term the potential of association sanskrutik sram (cultural labour). Cultural
labour produces aesthetic and cultural values. I posit this working definition of
sanskrutik shram or the cultural labour: sanskrutik sram ka tatparya aesi
sanskrutik aur performance kriya se hai jisme vyakti ya samuday sanskruti ke
dwara sram mein yogdan karta hai aur (p.7) aesthetic aur sanskrutik mulyon
ka utpadan karta hai (The cultural labour stands for the culture and performance
activities in which individual or community produces aesthetic and cultural
values through the modes of cultural expressions). Unlike immaterial labour,
which is a global phenomenon, cultural labour is a local phenomenon. It
operates through its mnemonic networks. Despite its universal encompassing
characteristics in a jati
and location. The performance of cultural labour produces a set of relationships
with people and places. While they renew, reinforce, and rupture the existing
bond, they may also strengthen the same and has the potential to create a new
set of relationships. The performance encodes the aesthetic distinction and
suggests relations of power (Conquergood 2013; Sax 2002). This work tries to
bring the potentials of associations produced by the performances of cultural
labour in specific contexts.
homogenous category: as a pre-political formation or as a pure political act of
assertion of the desire of the ordinary people. Using affective and performative
approach to theatre and performance studies, this work tries to bring such
political understanding. Theatre and performance studies offer a broader

theoretical perspective to combine segregated, disparate, and differently valued
Page 6 of 40

Introduction
knowledge by placing the performance at the centre of social and cultural

activities of the subaltern communities.
What is significant in this kind of performance, apart from meaning, message,
effects. Ritual and performance in their affective turn produce corporeal values
in the form of impulses, feelings, sensations, and passions. Deeply rooted in the
ritualized context, the performance reveals the most vivid exemplification of
formation of cultural and aesthetic values in society. I aim to explore, also, how
the performance produces meanings and values and help sustain them at what
(p.8) structures of
feeling is performative values, which creates, what James Scott (1990) would
Focusing on the wide-ranging array of the folk performances of subaltern
brings the understanding of culture in relation to its body and materiality. This
work also indirectly proposes a novel way of understanding the affective
relationship between culture and labour. The underlying problem is that artistes
and performers from the subaltern communities fit neither as artistes nor as
labourers. Yet they are artistes and labourers, and therefore their contributions
need to be recognized on both fronts. By explicating cultural labour, the work
brings the materiality of manual labour and labouring bodies in aesthetic
discourse. While the body has its own creative dimension in the postmodernist
Pang 2009). Materiality is important because, in such
relation between the subject who experiences and the context and content of
Guru and Sarukkai 2012: 36).
The performance traditions, despite changes, continue to be an important part

of the social and cultural life of the majority of subaltern communities in many
parts of India. It serves a vital function in creating a system of meanings,
feelings, values, and a set of relationships. The performance becomes a site of
symbolic struggles as well as a field of contestations. With the democratization
of social and political spheres, the performance is becoming a contested set of
socio-political claims. While in context of the aesthetics of affect, the
performance produces taste, judgement, attitude, and experience, in the context
of performativity, it generates a set of actions and representations.
Cultural Labour examines that which the performances of subaltern

communities invest and produce in a caste-based society. It explores the
precise means of interpretation by which we can analyse the affect of specific

performances, not just in its own immediate performative context but also in
Page 7 of 40

Introduction
relation to (p.9) its socio-political context. When it comes to the performance

tradition of subordinate communities, artists and performers work as labourers
in several performance genres. In this case, performance as labour and
performers as labourers become a hypothetical as well as an empirical claim to
analyse this connection.
The performers often survive and earn their livelihoods through performance.
They are cultural labourers in an economic sense. We can take examples of
bidesia, nautanki, and other rituals as well as commercial performances where
performers are workers. The performers, however, not only entertain and
exhaust their bodies, but also produce social and aesthetic values, which are
immediate in nature. In other words, performance becomes labour because it
provides social and artistic values and a particular kind of self-conception
through it. In another case, performance is labour because it produces specific
values, knowingly or unknowingly. For example, in ritual and festivals,
communities mobilize symbols and memories to create a conception of world
and life. Performance is a value-producing act, and thus, so is labour.
Performers are labourers in two different ways: as workers like any other worker
and as cultural workers who create value. In the first case, raw materials
become a commodity; in the second case, the performers themselves may
become a commodity or can change a product to an object of art. Put differently,
what a performer labours is performance, and what performers perform is
labour. Cultural labour is a labour carried out through the means of performance
and cultural enactments. What it produces is a set of meanings, feelings,
interpretations, and associations. The associations can be real or imagined;
feelings can be fake or genuine. The values can be enslaving or liberating or
both. In the same way, performance can be free labour as well as un-free
(bonded) labour. At one time, performers can become willing slaves of the
powerful, and at another, they may subvert the power relationship.
Unlike other forms of artistic and cultural practices, such performances remain
denigrated in the eyes of the social elites and the feudal upper castes for
different reasons. A significant number of folk performances across India fall in
this category. Spirit worship traditions across South Asia, for example, (p.10)
bhootaradhane (worship of Bhoota, the spirit) in Karnataka, theyyam in Kerala,
and land worship ceremonies, represent the performance tradition. Kuttu
traditions of south India (e.g., therakuttu), nach traditions of north India (for
example, launda nach (dance of men) of Bihar, nachni of Bengal and nacha of
the most visible examples of the performance of cultural labour. What are the
constitutive elements of these performances that create the aesthetics of disgust
and marginalize the performance traditions in the dominant discourses? How
Page 8 of 40

Introduction
does the category of cultural labour and aesthetics figure within such a
relationship?
Based on an extensive field study of five such folk performances, I examined the
role played by cultural labour in (un)production of values and associations in
Indian society. The performance includes bhuiyan puja (a land worship
celebration or worship of bhuiyan cult), bidesiya or bidesia (the theatre of
migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (a Dalit ballad), dugola (singer duels)
from the Indian state of Bihar and the performances of Gaddar and Jana Natya
Mandali (JNM) from Telangana. Using ethnography, archival material, and
personal memory, this work offers a conceptual frame to study the performance
of cultural labour in particular, and the status of the marginalized folk
performance in general. While performance here functions as an object of study
as well as an analytical tool, critical ethnography provides an ethical
responsibility. In the case of bhuiyan puja, the performance mobilizes stories and
memories to produce a landscape. Stories and narrative mark the places and
endow value in them. Place and landscape are the affective productions of
cultural labour that communities mobilize. In the case of bidesia, the connection
is overt with migrant labourers producing certain kinds of bodies and materiality
through the performance. In the case of Reshma-Chuharmal, performativity
creates self and community in various ways. In the context of Gaddar and Jana
Natya Mandali, revolutionary performers rupture the world of cultural labour
through their radical intervention. They redefine cultural labour, labouring
bodies, and symbols and values around them in new ways. As a result, the (p.
11) performance produces a new political subjectivity and a new set of cultural
values.
In this work, labouring body and its affective performativity is the single most
channelizing theme that underlines one performance to others, and one issue to
others. Morja Puncer locates affective performativity upon the body such that
perfectly it applies in the construction of a labouring body:
Affective performativity underlines body performances of specific, non-

normative artistic subjectivities. A performative body adds value to the art,
a value which is not brought in, neither by static description or
representation: the performance of a body with specific social and gender
mark is exactly the tool used by an artist to cut into the mythology of a
coherent subject. (2011: 409)
The affective performativity aligns an individual with the community, bodies with
places, and real with the imagined in its liminality. The relationship changes the
way things and relationships appear. It may or may not have a direct impact on
the social relationship. Even though the performance embarks on the question of
survival, that is, day-to-day struggles, it would be impossible to reduce it to the
Page 9 of 40

Introduction
concern of the everyday-ness. Likewise, the performance does not remain

restricted to the sphere of culture and often slips into the larger social structure.
Cultural Labour
contested in the field of anthropology and cultural studies. They include a
art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man
external approaches. M.J. Herskovits (1948) has viewed culture as a man-made

part of the environment, while for Margaret Mead culture was the total shared,
learned behaviour of a society of a sub-group (1956: 22). One of the most
influential (p.12) definitions has come from Clifford Geertz, who defines
culture as a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols
(1973). But scholars have increasingly realized that internal and external
external as well as internal, reflection of the internal to the external or vice-

versa.
The definition of culture, in addition, has to do with the development of ideas.

With the formation of class society, culture fell apart from the labouring
activities and production process. It only represented the civic sense of society
and the intellectual side of history. This development suggests that the definition
embodies not only the issues but also the contradictions through which it has
developed (Williams 1977: 11). The contradictions had their deep roots in
specific regions and cultures as well. While artistic and cultural practices of the
that relationship. This distinction has led to a severe problem in the

understanding of culture. For the social elites, the separation of culture from
labour becomes the yardstick to understand culture and aesthetics. While for
others, culture and labour were never in separation, they developed in strong
interactions.
Raymond Williams has proposed the most focused and, at the same time, the
most widely applicable definitions of culture. He argued that the complicated
transition of the concept of culture is still underway. Culture and labour in the
present discourse appear as two separate activities remotely connected to each
of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship (Williams 1977:

87). The culture had a strong association with tending and developing
agriculture. Cultural activities included the growth and tending of human
faculties too. In the form of cultivation, culture was also a laborious activity that
gradually reduced to the cultivation of human faculties.
Page 10 of 40

Introduction
But what is the notion of culture in the Indian context and what has been its
samskrita in the Ti-pitika, it means croatia (made), produced by a cause, created

things. The concept (p.13) of samskruti included things created by a human as
well as nature. As we can see sanskruti had a clear association with the
production process, but it was never limited to a civic and intellectual
production. At least, it was never limited to the things produced at the time of
leisure. Sharad Patil observes,
The formulation that samskruti or intellectual production is made in leisure

and leisure is available only to the upper classes, and hence upper classes
are the creators of culture, was first made by the philosophers of the Greek
slave society (2007: 182).
It is true, as it is also observed by Sartori (2008), that the genealogical roots of

culture come from the intellectual traditions of the West. However, I think the
dissociation of culture from labour activities happened in every society with the
division of labour and the formation of canons. I will discuss the canon formation
in the context of the Natyasastra where these tendencies are quite evident. But
what has happened at the level of discourse is more revealing. The upper class
social elites who largely came from aristocracy and feudal social background
tried to develop a high culture as a new enterprise upon the erasure of the
materiality of land and labour, more precisely manual and menial labour. They
started imposing their own notion of culture to denigrate cultures embedded in
labour activities and maintained this distinction to form civic canons.
Arguably, the history of culture is the history of this differentiation, resulting in

the formation of cannons that create a hierarchy of one over others. The
boundary between Culture and culture becomes the arbitrary manifestation of
This was one of the major reasons that led to the marginalization of the folk
performances of the subaltern communities. This marginalization did not happen
only at the discursive level; it had a strong material basis as well.
The discourses of the humanities and social sciences played an essential role in
shaping this distinction. While social sciences (p.14) carried out differentiation
through social norms, the discourse of humanities articulated differences
through symbolic names (Maxwell and Miller 2005: 3). Humanities placed it
under the regime of aesthetics in which culture came to serve as a marker of
values, tastes, attitudes, and experiences of social classes. The idea of culture as
a particular category was further concretized with the discourse of modernity.
Page 11 of 40

Introduction
This also has to do with the notion of aesthetic, civilization, and development of
the civic sense as well.
With the growth of a bourgeois notion of aesthetics and civilization in the

modern period, the idea of culture acquired a new connotation of being a
As this gap widened, art and culture became merely leisure activities that could
be mobilized or controlled to gain symbolic capital. At the same time, the
understanding of artistic production began to be established as being distinct
from both manufacturing and menial labour activities.
Namvar Singh argues how in the contact of aesthetics, artistic criteria became
the first condition to appreciate the culture. Since the artistic criteria were the
basis of aesthetics, they became the essential components of culture. It was
fundamentally believed that one who is capable of appreciating art has the real
The notion of high culture developed in close association to aesthetics and

civilization. Between culture, aesthetics, and civilization, it is difficult to make
out which has contributed to which. If we agree with Singh, then he would say
how culture devalued civilization. But this does not look logical. Culture existed
much before civilization in forms of language, communication, magic, and
beliefs. The story of civilization is also the story of the division of labour and
distinction of taste on the part of the act of civilizing. Civilization is associated
with the refinement of thought, manner, and taste. It represents a movement to
regime of art and aesthetics. The bourgeois notion of art and culture as leisure
activities (free activity) faced challenges from several scholars (Rojek 2010;
Thomson 1967; Williams 1977;). (p.15) Recently, there has been an attempt to
bring the question of labour in the field of art and culture. The discourse of
labour has experienced at once a significant revival and related openness.
Needless to say that there has been a cultural turn in labour studies and a
labour turn in cultural studies. This work stands at the intersection of this new
shift.
This dimension of labour as an affective, sensuous and creative activity connects

it to the artistic and cultural realm. Labour enters into the domain of
performance and aesthetics, and performance as labour becomes a hypothesis in
the formation of what I termed as cultural labour. Such performance with their
affective qualities becomes emblematic of the sensual, emotional and intuitive
investment. What does a performance produce, what do the performers invest
and how do the participants who create a new set of relationships become the
point of exploration? What cultural labour produces is cultural and aesthetic
Page 12 of 40

