When Labour Meets Culture

Sangeet Natak, 2009

This essay is an exercise in thinking through the issues involved in putting together a new project. It will aim to set out some of the problems I am encountering as I try to formulate my research questions-the dilemmas over directions to take or avoid; the anxiety about how to interpret diverse sorts of materials; about what methods to adopt; about how to constitute my archive. My last project took me deep into the analysis of Caribbean popular music in terms of the social grids that sustain it. The book, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), was followed by a documentary film called Jahaji Music (dir. Surabhi Sharma, 2007). The film engaged with the musical culture of the Caribbean through the journey and collaborations of an Indian musician, Remo Fernandes. The Remo project-which tried to pursue the possibility of connection in another sphere, that of actual musical practice-seemed to be a logical if somewhat unexpected outcome of the earlier scholarly endeavour. Perhaps the most predictable direction I could have taken next would have been to pursue the story of the Indian diaspora and its musical negotiations in the United Kingdom for example, where once again the Indian and the African come together to form different sorts of cultural equations. However, the insights I gained from thinking about music, nationalism and race in Trinidad took me in another direction altogether. The point of the comparative frame I proposed in my book was not simply to look at two different contexts, but to see how the questions I was asking could be brought back 'home' to India. What did I gain from thinking about popular music in Trinidad? That consolidation and displacement occur together and form part of a continuing process. [Here the consolidation and displacement had to do with notions of racial identity and citizenship.] That this complicated process is often manifested most visibly as cultural practice, and as music production in particular. That in our modernity-fashioned as it is through and in the wake of colonialism-thinking about the music might help us see one of the important ways by which ideas of who we are/who we want to be are put together, circulated, and gain purchase. That music is related to the structure of social aspiration and issues of social mobility. That female sexuality is central to processes of nation-making and the production of modern subjects, and that music is one such process. Thinking about these issues has brought me to my own cultural context, which is that of southern India.

Social Scientist, 2006

This paper is a review of the literature on postmodernism, cultural theory and globalization. It attempts to theorize how postmodernised forms of cultural globalisation threaten folk cultural practices.

In modern terminology, culture refers to the complete way of life of a people. The culture of the socially and economically privileged upper class is considered "high culture." When we use the term "culture," it generally denotes this dominant cultural expression. In contrast, the culture of the large sections of society who remain deprived of the fruits of a progressive, enlightened civilization has been categorized as "folk culture." Thus, the form of folk culture I intend to explore here is essentially the culture of the lower strata of a class-divided society. The struggles of laboring people are vividly reflected in folk culture, and the harsh realities of life for a section of this laboring class can be found hidden behind the makeup of the bahurupi performers. 1 As Maxim Gorky once said: "The true history of the toiling people can not be learnt without a knowledge of the folk lore." 2 Throughout Indian-and particularly Bengali-history, the nat (performer) community has consistently been considered a group belonging to the lower echelons of society. This includes actors of various folk theater forms like leto, alkap, performers of gajan, jugglers, scroll-painters (patua) and puppeteers-and among them, the bahurupis (impersonators). Even fifty years ago, bahurupis were a common sight across Bengal, especially along the banks of the Padma river, but today their presence is rare. This ancient tradition is on the verge of extinction due to commercialization and urbanization. The aim of this article is to raise awareness about this disappearing art form and emphasize the need to preserve it. At the same time, it seeks to explore how bahurupis, marginalized within the capitalist world, are transforming and evolving their art forms for survival-and how this form of folk culture is becoming so endangered that it is now reduced, for some, to mere begging.

Himalaya, 2018

Journal of Language, Literature, Social, and Cultural Studies, 2024

This paper explores the connection between gender, genre, and work space through Bhojpuri work songs. These songs are an important cultural and social memory of the Bhojpuri society, representing the experiences, ideologies, and way of life of individuals. The performance of these songs is gendered, with men performing them in outside spaces and women performing them within households or in the fields. This gendering of performance spaces corresponds to the division of labour, with women assigned to household activities and men to activities in the outside world. The songs touch on various themes such as familial issues, fulfilling duties, complaints, celebration of relationships, accepting and hiding sexual desires, excitement and dedication while performing the labour; and even political issues. What distinguishes these songs is their coordination with the performance and with the work, which follows a specific beat and rhythm. They are nested performances that highlight the actions being performed. They follow a stylized pattern which is materialized and internalized through transgenerational memory, that are expressed through embodied enactment. Based on memory and embodied performances these work songs reject the surrogate bodies of the museumization and sustain themselves in an organic way.