Introduction
labour and its circulation is a deeply current issue in Indian society and is
situated within the contemporary discourse of culture and politics.
Karl Marx has briefly discussed the relationship between art, creativity, and
non-alienated conditions, art and labour will not remain as two separate entities
rather functioning as co-producers. The possible claim provides the basis for a
humanist aesthetics (Bottomore 1983). Creative labour was supposed to bring
art and labour together in their self-creation, transformations, and mutual
manifestations. He envisioned a society in which not only art and leisure but also
labour will become creative. Marx introduced the idea of productive and
unproductive labour about capital. He was of the view that labour existed for its
determining factor of his division of productive and unproductive labour.
Milton, who did the Paradise Lost for five pounds, was an unproductive
labourer. On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his
publisher in factory style is a productive labourer ... A singer who (p.16)
sells her songs for her own account is an unproductive labourer. But the
same singer commissioned by an entrepreneur to sing in order to make
money for him is a productive labourer; for she produces capital. (Marx
1867: 389)
Marx recognizes that in the condition of alienation not only labour but art is also
alienated. Art itself becomes a commodity, and the relations of artistic
production reduce the position of the artistes to one of an exploited labourer.
Cultural labour becomes productive and unproductive simultaneously. What
a vital force to mask alienation. Cultural labour allows a simultaneous presence

of oppressive and liberatory impulses in its affective dimension and performative
expression. It produces a strange situation in which labour estrangement may
disappear at the affective level, but it may appear in performativity. Cultural
creative freedom is the basis of creative labour, the lack of freedom is the initial
condition of cultural labour.
Cultural labour is a particular form of labour, which not only produces a

performance of the work [performance] but also a certain kind of self-conception
and deception through it. Therefore, it becomes imperative to bring its
Guilia
Palladani (2012) remarked that such labour can be considered both as
paradigmatic for contemporary forms of precarious labour and also resonate
with echoes from marginal histories of performing arts. Cultural labour appears
closely related to the second aspect where it is a cultural expression of labouring
bodies. For example, in the case of Panwariya dance of Bihar, the performers
Page 13 of 40

Introduction
Sulabh 2009
some works on theatrical labour (Da Costa 2010, 2012; Rideout and Schneider
2012; Schimidt 2013
context for self-consumption and as part of a service and servitude, its new
meaning at the intersections of globalization cannot be undermined. Many
times, performances are taken out of their location and placed in a different
context. In that case, cultural labour may become part of a creative economy (p.
17) or render added affect in forms of a spectacle, as it happens in the case of
jhanki (tableau) from different regions on the eve of the Independence Day.
Sharmila Rege has used the term cultural labour to address the marginalization
of lavani and tamasa. Rege describes the cultural labour as those forms and
practices, which have roots in the social and material conditions of the Dalits
and bahujans (2002: 1040). She brings out the knotted problem of culture and
labour, and how widespread cultural practices of subaltern communities are
marginalized in the popular discourses because of its social and material
context. She criticized the postmodernist turn which emphasizes culture and
valorizes body. The labour concern has been so absent from the present cultural
Rege 2002:
1038). Rege argues that the performance traditions are neither just traditions of
resistance, nor are they just forms on which the bourgeois forms are
superimposed. They are at once emancipatory and imprisoning, containing and
resisting and, relatively, more or less affected and unaffected (in different
spheres) by capital... (2002: 1038). It can be argued that though the cultural
labour finds its strong manifestation in the language of performance, it is not
limited to the performative and expressive traditions; it is central to the ways
caste, and other hierarchies perform in Indian society. Thus, by analysing
cultural labour, one is not only engaging with the specific cultural enactments
but also its broader social and aesthetic structures.
With the rise of a bourgeois notion of aesthetics and civilization in the modern
period, the idea of culture acquired a new connotation of being a superior reality
antagonistic to acts of labour. As this trench widened, art and culture became
merely leisure activities that could be mobilized or controlled to gain symbolic
capital. At the same time, the understanding of artistic production began to be
established as being distinct from both manufacturing and menial labour
activities.
Dia Da Costa has flexibly used the nomenclature cultural labour to bring activist
theatre work within the orbit of labour historiography in her discussion on the
Buddhan theatre and its (p.18) creation of new values around the stigmatized
2012). She challenges the view, which asserts that capitalism has fully subsumed
artistic and cultural works. In her view, there is a need to analyse contested
Page 14 of 40

Introduction
theatrical form of cultural production as a space of political economy. In her
ironies of such performances is that performers are neither viewed as artistes

and nor as labourers. There is a reluctance to accept cultural work as labour.
Likewise, there is an apprehension to accept it as a work of artistic production. Though
she has not dealt with the intricacies of folk performance, her methodological
intervention helps us in expanding the field of labour studies. The Buddhan
theatre group transforms the stigma of criminality that regularly undermines the
survival of nomadic Chhara community in Gujarat, and produces a desire and
dignity to move away from stigmatized history.1 It takes the group a lot of labour
to construct this identity and create new values for the dominant belief systems.
of the concept has been more in the context of the creative economy. Her focus
in India cannot undermine the question of caste and labour. It is because the
labouring class in India are also labouring castes. It is labouring caste and
labouring class together that form subaltern communities in this work. Cultural
labour is also important in the light of argument made by Ford Smith that
cultural practices in South Asia are not studied as space of labour (1997). There
is a need to see these cultural practices as spaces of labour. However, the
problem is more pertinent as cultural labour is neither considered
(p.19) to explicit material production) and thus it becomes a category of

disavowal in the dominant discourses.
Emerging Conceptual Categories
Jati (caste) pervades nearly all spheres of Indian social, cultural, and political
life. It is deeply rooted in social and cultural institutions in India. The caste
system claims to have a divine origin and gets its sanction from religious and
philosophical texts; it has its commanding presence in rituals and customs.
Beyond texts, caste is a living practice in Indian society with each caste having
its own customs, practices, and rituals. It has its own informal rules and
legislations, which runs parallel to democratic institutions. Some scholars would
even claim that Brahminical-inscribed body politic has become the cornerstone
of the modern democratic institutions in India (Aloysius 2010; Anderson 2012).
performance of caste. In fact, the representation of the body in the performance

and the presentation of caste in everyday lives are two important sites of caste
practices in India. Until recently, there was a belief that caste would gradually
disappear with the vanishing of traditional social institutions. But the caste
system has been reinventing its structure, even so, to fit into the cosmopolitan
Page 15 of 40

Introduction
society. Studies have shown how caste system still persists in Indian cities and
among Indian diaspora (Jodhka 2014).
Caste is a ritualized system of exploitation having affective and performative
arrangement for appropriating labour, goods, and services from subordinate
institutionalized humiliation. When we see caste as humiliation, the notion of
Jodhka 2014). He points out

that how even the low ranks feel that they are privileged. This creates a multi-
layered (p.20) performativity where every caste tries to show itself in superior
light. In the graded system of hierarchy, whether it is caste system or corporate
system, performativity becomes the centre. Here, caste is a ceaseless
performance of caste values: humiliation and sense of privilege.
From a performance point of view, the Indian caste system is about the politics
of controlling bodies and spaces. Caste determines where one can perform and
where one cannot. Performance in a way becomes enactment of power (often
caste honour). It opens up various spaces of claims and counter-claims. To
delineate the politics of performance, one not only needs to know what they
perform but also why they perform the way they do. The condition of
performativity becomes more important than the question of representation.
This is significant because the meanings of cultural labour are inseparable from
their day-to-day struggles (Rege 2002). Arguably, caste is the most and the least
performative category of Indian society, which allows perpetual performance of
body and space. It will cease to exist without performance. Politics of cultural
labour is an enactment of power through performance. And, performance is a
representation of the political and cultural claims of different caste groups.
While performance is dynamic, its performativity is constrained by the caste
system. Caste system maintains hierarchical relationships between various
forms of performance and an absolute control of bodies and languages. In this
way, the caste system not only erases the liberating power and the efficacy of
performance but also limits the power of performing body and performance
spaces. Between control and fantasy, caste performance creates what Scott
performative text of a caste society.
The caste system and the performance of the subaltern communities cannot be
viewed in isolation. Scholars have argued how ritual and performance play a
significant role in maintaining the caste system and bondage relations (Raheja
1988; Prakash 1986), where performance becomes what Limon calls an
Scott (1987), Limon (1994), and
Narayan (2001) have argued, such a performance can resist domination through
Page 16 of 40

Introduction
performance strategies in order to come out (p.21) of marginality. What could

be the possible relationship between caste, cultural labour, and performance?
Mimesis has been the dominant mode of understanding the culture and
creativity of the subaltern communities in India (Menon 2006). Sanskritization
locates their culture and creativity in the light of upper caste ideology: the
performance becomes the mimesis of the upper caste culture (Dumont 1980;
Srinivas 1952). Subordinate classes are viewed as bereft of creative and cultural
expression. The cultural expression of upper castes becomes the basis of Indian
culture and ideology. In this understanding, the creativity of the subordinate
castes lies in replication, not in innovation (Menon 2006: xi). In other sides of
view, coming from Dalits and Bahujan scholars, subaltern communities are seen
as possessing an independent, autonomous culture that rejects any semblance to
the structures of Brahminical worldview.
While such performances are part of the caste system, they also stand against
the official religious cultures. They function as a repository of memories and
histories of a particular caste. Caste-based genealogy is based examples of this
practice. Unfortunately, the isolated places have the self and minds of the lower
orders. The performances, to an extent, resist homogenization of the religious
doctrinal unity. The subversive language and corporeality involved in such
performances make it difficult to accept by the puritanical religions.
N.B. Dirks (2001) warns anthropologists and others against essentializing caste
as a core of Indian society. Likewise, A.K. Ramanujan has also argued against
taking folklore as the culture of the low castes. The existing materials
nevertheless strongly suggest that the performance in significant ways is the
culture of the labouring lower castes. V.N. Rao (1985) argues that one should
have the courage to acknowledge the existence of jati-sanskruti in most forms of
our folk culture. Thereby, indicating that most of the folk performance genres in
has developed its own languages as well as narrative. They have developed their
Secondly, each jati has, over a period, developed its own language, its own
narrative tradition, dance, song, and (p.22) performance traditions. Each jati
has its own distinction and repository of culture and knowledge in this
segregated society. Mahendra Narayan Ram makes a similar point by saying
that, in the Mithila region of Bihar, most of the castes have their own gods,
goddesses, and ancestral spirits (2008: 33). Of course, there are folk
performances that have broken away from such caste lineages. Studies on the
folk culture of Telangana also support this claim by showing strong living
traditions of the Jambu Purana (caste-based epic traditions of Dalits) (Charlsey
and Kadekar 2004). It is true that lower caste and upper caste culture do not
Page 17 of 40

Introduction
exist in a complete separation, but an independent domain of lower caste culture

cannot be sidelined.
Katno Ahir hoy sayana, Lorik chhodh na gawhi gana

caste can become, he cannot sing except the Lorikayan).2 This popular saying is
not explicitly about one caste, but it is largely about the performance cultures in
a caste-based society. Caste is a social category here which also functions as
genres in performance. Caste has assigned roles both as characters on stage and
participants in celebration. This shows both the potentials and the limits of
caste-based communities and their performance cultures. So, if the Musahars
Likewise, the Doms worship Mansaram and Chhechhanmal and Chamars follow
the fact that the epic stories are generally sung by people belonging to the lower
strata of society (1989: 62). One can argue that not only folk performances in
India follow the caste lines, but they also perform their corresponding castes in
their performances. It is not a religion, but caste works as the major
contradiction of folk society. Caste becomes the main motif in the folk
performance. In other words, the performance of cultural labour in India is
about jati-chetna (caste-consciousness). Folk (p.23) performance in India is a
genealogy of caste-based performance in the first order. Caste mediates their
languages, spaces, bodies, and materiality of performance. Ironically, caste
ghettos have preserved histories, genres, and embody skills of the castes in their
segregated spaces.
In a caste-based society, caste as a culturally defined group functions as a

cultural repertoire. This is the reason that each caste has created its own
rhythmic language, song, musical pattern, and even musical instruments across
India. In Bihar, if the dhobi (washermen) have their dhobia-nac, then the Kahaars
(traditionally a community of palanquin bearers) (have their kahaar-nach. If the
Yadavas are happy with their birha, then the Musahars (traditionally a caste of
rat-catchers) feel proud in singing the song of Dina-Bhadri (an epic story of two
brothers who fought against feudal system) The cultural and performance
repertoire of the lower-castes not only tell the story of atrocities and oppression
but also their struggles as well as creative imagination. The performance of the
lower-caste spirit worship has endured because of the fixity of the division of
labour. The fixity of a community based on caste over time resulted in the
performances have a potential to bring forth the spatial and historical

consciousness of the particular caste community. It can be argued that this has
further resulted in the making of their special consciousness.
Page 18 of 40

Introduction
The Natyasastra divulges the whole gamut of the hegemonic politics of

representation and counter-hegemony of the other. It describes the first play,
Samundramanthan (The Churning of the Sea), in which the asuras (demons)
were shown as defeated. Against this (mis)representation, the asura members
among the audiences went on a rampage. They burnt down the stage to the
ground and paralyzed the memory and the speech of the actors. When Brahma,
the creator of the natya, asked them why they were spoiling the theatrical
(p.24) Verse
Samundramanthan was not just a play, it was the politics of representation. The
Cultural labour is the performance of labouring bodies in indirect but real sense.
It does not have the freedom to choose its context and performance. On the
contrary, the context plays a far more determinative role in deciding the terms of
performance. Rigidly hierarchical society cannot provide the active context for
creative articulation. The lack of freedom is the condition in which such
performance functions. Ambedkar discusses Balais caste of Maharashtra (2014:
215). He writes how in all Hindu marriages, balais were supposed to play music
before the procession and during the marriage. He emphasizes on the point that
how the balai caste was taught to render services without resentment but only
with passion. This rule for balais is not written in any text, but it is very much a
part of their cultural practices. While bodies and spaces embody and enact the
codes of performance, performance encodes bodies and spaces.
Cultural labour may abjure the feeling of labour alienation and hostility coming
from the actual material relationship. Despite the sense of alienation and
realization of consciousness, cultural labour as an affect may work to erase that
sense of alienation. Performers can perceive the social desire for culture not as
Klein and
Kunst 2012). Performers may feel a sense of desire that shrouds their
enslavement because of their artistic passion and emotional attachment. For that
matter, labouring bodies can exhaust their physical energy to the level of
corporeal bodies as it happens in many ritual contexts, for example, in the case
of vattakali of Adiyas and Paniyas community in Kerala (Menon 2015). However,
cultural labour can also work in an opposite way where it can usher passionate
inspiration to resist hierarchies in an impossible context. The performance of
oppressive structures of feeling and symbols are overturned for an emancipatory

project. They have transformed oppressive ritual symbols into the performance
of mobilization. But this is not only about the political performance; even in
traditional contexts, rituals (p.25) are often transformed. The ballad of Dina-
Page 19 of 40

Introduction
Bhadri in Bihar and Icchakiamma in Tamil Nadu are such examples where
oppressed castes have affectively turned the tables of oppression.
Land and Landscape

The performance produces a set of relationship with the land. It gives names of
places and encodes values on them. The characters or human figures need to be
grounded somewhere, memory needs its location. The songs and performances
create pathways. In turn, paths become song lines, a long narrative excursion
Pearson and Shanks 2001: 135). Since

places are fusions of experience, landscape, and location, they are necessarily
bound by time and memory as well.
Williams has discussed how in the construction of elitist notions of art and
culture, the culture was separated from agriculture and cultivation. Sharad Patil
(2007) brings this tension in the Indian aesthetic context by arguing how the
nature. Sanskruti in its elitist construction obliterated land and agriculture.

Indian rasa aesthetics model tends to marginalize aesthetic categories related to
land and agriculture. Divorced from the concerns of land, labour, and
agricultural life-worlds, the elite discourses gradually obfuscated artistic
categories such as landscape and materiality. Estranged from its spirit and
materiality, the landscape got relegated to formalistic depictions. Landscape
otherwise should have been a more immediate and experiential category to
discuss aesthetics in a mostly agrarian society and region-based cultures. In
most of the cases, the beauty of nature is not viewed as an essential connection,
Pearson and Shanks 2001). It is rather viewed as a field of

touristic gaze, a place of musing, a distant land, and hunting field. In most of the
Indian classical plays, for example in Abhigyan Shakuntalam, it was touristic
(p.26) almost any nuance or gradation

Bharucha 2003: 36). Komal Kothari in conversation with Bharucha
has focused more on the material culture around land. Scholars like Ryden
(1993) and Kothari (in Bharucha 2003) have indicated a strong relationship
between land and epics and performance. The folk performances are rooted in
land and lands are encoded with values. The category of land is personified, and
its nomenclature suggests its quality. The land is identified in relation to
language. Every part of land has created an environment around it. The
landscape is rooted in material and cultural practices around the land.
Unlike the dominant Rasa-aesthetic of north India, there was a great emphasis
on landscape in the Sangam poetics of south India. Tinai (often translated as
landscape or poetic situation) was widely used as a poetic category resembling
landscape or setting, which was a taxonomy of regions and feelings. Tinai as an
Page 20 of 40

Introduction
idea of landscape covers a wide human experiences, however, in the dominant

readings of Tamil poetics, it was debased to express two idealized objects of
poetry: love poetry and war poetry. In the context of cultural labour, we need to
address the question of landscape not as an idealized object of feeling as in the
case of tinai poetics of love and war, but the landscape as experiences. Scholars
have even tried to establish a geographic and material practical basis of tinais.
As Devadevan observed, tinai was an idea that revealed the crisis of transition
that people were facing at that moment in history (2006). There can be a doubt
about how much tinai represents that historical crisis, but it at least brings
regional expressions in its manifestations.
Andrew Sartori (2008)
notion of culture which was against agriculture. For Tagore, kristi (agriculture)
Sartori 2008: 3). Sartori pointed out
how sanskruti was understood to mean something like purification, the
grossly
material. In fact, Tagore had deep abhorrence for agriculture. Rabindranath
Tagore, the iconic literary and cultural figure, launched a campaign in the 1930s
to raise sanskruti (culture) to its (p.27) supremacy and to downgrade to
marginality its chief rival kristi. He writes,
There exist various skills for filling our stomachs and fulfilling the
of the mind in various ways to a variety of sensibilities, he has literature
and factories; literature in the field of his sanskruti, here occurs the
sanskruti of his own self, through it he raises himself in every respect, he
the sanskruti
erasure of land, materiality, and everyday life struggle. The notion of art and
culture is constructed on the erasure of land, materiality, and the labouring
body. He saw culture and agriculture had two different purposes, but in its
usage, culture was juxtaposed with agriculture to create supremacy of the
former. Agriculture was viewed as being bereft of culture, and so were the
people and communities associated with agricultural work. In India, it meant a
rejection of the culture of the popular masses who directly or indirectly depend
on land and agriculture.
While the landscape is viewed in a touristic gaze or a field of leisure or in the

context of tinais, culture gets a supreme status cut off from labour activities.
This leads to a formulation that sanskruti or intellectual production only happens
in leisure time. Since leisure is available only to the upper classes, it is the upper
Page 21 of 40

Introduction
classes who are the real creators of culture. The habit of thinking of culture as
an independent activity from labour is ingrained (Patil 2006: 185). With the
influence of Aristotelian poetics in modern discourses, the thought that leisure is
an indispensable precondition to living a life of virtue (aesthetics is also one of
the attributes) got further strengthened. Culture practices that had a close
association with labouring activities denigrated further. It needs to be pointed
out that for many performers and participants, enactments are not purely leisure
activities, they are simultaneously leisure and labour activities.
Materiality and the Performance of Disgust
labour. In the first case, performers are involved (p.28) in manual labour. In the
second case, the performers in their representation bring various aspects
including the materiality of manual labour. Representation of manual labour on
stage also becomes problematic. The existing prejudice towards these folk
performances is a result of deeper entrenched prejudice against manual labour.
Cultural labour brings body with all its materiality. To an extent, it denies the
performance of spirituality and immateriality. Even the spiritual experiences are
brought back to the level of materiality when it encounters the performance of
cultural labour. For example, Krishna, who became a divine figure during the
Bhakti period, transformed into a migrant labourer in his encounter with the
experiences of bidesia. It may also happen that labour itself becomes a spiritual
experience (in the context of Bhakti of the lower social order). As it happens in
the case of the songs and cultural practices of Bhakti poets from the lower
orders who exalted kayika (labour) to the spiritual experience. Once Brahminical
ideology based on purity and priesthood became a canon, the performance
cultures based on manual labour became a disgrace. The Natyasastra clearly
draws a connection creating a canon based on priesthood leading to the
relegation of the performance cultures of the lower classes.
Bhartendu Harishchandra, the Hindi poet, playwright, and essayist, classified

dramatic enactment in three categories: kavya misra (mixed poetry), suddha
kautuka (pure spectacle), and bhrasta (corrupt). He valourized Sanskrit drama
as an example of kavya misra, which represents the best of all. He downplayed
puppetry and mime as suddha kautuka, which do not have meaning and
expression. Most interestingly, he repudiated popular forms of bhand (humour),
tamasa, jatra
kavyahina (devoid
of poetic quality). Harishchandra indirectly hinted that earlier these bhrasta
forms had some poetic quality and only later they have become kavyahina. But
how did they become kavyahina? Who corrupted the poetic quality of the forms
to the extent to make them kavyahina. During the colonial and the nationalist
period and with the emergence of the middle class, such remarks on popular
Page 22 of 40

Introduction
subaltern performances were not unusual. Commenting on (p.29) the disgust

in jatra performance in Bengal, the Calcutta Review remarked,
Their sooty complexions, their coal-black cheeks, their haggard eyes, their
long-extended arms, their gaping mouths and their puerile attire, excite
disgust. For the screeching of the night-owl, the howling of the jackals, and
the barking of the dogs are harmony itself compared to their horrid yells
Mehtar [member of
the lowest-caste in the Hindu social order] who enters the stage with a
broomstick in his hand and cracks a few stupid jests which set the
audience in a roar of laughter. (emphasis added; quoted. in Chatterjee
2007: 120)
The haggard eyes and long, extended arms, and figurative extensions of the
performers are simply about jatra performers, but it symbolizes manual labour.
Along with manual labour, these performances are also viewed as lacking skills.
The Calcutta Review
underlying abhorrence of labouring bodies and their public enactments. The
presence of labouring bodies is graphically depicted by their sooty complexions,
their coal-black cheeks, their haggard eyes, their long, extended arms with a
broomstick in their hands. Who were/are the Mehtars? Mehtars and Doms were
the lowest of all castes in India, despised even by many untouchables. They are
traditionally engaged in sweeping, scavenging, and performing polluting and
defiling tasks as removing the carcases of dead animals and carrying dead
bodies of humans to burning ghats and arranging funeral pyres. This caste is
engaged with the body in its most polluting states. On the stage, they were
buffoons, tumblers, and dancers. With the emergence of the middle class, the
part of this project, the corrupt elements had to be erased, and popular forms
needed to be sanitized. Writing on the fate of the popular enactments, A.N.
Perumal, a Tamil historian, made a stingy remark on street performers that
needs to be quoted in length to render the politics of aesthetics. He writes,
The selfless services of erudite scholars have resurrected the Tamil drama
from the pits of negligence and withering. In the hands of (p.30) street
dancers drama became worse and worse losing its artistic value.
Throughout the night they shouted and hooted in the name of singing and
hopped and leapt instead of acting. In the morning they went from door to
door with stretched arms to get something to fill their belly. Their action on
stage and their behaviours on the streets were nothing but a great
disgrace to the noble art. Respectable people looked at them with utter
contempt. Something substantial had to be done to restore the stage from
the ugly hands of these street dancers. A few eminent men came forward
with great determination. They modernised the Tamil stage with high aims
and aspirations. Since their services were meritorious and highly valuable,
Page 23 of 40

Introduction
39)
Hannah de Bruin (1999) has discussed the fate of kuttu (street) artists in
therrakuttu performance traditions in Tamil Nadu. How does the name
therrakuttu create a sense of disgust among the elites? Participation in art and
culture had come to be about social and cultural capital. It was not about the
class status and formation of new taste and sensibility based on Sanskrit drama
and Western plays. Drama used to be discussed not in the context of its actual
performance but that of dramatic literature. Writing on Gujarati theatre, H.N.
Bhavai was the only drama liked by the people, rather by the people of the low
been a shift in the way in which folk and regional performances were viewed and
denigrated, the attitudes continue to remain the same. The cultures, civilized,
and aestheticized notion of culture has created the notion of disgust which
becomes the point of differentiation. Elite scholars found their own justifications
without blaming their own incapability and caste background. Kapila Vatsayayan
(1997 [1974]
the British in the early nineteenth century was isolated from the artistic
but social gaps were already there. She regrets that because of the absence of
(p.31) by the twentieth century and what
could be seen of it was only a diluted, almost degenerated form of what was
known as Sadir in the South. It was like a shadow of a bygone
Vatsayayan 1997 [1974]: 8). For the marginalization of subaltern
performance traditions, both the nationalist and postcolonial scholars have
conveniently put the onus on colonial education and the modernist project.
However, what Perumal and Vatsayayan were arguing in the nineteenth century
can be found in the Natyasastra. In Origin of Natya, Bharata describes how
Natya was created,
When Kritayuga (the Golden Age) passed with the reign of

Svaayambhuva
And Tretayuga (the Silver Age) commenced with the rule of
Vaivasvata Manu
Under the sway of desire and greed, people were getting inclined to
Gramyadharma [popular folk culture of the common villagers]
Then gods under the leadership of Indra went to meet Brahma and
requested him
To devise a play by which Sudra (the lower-castes) can be instructed
in the Vedas [As Sudras were mainly involved in Gramyadharma, who
could not follow Vedic rules because the Vedas were in Sanskrit].
Veda is created for all the
varna people.
Page 24 of 40

Introduction
Verse
the varna (used for four varnas) people. The verse clearly spells out the politics
and aesthetics of gramyadharma (rural performance) and its aims. I will argue
that there is not much difference between the anxiety felt by Bharatmuni and
Kapila Vatsayayan. For both of them, the theatre was a morality project, and
they aimed to raise popular theatre to the level of canonical aesthetics by
erasing the labouring bodies. There is no doubt that the threat perception and
anxiety of labouring bodies solidified with the colonial intervention and the
evident, this threat perception was not completely a modern phenomenon and
not just a local Indian phenomenon. (p.32) It appears that the phenomenon
started with the formation of the civic notion of art and culture and because of
disavowal of labouring activities in aesthetics.
Grotesque and Subversion

Stallybrass and White (1986) have suggested a framework to explicate the
axioms of hierarchies in cultural practices. In their view, if we study the symbolic
of extremes of the cultural practices, one can lay bare a framework of discourse
within which any judicious questions must take place. The conceptual framework
particularly works in a carnivalesque context where inversion and grotesque
become a mode of resistance. However, the system of extremes in the Indian
context has graded extremities in which the grotesque as an aspect of
subversion stops working after a point.
Cultural labour is an enactment of defiled bodies of the labouring lower castes,

which excites disgust for the social elites. What is the performance all about?
How to study these bodies which engender disgust in their physicality and
theatricality? Are they just about exploitation of labour or do they also possess
Rabelais has
become the figure to analyse such cultural enactments of the subaltern
discursive norms of impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories),
heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitance,
clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements, a focus on gaps, orifices, and
symbolic filth, materiality, and parody. They are the figures with
disproportionate corporeality, horrid laudability, and peripheral presence.
Stallybrass and White (1986) bring the notion of taboo-laden hierarchies that
produce the classical and the grotesque body. The grotesque body functions as a
perpetual enemy on which the classical body has to be persistently transfixed. In
carnivalesque frameworks, the grotesque libidinal bodies become the centre of
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Introduction
(p.33) analysis. The frame though refers to economic interactions, but overall
libidinal shapes overshadow the labouring bodies. One can see the joker of
bidesia as a carnivalesque figure, but he is equally a figure of irony.
Disgust and defilement emerge as essential themes to discuss the performance
who mobilize civic and religious authorities against the performance cultures of
differentiation of high and low, and purity and impurity. While the carnivalesque
understanding of culture brings the language and materiality of labouring body,
it evades the question of labour. The understanding offers a ritualistic
abhorrence to dirt, blood, and lower bodily stratum were merely about taboo
and therefore, they wanted to maintain distance from the impure and profane
elements. Here, libidinal and labouring bodies cannot be viewed in isolation
from the centre; both were rather complementary to each other. I would rather
argue that the labouring body with its closeness to the body in its most polluting
states was the source of disgust.
Secondly, the carnivalesque approach creates a robust framework of counter-

discourse, but it does not address the alternative possibility embedded in such
performances. Carnival emerges as deconstruction, but as Eagleton (1981)
suggests, it is more than deconstruction. By rendering existing power structures
alien and arbitrary, it also ushers potentials. He remarks about how utopian
aspects of performances are subordinated mainly to its satirical functions. Third,
depends on a permissible rupture of hegemony (1981: 148). In Indian caste-

based segregated spaces, which are again ritually sanctioned spaces, one also
approach that they were able to see satires but not the irony embedded in the
carnival.
traditions in the eyes of the puritanical elites? The example is not an exception.
In fact, the attitude needs to be understood (p.34) as a larger cultural
phenomenon that happens everywhere in the process of construction of what
Stallybrass and White (1986)
Stallybrass and White (1986) have suggested a methodological tool to explicate

the basis of hierarchies, though they did not say that hierarchies are constantly
performed. In their view, if we study the symbolic extremities of the exalted and
Page 26 of 40

Introduction
the base, we should be able to explicate the key themes of the contested sites,
both time and space.
Cultural Capital and Cultural Labour

Smita Tewari Jassal (2012) has used an ethnographic analysis of folk song to
examine the ongoing system of inequality with reference to caste and gender
division in north India. While sung in Bollywood context, song and performance
offers an enormous cultural capital for the singer who comes from a class
background. The songs, as Jassal underlines, have transgressive potential but
fail to generate cultural capital for the singers. She rightly observes how the
social reformers of the nineteenth century tried to regulate and sanitize
indecent songs were expunged, and new ideal songs were introduced to give a
class of women their cultural status. This has happened more or less in the field
of dance, theatre, and music as well. While getting trained in classical dance and
music acts as a cultural asset to the social elites and middle classes, the same
puts them into oblivion. For the former, it creates cultural capital, for another, it
becomes shame and denigration. There are many examples in traditional Indian
performances where male artistes who impersonate females not only become an
object of ridicule, in their locality, in the eyes of social elites but also a figure of
humiliation. They are physically and sexually harassed on an everyday basis on
streets, for being effeminate. There are many such examples where we can see
these culturally entrenched (p.35) paradoxes. While a famous Bhojpuri song,
become famous overnight. So, what is this politics of cultural accumulation that
makes one privileged and the other disadvantaged? Gopal Guru (2016) observes
a similar dilemma in the case of a leather cricket ball. He tried to understand
how a leather ball becomes special in the hand of an upper caste, while connotes
something else in the hands of the Dalits. Even the ball becomes precious, but
the person who is engaged in making the ball remain denigrated. Ironically, the
real value of cultural labour in Indian society lies in the devaluation of its
artistes and performers, often in forms of shame, humiliation, and exploitation.
However, this experience cannot be generalized. This value can be subverted
where the value can be viewed as a cultural capital of the subaltern
communities. It is true that social elites try to devalue the immense contribution
of artistes, but they generally get respect from their own communities. Hasan
and Kalapura (2009) have shown this connection in the context of Dalit and
subaltern performances in Bihar. They have observed that performers are
viewed differently in different social classes.
Page 27 of 40

Introduction
Pierre Bourdieu (1986) defines cultural capital as a social relation within a

system of exchange that includes accumulated cultural knowledge, which
confers power and status. He has argued that cultural knowledge and cultural
experiences are an asset, and like economic capital, cultural capital can be
accumulated and inherited. In case of cultural labour, accumulated cultural
knowledge may well disempower the artistes and performers. He rightly
concludes that cultural capital was being used to enforce a distinction between
an empowered ruling class and a disempowered working class. It is cultural
labour that gets excluded from the legitimate culture. Here, if capital can be
understood as embodied labour then what is cultural labour? Disembodied
labour? Alienated labour? Bourdieu has classified cultural capital in three forms
in which they exist as embodied state, objectified state, and institutionalized
state (1986: 47). The (p.36) most fundamental aspect of the value of cultural
coming from lineage. But it is the body that gives it a recognition of capital; the
body which already is part of a particular community. In the case of cultural
based Indian society, it is the ideology of untouchability that provides a

definitional ground for corporeal touch (Guru 2016). Labouring bodies involved
in manual labour are perceived as unclean and obnoxious, and after that
whatever accumulation the bodies learn as art and culture are perceived from
the viewpoint of the obnoxious filth, and therefore their accumulation can never
generate cultural capital unless the order is not subverted and challenged.
The function of cultural labour is the reverse of cultural capital. It can also be
asserted that one part of cultural capital is constructed through the production
of cultural labour. But cultural labour is much broader than the overall spheres
of cultural capital as discussed by Bourdieu. Another dimension of cultural
capital can be understood regarding the mobility of the participants. Cultural
capital as an asset gives social mobility to its participants. Cultural labour has an
immense potential of mobilization but generally, it tends to enslave its
participants. The use of cultural labour and its potential mobility depends on the
ideology employed. Of course, it has two different meanings for the elite class
and the subaltern communities. Despite contributing enormous cultural labour,
it may be possible that its value is not recognized. There are cases where the
acquired cultural labour may disempower the individual and the collective.
There are also examples where the artistes are appreciated for their skills and
have a special status in their own society. But in that case, cultural labour does
not match the disseminative power of cultural capital and its relationship with
recognized unless they do not use the cultural capital provided by the owners of
the cultural capital. Despite his popularity, Bhikhari Thakur could not get
recognition for his work until he was discovered by Jagadish Chandra Mathur.
(p.37)
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Introduction
Bourdieu has pointed out that habitus is central to cultural capital. Coming from
segregated colonies, performers of cultural labour face all sorts of
discrimination because of their habitus association. Their primary cultural
kis basti ka hai (which slum he/
she belongs to). So cultural labour is not simply an idea of folk performance, it is
also performed on an everyday basis. Cultural labour is directly related to
cultural capital, it works as an institution that gives access and legitimacy to its
performers. Once individuals or groups are part of that cultural labour, there is a
chance that their cultural capital in either way is going to be impacted. The
devaluation of cultural labour is based on the notion of being socially superior to
the lower castes.
In most of the cases, subaltern communities are engaged in menial labour. In

fact, it appears that the relationship between the performer and communities
and manual labour and its proximity to extreme corporeality is one of the main
reasons for its denigration. Since the public spheres and the dominant cultural
spheres are defined by purity and bodily integrity, many performances become
an aberration. In the context of manual labour and cultural practices, Antonio
becomes a canon that manual labour becomes a disgrace but the very
foundation of the principle is based on its hostility to manual labour. This
relationship between priesthood and manual labour is primarily maintained
through cultural practices in most of the societies. This work brings forth the
politics and aesthetics of Indian subaltern performances and their affective
presence in forms of cultural labour in the Indian, caste-based society.
Geographies of Performance
In most of the cases, folk performances are region-specific performance
traditions in India and South Asia. They hold topographic (p.38) phenomenon
of both natural histories and local histories. The question of local and region, as
well as place and landscape, becomes vital in their construction. In a reciprocal
relationship, the performances produce region, but they also get produced
through the regions. While I understand the regional sensitivity and regional
expressions closely associated with this performance, some key features of the
performances go beyond local and regional particularities. G. Aloysius brings
this point to the fore by arguing that the very core of the social construction of
labour that primarily lies at the heart and root of the production and
Aloysius 2013: 19)
If the region is about differentiating principle, it can also be discussed in its
similarities with other regions. Regional particularities often undermine this
connection. Bihar and Telangana are two regions and states apart, but their
Page 29 of 40

Introduction
experiences and historical formation bring them together. What is special about
the performance is that we can see a pattern of aesthetics and a pattern of
marginality across the regions.
Aloysius 2013: 30). I consider the region as suggested by Aloysius as
Aloysius 2013: 31). Aloysius points out that even while the researcher
is engaged with a single region, there are similar and several other regions
differentiated according to the same criteria moving in the background. This
reading offers a conceptual framework to see cultural labour as a trans-regional
and trans-cultural category based on similar expressions and experiences. And,
if the region is structured by the same factors and ideology, then it should
theoretically be possible to extend such differentiation of regions as a principle
to an entire area (Aloysius 2013: 31).
Bihar and Telangana as regions may vary geographically, but they share some
regions have a minimal interface (p.39) with direct colonialism. Both regions
bereft of artistic and cultural practices (emphasis added) (1975:

1). The regions are supposed to have a less advanced culture, unlike Bengali,
determining other factors. The region becomes a model to bring regional

sensitivity, experience, and expression to discuss the marginalization of specific
styles of performances.
Despite rapid urbanization and forced displacement, India is still, primarily, a
below the poverty line, and half of them are agricultural labourers (Census of
India 2011). Agricultural labourers, small farmers, and casual workers constitute
a significant section of the poor. Most of them represent not only the lower class
but also the Dalits and lower caste section of the society. These facts are crucial
in this study, as these are the contexts in which the performance of cultural
labour works. Pauperization of the small peasantry and their migration to cities
as the workforce have also influenced the performance in a significant way.
The fieldwork for this research has been mostly conducted in four districts of
Bihar, namely Patna, Nalanda, Vaishali, and Jahanabad in addition to the city of
Hyderabad and its suburban areas. At present, Bihar has the third largest
population in the country and is the most impoverished state in India with a per
per cent of the population of Bihar depends upon agriculture, and 32 per cent of
Page 30 of 40

Introduction
the total population of the state lives below the poverty line (Census of India
2011). From the colonial period to the present, Bihar continues to be the biggest
supplier of the cheapest labourers across India. It also has the lowest literacy
rate in India. According to the 2011 Census, the total literacy rate was 61.8 per
cent. Among the lower-caste communities, this percentage would not be more
than 30 per cent (Census of India 2011). Most people belonging to lower castes
are engaged in agricultural work, (p.40) with the Backward Castes as middle
and small peasants and the Dalits as the landless agricultural labourers and
service providers. Both small peasants and agricultural labourers seasonally
migrate to cities as unskilled labourers. With the assertion of Dalits and the
lower castes in the public sphere, the state witnessed brutal caste conflicts
between the dominant and lower castes. The situation in the Telangana region in
Andhra Pradesh is more or less similar.
Due to the absence of a significant middle class and due to underdevelopment,

the region continues to harbour precolonial cultural practices. However, many of
these performances mark a shift from the traditional caste order (de Bruin 1999:
146; Charsley and Kadekar 2007:123). During the colonial period and later in
the aftermath of globalization, the folk performances have gone through a
radical transformation. While performances like yakashgana and bidesia went
through successful commercialization, the performance of bhuiyan puja and
other ritual enactments still exist as community practices. It is not possible to
discuss all the performance traditions of the region, but performances and
festivals like Chhath puja, karma, chakwa-chakaiyi, jat-jatin, and domkach and
3
Most of these
performances are going through a drastic change in terms of their production
and reception, especially with the ever increasing presence of mass media. Some
new performances have also been making their inroads like orchestra party,
jagarna and the pujas based on television soap operas. It used to be believed
that these performances are gradually going to become marginal and eventually
disappear, but the recent trends show that they are making a strong comeback
with the revival of a local and regional identities and democratization of socio-
political spheres.
(p.41) Materials and Methods

This work draws on the interdisciplinary methodology of humanities and social
sciences with specific methods of theatre historiography and performance
analysis. Recognizing that both are different, this volume uses both to serve
specific purposes. In the absence of archives and documents, it is difficult to
delineate when writing uses performance analysis and when the distance from
the performance becomes theatre historiography. It would also be a challenge to
maintain the distinction between text and performance, myth and history and
reality and fiction. For example, when it comes to writing historiography of folk
performance, I have employed theatre historiography, but in case of writing on
live performance, I have employed performance analysis.
Page 31 of 40

Introduction
Marxism and Literature (1977) and various essays on culture provides a core
methodological framework for this work. Though Sharad Patil (2007) has not
referred to the works of Williams, their approach to cultural production and
aesthetic formations show profound similarities. Two crucial key terms provide
methodological tools for this analysis: affect/aesthetics and performativity or
what Mojca Puncer (2011: 409) calls the affective performativity. He argues that,
The cultural turn in aesthetics itself brings us an open mind platform,

where the historical methods of studying the senses, emotions and feelings
embodied in art objects are increasingly substituted by studies of
aesthetical processes and performativity.
Recognizing that culture has various dimensions, I am interested in affective and

performative dimensions. In this direction, Richerson and Boyd define culture as
other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of
producing an act of culture as labour. Cultural labour embodies, what Raymond
(p.42)
potentials of the culture.4 Similarly, he offers a novel approach to understand the

nature of cultural production. He discusses dominant, residual, and emergent
practices in tradition and their dynamic interrelations. Williams argues that any
culture includes available elements of its past, but their place in the
contemporary cultural process is profoundly variable. Unlike his predecessors,
the past, but in the present. He argues that,
The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is
still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an
element of the present. Thus, certain experiences, meanings and values
which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the
or formation (Williams 1977: 122).
the fixity of the modern, traditional, and contemporary. Williams (1977) was of
the view that while the residual can be incorporated, there is something
inherently oppositional counter-hegemonic, and indeed threatening in its very
Page 32 of 40

Introduction
experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects,
the centre of performance which connects and cuts across regions and cultures
in Indian caste-based society, I have tried to offer a conceptual framework that
has the potential to restructure its own materials and methods. Cultural labour
is the enactments of labouring bodies. Existing studies have focused on relations
between produced institutions, formations, (p.43) and experiences. Cultural
labour, in a strict sense, is neither ideology nor a structure, rather it can be
structures, it works as a force that has potential to subvert the structure.
concerned with meaning and values as lived and felt the force. Cultural labour
as structures of feeling brings affective elements of consciousness and
relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought of feeling as felt value
and taking feelings as thoughts. It creates a force of encounter in which cultural
labour, which appears to be regressive, may become a transformative force.
Social theorists have examined social institutions and their analysis based on
relations between produced institutions, formations, and experiences. In this
In
a cultural context, he suggests us to present them in active reading. The
challenge is how to present caste-based performances in its manifestation with
an affective presence. Williams complicates the idea of the hegemonic and
shows us potential to think about counter-hegemony as an alternative hegemony.
approach and gives us an initial frame to grasp some of these nuances in the
Indian context.
and performance helped me to engage with the volatile performance materials

in the context of cultural struggles and power relationship. Performance as the
elementary constituent of culture and the ultimate unit of observation emerges
as a key concept to work with and the lens to conceptualize the cultural
phenomenon. Performance is important because it resists culture to end at the
level of cognitive reductionism. The performances are dynamic, ephemeral,
volatile, but nonetheless framed, repeated, and recognizable enactments.
Scholars from anthropology and various other disciplines have already
demonstrated strong possibilities for a performance-centered approach in the
performance as a unit of observation (1972), (p.44)
importance of performance, Bauman believes that a performance-centred

Page 33 of 40

Introduction
certain behaviours. It is central to so many things. [...]. Performance

enables people to negotiate their way through the various realms of being.
things to be looked at differently [...]. There is a kind of performativity all

around. (2009)
I have used both affective and performative aspects of performance to explore

the field of study. I discuss the performance within two intersecting planes:
aesthetic or affective and performative. While the affective dimension examines
the values performance produces, the performative dimension explores the
Bell 2008: 116). From a
performative perspective, culture is more like a vortex than a variable
(Conquergood 2013: 17). Affective forms and performativity or affective
of emotional and affective forms and meanings, and their evaluations in a

Puncer 2011: 409).
Theron Schmidt (2013) offers schemata to understand the two kinds of work.
The first type of work, as he suggests, is just
anonymous form of capital. He refers to Marx who says that this is the site of the
form, circulating independently, and defined precisely by its abstraction from the
labour that went into it (2013: 15). He discusses the third kind of work, that is,
the work of art or performance that consists of the ordinary hidden labour that
goes (p.45) into producing it. He suggests two primary ways in which the
relationship between theatre, performance, and labour take place in
sometimes as affect, sometimes as performativity and at times as affective
performance of cultural labour as (1) an object of study; (2) a model and a

method, and (3) as an alternative space of struggle (1989: 318). Performance
theory has also emerged as a new way of approaching South Asian theatre,
performance, and culture with the recent works of Afzal-Khan (2005), Chatterjee
(2007), Dutt and Munsi (2010), and Menon (2013). By employing the lens of
performance studies, this work tries to offer a new way of exploring the field.
Page 34 of 40

Introduction
The works of Limon and Lombardi Satriani on folklore offer a specific approach
to engage with the particular nature of the folk performance. I take the cultural
practices lying in the field of contestations where every class and caste wants to
appropriate the cultural materials in their own ways. Located in local and
Satriani
1974
and behaviour visible even today in the folk world are substantially different
from those of the dominant class. It is because both the economy and culture to
Limon (1983) challenges two
character is in some way inherently opposed to the dominant social order. And
become crucial in the analysis of the folk performance of the subaltern

communities in India. It needs a critical review in the light of changing the
structure of performance and mobility and migration of communities.
Based on ethnographic research, archival material, and personal memory, this

approach indirectly emphasizes performance as a site of struggle where
competing interests intersect and dominant ideologies may be reproduced,
reinforced, or resisted (Conquergood 2013). While performance here functions
as an epistemic as well (p.46) as an analytical tool, critical ethnography
provides an ethical responsibility to address processes of what Soyini Madison
Madison 2005
approaches have proved useful and engaging for the study of marginalized
cultures and communities. Both of them have placed ethics of representation at
the centre of their strategy. The critical ethnography offers a space to reflect,
revisit, rethink, rearrange, and analyse our own position to renew the
scholarship for a better dialogue.
visceral presence, performativity (the way people present themselves and make
meaning of their lives), and theatricality and corporeality (embodied
performative presence in caste-based Indian society. Although these thematic

materials are broadly conceived in the scope of folk performance in India and
South Asia (at least in caste-based societies), my method is to study them at
limited sites. This work is based on two years of fieldwork, but it is also a
reflection of a long-term association with the field of study. The fieldwork was
conducted in my home region of Bihar, where I was born and spent twenty years
Page 35 of 40

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
les vallées, et, sur la pente de la colline arrondie, recouverte d’une
croûte de glace polie, s’accroche une vague lueur de lune,
ressemblant plutôt à une traînée visqueuse de limace. Une ou deux
fois, peut-être, en hiver, les grands flamboiements du Nord se font
voir entre la lune et le soleil, de sorte qu’à ces deux lumières
irréelles viennent s’ajouter l’éclat et le jaillissement de l’Aurore
Boréale.
En Janvier ou en Février ont lieu les grandes tempêtes de glace,
lorsque chaque branche, chaque brin d’herbe, chaque tronc est
revêtu de pluie gelée, si bien qu’en vérité l’on ne peut rien toucher.
Les piquants des pins sont engoncés dans des cristaux en forme de
poire et chaque poteau de palissade est miraculeusement enchâssé
de diamants. Si vous pliez un rameau le revêtement glacé se casse,
craquèle comme du vernis et une branche épaisse d’un demi-
centimètre se brise au moindre attouchement. Si le vent et le soleil
inaugurent ensemble le jour, l’œil ne peut contempler fixement la
splendeur de cette joaillerie. Les forêts résonnent d’un fracas
d’armes, du bruit des cornes de daims en fuite, de la débandade de
pieds, chaussés de fer, de haut en bas des clairières, tandis qu’une
grande poussière de bataille est poussée jusqu’au milieu des
espaces découverts, tant et si bien que les derniers vestiges de la
glace se trouvent chassés, et que les branches débarrassées
reprennent leur chant régulier de jadis.
De nouveau le mercure tombe à 20 ou plus au-dessous de zéro
et les arbres eux-mêmes défaillent. La neige devient de la craie,
grinçant sous le talon et le souffle des bœufs les revêt de givre. La
nuit le cœur d’un arbre se fend en lui avec un gémissement. Au dire
des livres c’est le gel, mais c’est un bruit effarant que ce grognement
qui rappelle celui de l’homme qu’on assomme d’un seul coup.
L’Hiver qui est réellement l’hiver ne permet pas au bétail et aux
chevaux de jouer en liberté dans les champs, de sorte que tout
rentre au logis et puisqu’aucun soc ne saurait avec profit briser le sol
pendant près de cinq mois on pourrait s’imaginer qu’il y a fort peu à
faire. En réalité, les occupations de la campagne sont, en toute
saison, nombreuses et particulières, et la journée ne suffit pas pour
les remplir toutes, une fois que vous avez enlevé le temps qu’il faut à
un homme qui se respecte pour se retourner. Songez donc ! Les
heures pleines et nullement troublées se tiennent autour de vous
comme des remparts. A telle heure le soleil se lèvera, à telle autre
très certainement aussi il se couchera. Voilà ce que nous savons.
Pourquoi alors, au nom de la Raison, nous accablerions-nous de
vains efforts ? De temps à autre un visiteur de passage vient des
Villes, des Plaines, tout pantelant d’envie de travailler. On le
contraint à écouter les pulsations normales de son propre cœur, son
que bien peu d’hommes ont perçu. Au bout de quelques jours,
quand son zèle s’est calmé, il ne parle plus « d’y arriver » ; ou bien
« d’être laissé en route ». Il ne tient plus à « faire les choses tout de
suite » et il ne consulte pas sa montre par pure habitude, mais la
garde là où elle doit toujours être, c’est-à-dire dans son ventre. Enfin
il s’en retourne à sa ville assiégée, à contre-cœur, civilisé en partie.
Sous peu il sera redevenu sauvage, grâce au fracas de mille guerres
dont l’écho ne pénètre même pas jusqu’ici.
L’air, qui tue les germes, assèche même les journaux. Ils
pourraient bien être de demain ou d’il y a cent ans. Ils n’ont rien à
faire avec le jour présent, le jour si long, si plein, si ensoleillé. Nos
intérêts ne sont pas sur la même échelle que les leurs, mais ils sont
beaucoup plus complexes. Les mouvements d’une puissance
étrangère — ceux par exemple d’un traîneau inconnu sur cette rive
Pontique — doivent être expliqués, ou doivent trouver une
justification, sans quoi le cœur de ce public éclatera de curiosité non
satisfaite. S’il s’agit de Buck Davis qui vient accompagné de la
jument blanche, celle qu’il a échangée contre sa pouliche, et le
manteau qu’on porte en traîneau, pratiquement neuf, acheté à la
vente Sewell, pourquoi Buck Davis, qui demeure sur les terrains
plats de la rivière, traverse-t-il nos collines à moins que ce ne soit
parce que Murder Hollow se trouve bloqué par la neige, ou parce
qu’il a des dindons à vendre ? Mais s’il vendait des dindons, Buck
Davis se serait certainement arrêté ici, à moins qu’il ne fût en train
d’en vendre un grand stock en ville. Un gémissement venu du sac à
l’arrière du traîneau dévoile le secret. C’est un jeune veau d’hiver, et
Buck Davis va le vendre pour un dollar au marché de Boston, où l’on
en fera du poulet de conserve. Reste cependant à expliquer le
mystère de la route qu’il n’a pas suivie.
Après deux jours passés sur des charbons ardents on apprend,
indirectement, que Buck est allé rendre une toute petite visite à
Orson Butler qui demeure dans la plaine où le vent et les rochers
dénudés vident leurs querelles. Kirk Demming avait apporté à Butler
des nouvelles d’un renard qui se trouvait derrière la Montagne Noire
et le fils aîné d’Orson, en passant par Murder Hollow avec un
chargement de planches pour le nouveau parquet que la veuve
Amidon fait installer, prévint Butler qu’il ferait peut-être bien de venir
causer avec son père au sujet du cochon. Mais le vieux Butler, dès
le début, n’avait eu que la chasse au renard en tête ; ce qu’il voulait
c’était emprunter le chien de Butler, lequel avait donc été amené
avec le veau et laissé sur la montagne. Non, le vieux Butler n’était
pas allé chasser tout seul, mais avait attendu que Buck fût revenu de
la ville. Buck avait vendu le veau 6 fr. 25 c. et non pas 3 fr. 75 c. ainsi
que l’avaient faussement prétendu des gens intéressés. Alors, mais
alors seulement, ils étaient allés tous les deux à la chasse au renard.
Une fois qu’on sait cela, tout le monde respire librement, à moins
que la vie n’ait été compliquée par d’autres contre-marches
étranges.
Cinq ou six traîneaux par jour, c’est admissible, si l’on sait
pourquoi ils sont sortis ; mais toute circulation métropolitaine intense
dérange et excite les esprits.
LETTRES A LA FAMILLE
(1908)
Les lettres ont paru dans des journaux pendant le printemps de 1908, après une
excursion au Canada faite pendant l’automne de 1907. Elles sont réimprimées
sans modification.
LA ROUTE DE QUÉBEC.
UN PEUPLE CHEZ LUI.
CITÉS ET ESPACES.
JOURNAUX ET DÉMOCRATIE.
LE TRAVAIL.
LES VILLES FORTUNÉES.
DES MONTAGNES ET LE PACIFIQUE.
UNE CONCLUSION.
LA ROUTE DE QUÉBEC
1907
Il doit être difficile, pour ceux qui ne vivent pas en Angleterre, de

se rendre compte de la maladie mi-chancre et mi-moisissure qui
s’est abattue sur ce pays depuis deux ans. On en sent les effets à
travers l’Empire tout entier, mais au quartier général nous flairons la
chose dans l’air même, tout comme on sent l’iodoforme dans les
tasses et les tartines beurrées d’un thé d’hôpital. Autant qu’il est
possible, au milieu du brouillard actuel, de savoir la vérité, toutes les
formes imaginables d’incompétence générale ou particulière
existantes ou créées pendant la dernière génération se sont réunies
en un énorme trust, majorité unique formée de toutes les minorités,
pour faire le jeu du Gouvernement. Maintenant que ce jeu a cessé
de plaire, les neuf dixièmes des Anglais qui avaient confié le pouvoir
à ces gens-là se mettent à crier : « Si seulement nous avions su ce
qu’ils allaient faire, nous n’aurions jamais voté pour eux ! »
Pourtant, ainsi que le reste de l’Empire s’en était bien aperçu à
l’époque même, ces hommes avaient toujours fait nettement
comprendre leurs sentiments et leurs intentions. Ils affirmaient
d’abord, en ayant soin de faire comprendre leurs idées au moyen de
vastes images, que nul avantage susceptible d’échoir à l’Empire
Britannique ne pouvait compenser la cruauté qu’il y avait à prélever
chez le travailleur anglais une taxe de vingt-cinq centimes par
semaine sur certaines de ses denrées alimentaires. Incidemment ils
expliquèrent, de façon telle que l’univers tout entier, à l’exception de
l’Angleterre, les entendit, que l’Armée était criminelle, bien des
choses dans la Marine, inutiles ; qu’une moitié des habitants d’une
des Colonies se livrait à l’esclavage, accompagné de tortures, en
vue de profits personnels, et qu’ils étaient lassés et écœurés rien
que d’entendre le mot Empire. Pour ces raisons ils voulaient sauver
l’Angleterre, pour ces raisons on les avait élus avec le mandat
précis, on l’aurait cru du moins, d’annihiler l’Empire, ce fétiche
sanglant, aussitôt que la chose serait possible. La situation si
enviable actuellement de l’Irlande, l’Égypte, l’Inde et l’Afrique du Sud
est le témoignage probant de leur honnêteté et de leur obéissance.
Sans compter que leur seule présence au pouvoir produisit partout
chez nous, au point de vue moral, le même effet que la présence
dans une classe d’un maître incompétent. Des boulettes de papier,
des livres et de l’encre se mirent à voler ; on claqua des pupitres ;
ceux qui essayaient de travailler reçurent dans les flancs des coups
de plumes malpropres ; on lâcha des rats et des souris au milieu de
cris de terreur exagérés ; et, comme à l’ordinaire, les gens les moins
recommandables de la classe furent les plus bruyants à proclamer
leurs nobles sentiments et leur douleur de se voir mal jugés.
Pourtant les Anglais ne se sentent pas heureux, et l’inquiétude et la
mollesse ne font que s’accroître.
D’autre part, — et c’est à notre avantage — l’isolement où se
trouvent les gens incompétents appartenant à un des partis
politiques a jeté les extrémistes dans ce que le Babou dénomme
« toute la crudité de leur cui bono ». Ceux-ci cherchent à satisfaire
les deux désirs principaux de l’homme primitif au moyen des
derniers procédés de la législation scientifique. Mais comment
obtenir des aliments libres et l’amour, dirons-nous, libre ? dans
l’espace restreint d’un acte de parlement, sans vendre trop
grossièrement la mèche ? Voilà ce qui les ennuie tout de même un
peu. Il est facile d’en rire, mais nous sommes tellement liés
ensemble aujourd’hui, qu’une épidémie, survenant en, ce qu’on est
convenu d’appeler, « haut lieu », pourrait se propager, comme la
peste bubonique, avec chaque steamer. Je suis allé passer
quelques semaines au Canada l’autre jour, principalement pour
échapper à cette Moisissure, et aussi pour voir ce que devenait
notre Frère Aîné. Avez-vous jamais remarqué que le Canada a,
somme toute, à peu près les mêmes problèmes à démêler en bloc
que ceux qui nous affligent, nous autres en particulier ? Par exemple
il a à résoudre la complication bi-lingue, bi-législative, bi-politique, et
cela sous une forme encore plus désagréable que celle qui existe
dans l’Afrique du Sud, parce que, — différents en cela de nos
Hollandais, — les Français ne peuvent se marier en dehors de leur
religion ; ils reçoivent leurs ordres de l’Italie — moins centrale parfois
que Pretoria ou Stellenbosch. Il souffre également des complications
qu’éprouve l’Australie au sujet des problèmes du Travail, sans
cependant connaître son isolement, mais a en plus à subir
l’influence tant manifeste que secrète du « Travail », retranché avec
des armes et de forts explosifs sur un sol voisin du sien. Et, pour
compléter le parallèle, il garde, bien enfoui derrière des montagnes,
un petit rien de terre anglaise, la Colombie Britannique qui
ressemble à la Nouvelle Zélande ; et voici que déjà les habitants de
cette île qui ne trouvent pas de grands débouchés pour la jeunesse
entreprenante dans leur propre pays, se portent de plus en plus vers
la Colombie Britannique.
Le Canada dans son temps a connu des calamités plus
sérieuses que les inondations, la gelée, la grande sécheresse et le
feu — il a pavé certaines étapes de la route menant vers sa
nationalité avec les cœurs brisés de deux générations ; voilà
pourquoi on peut, avec des Canadiens de vieille souche, discuter
d’affaires qu’un Australien ou qu’un habitant de la Nouvelle Zélande
ne comprendraient pas plus qu’un enfant sain ne comprend la mort.
En vérité nous sommes une étrange Famille ! L’Australie et la
Nouvelle Zélande (la guerre avec les Maoris ne comptant pas) ont
tout eu pour rien. Le Sud-Africain donna tout et obtint moins que
rien. Le Canadien a donné et obtenu de toutes les manières pendant
près de 300 ans, et à cet égard il est le plus sage, comme il devrait
être le plus heureux, de nous tous. Il est curieux de voir jusqu’à quel
point il semble ne pas se rendre compte de la position qu’il occupe
dans l’Empire, peut-être parce que, récemment, ses voisins l’ont
gourmandé ou sermonné. Vous savez bien que lorsque nos hommes
d’État, venus de partout, se rassemblent, c’est un fait admis
tacitement que c’est le Canada qui prend la tête dans le jeu Impérial.
Pour parler franchement, c’est lui qui a vu quel était le but à atteindre
il y a de ça plus de dix ans, et c’est lui qui y a tendu de tous ses
efforts depuis. Voilà pourquoi son inaction, lors de la dernière
Conférence Impériale, a fait que tous ceux qu’intéressait la partie se
sont demandé pourquoi lui surtout, parmi nous tous, préférait se
liguer avec le général Botha et mettre obstacle à la ruée en avant.
Moi aussi, j’ai posé cette question à beaucoup de gens. On m’a
répondu à peu près comme il suit : « Nous nous sommes aperçu que
l’Angleterre ne faisait pas de points dans le jeu à ce moment-là. A
quoi bon nous exposer à nous faire rabrouer plus encore que nous
venions de l’être ? Nous nous sommes tenus tranquilles. » C’était
fort raisonnable, même presque trop probant. Il n’était pas utile en
effet que le Canada se comportât autrement, sinon qu’il était l’aîné et
qu’on s’attendait vraiment à plus de sa part. Il se montre un peu trop
modeste.
C’est ce point que nous avons discuté tout d’abord, en plein
Atlantique, bien à l’abri du vent, mais sous une fougue trempée (les
interlocuteurs coupant la conversation à intervalles irréguliers selon
qu’ils tiraient ou non sur leur pipe de tabac humide). Les passagers
étaient presque tous de purs Canadiens, nés pour la plupart dans
les Provinces Maritimes, où leurs pères disent « Canada » comme le
Sussex dit « Angleterre », mais que leurs affaires éparpillaient dans
toutes les régions du vaste Dominion. De plus ils étaient à l’aise les
uns avec les autres ; ils avaient cette intimité agréable qui est la
caractéristique de toutes les branches de notre Famille et de tous les
bateaux qu’elle emprunte pour retourner au pays. Un bateau du Cap
représente tout le continent depuis l’Équateur jusqu’à Simon’s Town ;
un bateau de la Compagnie d’Orient est australien en tout, et un
vapeur C. P. R. ne saurait être confondu avec quoi que ce soit
d’autre que le Canada. C’est dommage que l’on ne puisse être né en
quatre endroits à la fois, sans quoi l’on comprendrait tout de suite,
sans perte de temps précieux, les intonations de voix, les allusions
voilées à la vie de toute notre Famille. Ces grands gaillards, fumant
dans la bruine, avaient l’espoir dans les yeux, la croyance sur leurs
langues, la force dans leurs cœurs. Je songeais avec tristesse aux
autres bateaux à l’extrémité sud de cet océan — remplis, au moins
d’un quart, de gens dépourvus de cet esprit-là. Un jeune homme
avait eu l’extrême bonté de m’expliquer en quoi le Canada avait
souffert de ce qu’il appelait « le lien impérial » ; comment son pays
avait été de diverses façons mis à mal par les hommes d’État
anglais pour des raisons politiques. En réalité il ne savait pas son
bonheur, et ne voulait pas me croire lorsque j’essayais de le lui faire
voir, mais un homme vêtu d’un plaid (gentil garçon et qui connaissait
bien l’Afrique du Sud) déboucha brusquement d’un coin et l’assaillit
avec un tel luxe de faits et d’images que l’âme du jeune patriote s’en
trouva tout effarée. Le plaid termina sa bordée en affirmant — et
personne ne lui donna de démenti — que les Anglais étaient fous.
C’est sur cette note-là que prenaient fin tous nos entretiens.
C’était une expérience nouvelle, celle de se mouvoir dans une
atmosphère de dédain nouveau. On comprend, on accepte le mépris
amer des Hollandais ; la colère désespérée de sa propre race
résidant dans l’Afrique du Sud fait partie encore, sans doute, du
fardeau à supporter ; mais le mépris — profond, parfois enjoué,
souvent étonné, toujours poli, — que manifeste le Canada envers
l’Angleterre d’aujourd’hui, blesse tout de même un peu. Voyez-vous,
cette dernière guerre [2] — cette guerre si peu de mise, celle contre
les Boërs, a été quelque chose de très réel pour le Canada. Elle y
envoya pas mal d’hommes, et un pays où la population est
clairsemée a plus de chance de s’apercevoir de l’absence de ses
morts que celui qui est très peuplé. Lorsque, à son point de vue, ils
sont morts, sans qu’il en soit résulté aucun avantage concevable,
moral ou matériel, ses instincts professionnels où, peut-être encore,
l’affection purement animale qu’elle porte à ses enfants font qu’elle
se souvient et garde rancune du fait bien longtemps après que celui-
ci eût dû être en toute décence oublié. J’ai été choqué de la
véhémence avec laquelle certains hommes (et même certaines
femmes) m’en parlèrent. D’aucuns allèrent jusqu’à débattre la
question de savoir (sur le vaisseau et ailleurs) si l’Angleterre
continuerait à être de la Famille ou bien si, ainsi que certain éminent
politicien passait pour l’avoir affirmé dans une conversation
particulière, elle trancherait tout lien pour éviter les frais. L’un d’eux
disait, sans trace d’emportement, qu’elle serait moins portée à se
séparer de l’Empire d’un seul coup de tête qu’à vendre politiquement
ses rejetons un à un à toute Puissance voisine qui menacerait son
bien-être ; chaque marché serait, en guise de préliminaires, précédé
d’un sonore dénigrement en règle de la victime choisie. Il cita, —
vraiment, la rancune de ces gens leur donne des mémoires
tenaces ! — comme précédent et comme avertissement, la
campagne d’injures menée contre l’Afrique du Sud et qui avait duré
cinq années.
[2] La guerre du Transvaal, 1899-1902.
Notre Parlement de Fumeurs se demanda ensuite par quels

moyens, au cas où cela arriverait, le Canada pourrait bien garder
son identité intacte ; ce qui donna lieu à une des conversations les
plus curieuses que j’aie jamais entendues. On décida, selon toute
apparence, qu’il pourrait, oh ! tout juste, s’en tirer en tant que nation
si (mais c’était fort douteux) l’Angleterre n’aidait pas d’autres peuples
à l’assaillir. Or, il y a vingt ans seulement on n’aurait jamais rien
entendu de pareil. Si cela paraît un peu fou, rappelez-vous que la
Mère-Patrie passait aux yeux de tous pour être une dame atteinte
d’une forte attaque d’hystérie.
Au moment même où notre conversation prenait fin, un de nos
douze ou treize cents passagers de troisième classe se jeta par-
dessus bord, tout habillé d’un chaud pardessus et bien chaussé,
dans une mer tumultueuse et atrocement froide. Chaque horreur que
renferme ce bas monde a le rituel qui lui convient. Pour la cinquième
fois — quatre fois par un temps pareil — j’entendis s’arrêter l’hélice,
je vis notre sillage tournoyer comme une mèche de fouet lorsque
notre grande ville flottante fit violemment volte-face, l’équipage du
bateau de sauvetage se précipiter sur le pont, les officiers de bord
grimper à toute vitesse sur les haubans pour apercevoir, si c’était
possible, la moindre trace laissée par la malheureuse tête qui
s’estimait si peu. Un bateau au milieu des vagues ne peut rien voir. Il
n’y avait, dès le premier moment, rien à voir. Nous avons attendu,
avons fait et refait l’espace pendant une longue heure, tandis que
tombait la pluie, que la mer battait nos flancs et que la vapeur, en
traînées lugubres, sortait mollement par les échappements. Puis
nous continuâmes notre route.
La rivière St-Laurent se comporta, le dernier jour de notre
voyage, fort dignement. Les érables bordant ses rives avaient
changé leurs teintes, étaient devenus rouge-sang, magnifiques
comme les étendards de la jeunesse perdue. Le chêne lui-même
n’est pas plus arbre national que ne l’est l’érable et son apparition
bienvenue rendit les gens à bord plus heureux encore. Un vent sec
apportait l’odeur de propreté où entraient toutes les odeurs
mélangées qui émanent de leur Continent, bois scié, terre vierge,
fumée de bois, et ils la humèrent, tandis que leurs yeux
s’adoucissaient à mesure qu’ils identifiaient lieu après lieu, sur tout
le parcours de leur bien-aimée rivière, lieux où, en temps de congé,
ils jouaient, pêchaient et s’amusaient. Il doit être agréable d’avoir un
pays à soi, bien à soi, à faire parader. Et puis, comprenez-le bien, ils
ne se sont en aucune façon vantés, ils n’ont pas poussé de cris ni
d’exclamations bruyantes, ces gens-là, à la voix si égale, ces gens
qui rentraient chez eux. Non. Mais la joie de revoir leur pays natal
était simple, sincère. Ils disaient : — N’est-ce pas charmant ? Ne le
trouvez-vous pas délicieux ? Nous, nous l’adorons.
A Québec il y a un endroit, très infesté par les locomotives, tout
comme une soute à charbon, d’où s’élèvent les hauteurs que les
soldats de Wolfe escaladèrent en montant à l’assaut des Plaines
d’Abraham. Peut-être que de toutes les traces laissées dans
l’ensemble de nos possessions l’affaire de Québec s’adresse mieux
à nos yeux et à nos cœurs qu’aucune autre. Tout s’y rencontre : La
France, partenaire jalouse de la gloire de l’Angleterre sur terre et sur
mer pendant huit cents ans ; l’Angleterre, déconcertée comme
toujours, mais, par extraordinaire ne s’opposant pas ouvertement à
Pitt, lui qui comprenait ; ces autres peuples destinés à se séparer de
l’Angleterre aussitôt que le péril français serait écarté ; Montcalm lui-
même, condamné mais résolu ; Wolfe, l’artisan prédestiné, auquel
l’achèvement final était réservé ; et, quelque part à l’arrière-plan, un
certain Jacques Cook, capitaine de HMS le Mercure en train de faire
de jolies, de fines cartes marines de la rivière St-Laurent.
Pour toutes ces raisons les Plaines d’Abraham sont couronnées
de toutes sortes de belles choses — y compris une prison et une
factorerie. L’aile gauche de Montcalm est marquée par la prison et
l’aile droite de Wolfe par la factorerie. Mais heureusement un
mouvement se dessine en vue d’abolir ces ornements et de
transformer le champ de bataille et ses environs en un parc qui, par
sa nature et par suite des associations qui s’y rattachent, serait un
des plus beaux de notre univers.
Pourtant, en dépit de prisons d’un côté et de couvents de l’autre,
malgré l’épave maigre et noire du pont du Chemin de Fer de
Québec, qui gît là dans la rivière tel un amoncellement de boîtes en
fer blanc qu’on y aurait déchargées, la Porte orientale du Canada est
d’une noblesse, d’une dignité ineffables. Nous l’avons aperçue de
très bonne heure, à l’instant où la face inférieure des nuages, se
transformant en un rose frileux, s’étalait au-dessus d’une ville
hautement entassée, rêveuse, et d’une pourpre crépusculaire. A la
seconde même où pointait l’aube, quelque chose qui ressemblait à
la péniche appartenant en propre à Haroun-al-Raschid et toute
constellée de lumières multicolores glissa sur les eaux gris-fer et alla
se confondre avec les ténèbres d’une bande de terre. Au bout de
trois minutes elle réapparut, mais le plein jour était également
survenu ; aussi fit-elle disparaître promptement sa tête de mât, son
gouvernail et l’électricité dans sa cabine, et se mua en un bac de
couleur terne, rempli de passagers glacés. J’en causais avec un
Canadien. — Ah, mais oui, répondit-il, c’est le vieux bâtiment un tel,
qui va à Port Levis, tout étonné comme le serait un habitant de
Londres si un étranger suivait d’un œil interrogateur un train de la
Petite Ceinture. C’était là sa Petite Ceinture, à lui, la Zion où il était
bien à l’aise. Ville majestueuse et majestueuse rivière, il attirait mon
attention sur elles, avec la même fierté tranquille que nous
éprouvons, nous, lorsqu’un étranger franchit notre seuil, qu’il
s’agisse des eaux de Southampton par une matinée grise à houle,
du port de Sydney avec une régate en pleine fête, ou de Table
Mountain, radieuse et nouvellement lavée par les pluies de Noël.
Avec raison il s’était senti personnellement responsable du temps
qu’il faisait, de chaque enfilade flamboyante recouverte d’érables,
depuis que nous étions entrés dans la rivière. (Celui qui vient du
nord-ouest, dans ces régions, équivaut à celui qui vient du nord-est
ailleurs, et il se peut qu’il impressionne d’une manière défavorable
un invité).
Puis le soleil d’automne se leva, et l’homme sourit.
Personnellement et politiquement, disait-il, il détestait la ville, —
mais c’était la sienne.
— Eh bien, dit-il finalement, qu’en dites-vous ? Pas trop mal,
n’est-ce pas ?
— Oh, non, pas mal du tout, répondis-je ; mais ce ne fut que plus
tard que je me rendis compte que nous venions d’échanger le mot
de ralliement qui fait le tour de tout l’Empire.
UN PEUPLE CHEZ LUI
Un proverbe du haut pays dit : « On l’a invitée à la noce mais on

l’a mise à moudre du blé. » Le même sort, mais inverse, m’attendait
lors de ma petite excursion. Il y a un lacis subtil d’organisations
formées par des hommes d’affaires que l’on dénomme Clubs
canadiens. Ils s’emparent de gens qui ont l’air intéressant,
rassemblent leurs membres à l’heure du déjeuner, à midi, et après
avoir attaché leur victime à un beefsteak lui intiment l’ordre de
discourir sur tout sujet qu’il s’imagine savoir. On pourrait copier ce
procédé ailleurs, puisqu’il oblige les gens à sortir d’eux-mêmes et à
écouter des choses qui autrement ne s’offriraient pas à leur
attention, sans le moins du monde entraver leur travail. Et puis, sûre
sauvegarde, la durée en est courte. Toute l’affaire ne dépasse pas
une heure et, là-dessus, une demi-heure est prise pour le lunch.
Tous les ans, les clubs impriment leurs discours, l’on a ainsi des
aperçus de questions fort intéressantes, en coupe transversale,
depuis celles qui touchent d’une façon pratique aux eaux et forêts
jusqu’à celles se rapportant aux fabriques de monnaie appartenant à
l’État — le tout exposé par des experts.
N’étant pas un expert, l’expérience me parut fort pénible.
Jusqu’alors j’avais cru que faire des discours était une espèce de
whist, à conversation, c’est-à-dire que n’importe qui pouvait y
prendre part à l’improviste. Je me rends compte maintenant que
c’est un Art de convention très éloigné de tout ce qui sort d’un
encrier, et qu’il est difficile d’exercer un contrôle sur les couleurs
qu’on emploie. Les Canadiens, apparemment, aiment les discours,
et bien que ce ne soit en aucune façon un vice national ils font de la
bonne rhétorique de temps à autre. Vous n’êtes pas sans connaître
la vieille superstition qui veut que le blanc qui se trouve sur des
terres de peaux-rouges, de nègres ou de métis, reprenne les
manières et les instincts des types qui y demeuraient primitivement ?
Ainsi, un discours fait dans la langue des Taal devrait être
accompagné du roulement sonore, de l’appel direct au ventre, des
arguments réitérés, habiles, et des métaphores simples et peu
nombreuses de ce prince d’orateurs commerciaux, le Bantu. On dit
que l’habitant de la Nouvelle Zélande parle du fond du diaphragme,
tient les mains serrées aplaties contre ses flancs ainsi que le
faisaient les vieux Maoris. Tout ce que nous connaissons de
l’éloquence de première classe chez des Australiens témoigne de la
même promptitude, du même vol rapide, du même débit net que
celui du boomerang qu’on lance. Je m’attendais presque à retrouver
dans les discours canadiens quelque survivance des appels
compliqués que les Peaux-Rouges adressent aux Soleils, aux
Lunes, aux Montagnes — indications légères de grandiloquence
rappelant les invocations de cérémonies. Mais rien de ce que
j’entendis ne pouvait rappeler quelque race primitive. Il y avait dans
ces discours une dignité, une retenue, et surtout une pondération qui
étonne lorsqu’on songe aux influences auxquelles la terre est
soumise. Ce n’était pas du Peau-Rouge, ce n’était pas du Français,
c’était quelque chose d’aussi distinct que l’étaient les orateurs eux-
mêmes.
Il en est de même pour les gestes rares et l’allure du Canadien.
Pendant la guerre (des Boërs) on observait les contingents à tous
les points de vue et très probablement que l’on tirait de fausses
inductions. Il m’a paru, à ce moment-là, que le Canadien, même
lorsqu’il est fatigué, se relâche moins que les hommes des pays
chauds. Lorsqu’il se repose il ne se couche pas sur le dos ou sur le
ventre, mais plutôt sur le flanc, la jambe repliée sous lui, prêt à se
lever d’un seul bond.
Maintenant que je regardais attentivement des assemblées
assises, — hommes logés à l’hôtel ou passants de la rue — il me
semblait qu’il gardait chez lui, parmi les siens, cette habitude de
demi-tension — pendant de sa figure immobile, de sa voix égale et
basse. Quand on regarde l’empreinte de ses pas sur le sol, elle
paraît sous forme de piste presque droite ; il ne marche ni en dehors
ni en dedans : il pose le pied la pointe en avant, et la foulée est
douce, rappelant le pas furtif de l’Australien.
En parlant entre eux, ou en attendant des amis, ils ne
tambourinaient pas des doigts, ne grattaient pas des pieds, ne
tripotaient pas les poils de leur figure. Voilà des choses triviales sans
doute, mais lorsqu’une race est en voie de formation tout importe.
Quelqu’un m’a dit un jour, — mais je n’ai jamais essayé de vérifier
son dire — que chacune de nos Quatre Races allume et manie le
feu d’une façon particulière.
Rien d’étonnant que nous soyons différents ! Voici un peuple,
sans peuple derrière lui, menant la grande charrue qui gagne le pain
du monde, plus haut, toujours plus haut, par delà l’épaule de
l’univers ; n’est-ce pas là vraiment une vision tirée, en quelque sorte,
de quelque magnifique Légende Norse. Au nord existe le froid
durable de Niflheim ; l’Aurore Boréale au jaillissement subit, au
crépitement vif, leur tient lieu de Pont de Bifrost visité par Odin et
l’Esir. Ce peuple se dirige, lui aussi, vers le nord, année après
année, et traîne derrière lui d’audacieuses voies ferrées. Parfois il
rencontre de bonnes terres à blé ou des forêts, parfois des mines à
trésors, et alors tout le Nord est rempli de voix, — ainsi que le fut un
jour l’Afrique du Sud, — annonçant des découvertes et faisant des
prophéties.
Lorsque vient l’hiver, dans la majeure partie de ce pays,
exception faite des villes, il faut rester tranquille, manger et boire,
comme faisait l’Esir. En été on fait tenir dans six mois le travail de
douze, parce qu’entre telle ou telle date certaines rivières lointaines
seront figées, et plus tard certaines autres, jusqu’au moment où
même la Grande Porte Orientale à Québec se ferme et qu’on est
obligé de sortir et de rentrer par les portes latérales de Halifax et de
Saint-Jean. Ce sont là des conditions qui tendent à vous rendre
extrêmement hardi, mais non vantard d’une façon déréglée.
Les érables disent quand il est temps de s’arrêter, et tout le
travail en train est réglé d’après leur signal d’avertissement.
Certaines besognes peuvent être terminées avant l’hiver, mais
d’autres doivent être abandonnées, prêtes à être menées rondement
sans un instant de retard dès qu’apparaît le printemps. Ainsi, depuis
Québec jusqu’à Calgary, un bruit, non pas de bousculade, mais de
hâte et d’achèvement pressé, bourdonne comme les batteuses à
vapeur à travers l’air tranquille d’automne.
Des chasseurs et des sportsmen rentraient du Nord ; des
explorateurs également avec eux, la figure pleine de mystère, les
poches remplies de spécimens, comme il en va des explorateurs
dans le monde entier. Ils avaient déjà porté des manteaux de
rakoons et de loups. Dans les grandes villes qui travaillent toute
l’année, les devantures des carrosseries exhibaient, en guise
d’indication, un ou deux traîneaux nickelés, car ici le traîneau est « le
char tout préparé de l’Amour ». A la campagne, les maisons de
ferme étaient en train d’empiler leur bois à portée de main près de
l’entrée de la cuisine et d’enlever les écrans contre les mouches.
(On les laisse d’ordinaire jusqu’à ce que les doubles-fenêtres aient
été remontées de la cave, et il faut alors faire la chasse dans toute la
maison pour trouver les vis qui manquent).
Quelquefois il nous arrivait de voir dans une arrière-cour
quelques longueurs de tuyaux de poêle neufs et étincelants, et l’on
prenait en commisération le propriétaire. Il n’y a pas matière à
facétie dans les plaisanteries touchant les vieux tuyaux, — amères à
force de vérité et que l’on trouve dans les journaux comiques.
Mais les chemins de fer ! oh ! les merveilleux chemins de fer ! ce
sont eux qui racontaient l’histoire de l’hiver mieux que tout le reste.
Les wagons à charbon de trente tonnes parcouraient trois mille
kilomètres de voie ferrée, geignaient en se heurtant les uns contre
les autres dans les garages, ou passaient, la nuit, avec leurs lourds
cahots, se rendant chez ces ménagères prévoyantes des villes de la
prairie. L’accès n’était pourtant pas aisé car le lard, le saindoux, les
pommes, le beurre et le fromage renfermés dans de belles barriques
en bois blanc s’acheminaient dans la direction de l’est, vers les
bateaux à vapeur, de façon à arriver avant que le blé ne vînt fondre
sur eux. Cela, c’est le cinquième acte de la Grande Pièce Annuelle
en vue de laquelle la scène doit être débarrassée. Sur des centaines
de voies de garage congestionnées gisaient d’énormes poutres en
acier, des traverses en fer roulé, des poutrelles et des boîtes
d’écrous, jadis destinées à la construction du pont de Québec, mais
qui ne sont plus actuellement qu’un embarras obstruant tout — les
vivres pour s’y frayer un chemin étaient contraints de se débrouiller,
puis derrière les vivres arrivait le bois de charpente, du bois tout neuf
venu tout droit des montagnes, des bûches, des planches, des
douves, des lattes, qu’on nous fait payer des prix exorbitants en
Angleterre, — tout cela se portait vers la mer. Il y avait sur toutes ces
roues de quoi bâtir des maisons, des aliments, des combustibles,
pour des millions de gens, avant même qu’on eût seulement déplacé
un seul grain du stock que l’on était en train de battre sur plus de
cinq cents kilomètres, en tas hauts comme des villas de cinquante
livres sterling.
Ajoutez à cela que les chemins de fer travaillaient à leur
développement, doublant leurs voies, établissant des boucles, des
raccourcis, des lignes d’intérêts locaux, ainsi que des
embranchements et de vastes projets vers des régions encore
vierges mais qui seraient bientôt peuplées. De sorte que les trains
qui amènent les matériaux de construction, ceux du ballast, ceux du
matériel, les machines de renfort, tout aussi bien que les machines
de secours avec leurs grues à la silhouette railleuse en forme de
chameaux, — c’est-à-dire tous les accessoires d’une nouvelle
civilisation — devaient trouver quelque part à se caser dans le
rassemblement général avant que la Nature ne criât « Repos ! »
Quelqu’un se souvient-il de la forte, la joyeuse confiance que l’on
éprouvait après la guerre lorsqu’il semblait, qu’enfin, l’Afrique du Sud
allait être développée — lorsque les gens créaient des chemins de
fer, et commandaient des locomotives, du matériel roulant neuf, de
la main-d’œuvre et croyaient avec enthousiasme à l’avenir. Il est
certain que plus tard cet espoir fut anéanti, mais — multipliez cette
bonne heure par mille et vous aurez une idée approximative de la
sensation que l’on éprouve à être au Canada, endroit que même un
« Gouvernement impérial » ne peut tuer. J’eus la chance d’être mis
au courant de certaines choses intimement, de pouvoir entendre
parler en détails des travaux projetés, et des travaux achevés. Par-
dessus tout, je vis tout ce qui avait été en fait accompli depuis ma
dernière visite, quinze ans auparavant. Un des avantages d’un pays
neuf c’est qu’il vous donne la sensation d’être plus vieux que le
Temps. J’y trouvais des cités où il n’y avait jadis rien, — littéralement
rien, absolument rien sinon, comme dans les contes de fées, « le cri
des oiseaux et un peu d’herbe ondulant au vent ». Des villages et
des hameaux étaient devenus de grandes villes, et les grandes villes
avaient triplé et quadruplé de dimension. Et les chemins de fer, se
frottant les mains, disaient tout comme les Afrites de jadis : « Voulez-
vous que nous fassions une ville là où il n’y en a point, ou que nous
rendions florissante une cité abandonnée ? » Et c’est là ce qu’ils font.
Mais outre-mer les messieurs qui n’ont jamais été contraints de
souffrir un seul jour de gêne physique, se dressent soudain et
s’écrient : — Quel grossier matérialisme !
Parfois je me demande si tel éminent romancier, tel philosophe,
tel dramaturge, tel ecclésiastique de nos jours fournit la moitié
seulement de l’imagination, pour ne pas parler de la perspicacité, de
l’endurance, de la maîtrise de soi, toutes qualités qu’on accepte
sans commentaire lorsqu’il s’agit de ce qu’on est convenu d’appeler
« l’exploitation matérielle » d’un pays neuf. Prenez à titre d’exemple
rien que la création d’une nouvelle cité, à la jonction de deux voies
— lorsque les trois choses sont à l’état de projet seulement. Le
drame à lui seul, le jeu des vertus humaines que cela renferme,
remplirait un volume. Et quand le travail est fini, quand la ville existe,
quand les nouvelles voies embrassent une nouvelle région de
fermes, quand la marée du blé s’est avancée d’un degré de plus sur
la carte que l’on était en droit d’espérer, ceux qui ont accompli la
besogne s’arrêtent, sans félicitations, pour recommencer la
plaisanterie ailleurs.
J’ai bavardé quelque peu avec un homme assez jeune dont le
métier consistait à contraindre les avalanches à dévaler bien en
dehors de la section de la voie qui lui était confiée. Le dieu Thor,
dans le conte, se rendit seulement une ou deux fois à Jotunheim et
avait avec lui son utile Marteau Miolnr. Ce Thor-ci demeurait dans
Jotunheim au milieu des pics Selkirks couronnés de glace verte, —
endroit où les géants vous remettront à votre place, vous et vos
belles émotions si, en faisant du bruit, vous les dérangez à de
certaines saisons. De sorte que notre Thor les surveille soit qu’ils
resplendissent sous le soleil de mai ou s’assombrissent et menacent
doublement sous les pluies du printemps. Il pare leurs coups au
moyen de lattes de bois, de murailles de bûches rivées ensemble,
ou telles autres inventions que l’expérience recommande. Il ne porte
pas de rancune aux géants : eux font leur travail, lui fait le sien. Ce
qui l’ennuie tout de même un peu, c’est que la violence de leurs
coups arrache parfois les plus des versants opposés et fait en
quelque sorte sauter en une seule explosion toute une vallée. Il croit
pourtant qu’il peut s’arranger de façon telle que de grandes
avalanches soient obligées de se fondre en petites.
Le souvenir d’un autre, avec qui je ne bavardais pas, me reste
dans la mémoire. Il avait, depuis des années et des années,
inspecté des trains au sommet d’une montée rapide dans les
montagnes, qui n’était pourtant pas de moitié aussi raide que celle
au-dessus du Hex [3] , où l’on serre tous les freins à fond, pendant
que les convois glissent avec précaution sur quinze kilomètres de
parcours. Toute complication survenant aux roues entraînerait de
sérieux embarras, de sorte que, c’est à lui qu’incombe, puisqu’il est
la personne la plus compétente, la tâche la plus dure — faite de
monotonie et de responsabilité. Il me fit l’honneur de manifester qu’il
désirait me parler, mais d’abord il inspecta son train à quatre pattes,
au moyen d’un marteau. Lorsqu’enfin il se fut rassuré au sujet des
étayages, il était temps de partir pour l’un comme pour l’autre, et tout
ce que je reçus fut un signe amical de la main — le signe du maître
en son art, pour ainsi dire.
[3] Hex, rivière de l’Afrique du Sud.
Le Canada a l’air d’être plein de ce genre de matérialistes.

Ceci me rappelle que je vis la contrée elle-même sous la forme
d’une femme de haute taille, de vingt-cinq à vingt-six ans, qui
attendait son tramway au coin d’une rue. Elle avait des cheveux
presque couleur de lin doré, ondulés et séparés en grands bandeaux

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Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the

‘Folk Performance’ in India Brahma

Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk

Print publication date: 2019

(p.i) Cultural Labour (p.ii)

(p.iii) Cultural Labour

(p.iv) Copyright Page

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

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© Oxford University Press 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

You must not circulate this work in any other form

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-949081-3

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909584-1

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval LT Std 9.5/13

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Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk

Print publication date: 2019

names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of

A place I remember from my childhood is an abode of the deity on the outskirts

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 October 2020

Unlike the institutionalized religions, such cultural practices are viewed as

and artistic activities. It is important because telling and creating affective

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Ritualized in structure and flexible in operation, folk performance creates an

As the crows caw-cawed

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baggage and (p.xii) has emerged as a problematic term in an academic world; I

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with this inherent problematic.

While modern education works as an emancipatory tool, it also has a colonizing

and cultures, but also annihilate themselves in the process.

Education, supposed to be a liberating force, was perpetuating hegemonic

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distancing myself from the performance culture. What I am indicating is a

This book is a personal journey, a passage of time in which I get transformed

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the University of London, in 2013. It is based on an extensive fieldwork of 15

directly and indirectly helped me in this research. I thank my PhD thesis

At crucial stages of the research, I received invaluable supports from friends: R.

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Vijay Kumar Yadavendu, Santosh Raut, Nilanjana Sengupta, and Bikaramaditya

I am indebted to my family members and friends from village. Thanks to Mantu,

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Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk

Print publication date: 2019

Abstract and Keywords

in India when labour becomes a performance, performance becomes labour. The

Antonio Gramsci (2014b:362)

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khadi kurta. I think I am an artist.

you know how to sing and dance?

Can you sing something?

The life I spent in dancing.

But I continued to dance

What else happened?

I had two acres of paddy field

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But I continued to dance