Writing Identities: Folklore and Performative Arts of Purulia, Bengal by Roma Chatterji, 2009

Chho dance, Jhumur songs, Bhadu puja in Purulia have served as platforms in this volume for a historiographic exploration of folklore studies and performances in West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand. The exploration situates itself in the history of the passage of oral into print culture. It speaks of the use of folklore for political, social, economic or intellectual movements. It shows how folk art has been harnessed to objectives of strengthening feudal hierarchy, promoting social ascent, boosting national or regional self esteem, or ensuring appropriation of orality in self reflective intellectual or semiotic discourse. It also reveals the tremendous energy of folk art forms that have enabled them to survive and recharge themselves, like Antaeus drawing strength from the earth.

Contemporary South Asia, 2012

Recent attempts to rethink labour history and contemporary labour struggles in India have variously memorialised the ‘lost worlds’ of industrial labour struggle and argued for stretching the terms of labour historiography, in part, by moving the conceptual and political boundaries of the factory gate to take into account the complex configurations of labour, accumulation and struggle. This article contributes to this scholarship with a methodological focus on political theatre by three organisations in India. I ask what we might learn about labour and labour struggles when we look through the lens of cultural activism by the urban and rural poor. Drawing on Kalyan Sanyal’s provocative distinction between accumulation and need economy, I argue that contemporary cultural work and activism both refuses and contributes to the market-based fetishisation of surplus-value as the sole purpose of work and as such it founds a view of labour and labour struggle that learns from labour and not just capital.

Global Labour Journal

Book Review Jonathan Parry (in collaboration with Ajay T.G.) (2020) 1 Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town. Oxon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781138095595 (hardback) 9780367510329 (paperback) 9780203712467 (e-book). 732 pages. £112 (hardback); £29.59 (paperback); £29.59 (e-book). Reviewed by Suravee Nayak, Centre for Development Studies, India Classes of Labour by Jonathan Parry is based on thirty-four months of ethnography in one of Nehru's projects of modernity-the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) and its township in central India. This meticulously written monograph of 732 pages covers sixty years of work and social life of industrial labour in Bhilai, between 1955 and 2014, and focuses on the workforces of a public-sector steel plant, a variety of private-sector factories and informal-sector labour. The book under review explores class differentiation in the manual labour force by analysing both shop floors and neighbourhoods in Bhilai. Parry argues that the working class in Bhilai is divided into two distinct classes of labour-naukri (regular BSP workers as labour elites) and kam (contract, temporary and informal-sector workers as the labour class). The labour elites sometimes share a relationship of exploitation against the labour class. The author further argues that the shop floor of the Bhilai Steel Plant, its township and middle-class housing colonies are the "melting pots" of old hierarchies or primordial relations of caste in India. Parry shows us that "class now trumps caste as the dominant axis of inequality" which shapes the contemporary social classes of labour (p. 4). He identifies the weakening not only of the hierarchy of castes, division of labour and interdependence, but also separation between upper and lower castes of the Hindu religion that characterised the "traditional" caste relations in India. The class divide between labour elites and the labour class is analysed and observed not only on the basis of wages, lifestyles and life chances, "but also in kinship and marriage practices, the premium placed on ties with one's village of origin, the significance of caste in daily life and the texture of relations between neighbours, and even in the propensity to suicide" (p. 4). The book is organised into thirteen chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, across four parts-Context, Work, Life and Concluding. The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) sets out the key arguments and provides us with the conceptual basis on which the arguments are framed. It also gives the reader a sense of the wider political economy and the historical processes behind the making of Bhilai township. The author asserts that Bhilai is not among the examples representing a "tragedy of development" but rather a symbol of national integration and modernity. As an industrial monoculture, BSP has a heterogeneous and culturally diverse workforce dominated by migrant workers from different parts

Springer Nature, 2024

This paper looks at the transformative nature of intangible cultural heritage and its co-relation to the evolution of a community. In order to do so the paper looks at the caste labour of *Naga Kalam Pulluvan Pattu* which is a form of *Kalamezhuth Pattu* where *Kala* means art or picture and *mezuth* is the act of making, and *pattu* is to sing i.e. it is *the song of making art*. It is performed primarily by the Pulluva caste community. Although different regions of Kerala, where this ritual art practice is found often sees other caste groups associated to this practice. Naga Kalam Pulluvan Pattu is a negotiation with snakes of the region where it is mediated through the Pulluvas—at least that is the belief—that the snakes would not destroy crops or bite small children and this ritual will bring prosperity. In 2014, I first saw a performance of Nagakalam Pattu as part of a narrative called *Clear Enigma*directed by Eugenio Barba. Clear Enigma was to have only one performance to celebrate the 50 years anniversary of Odin Teatret at a small village in Denmark called Holstebro where the theatre is located. From what is known, the village of Holstebro is not infested by snakes! Although both ritual and theatre have often been seen as embodied and transformative, this paper looks at what happens to caste labour that is entrenched in belief and a community’s social being, when there is a transference of it as theatre.

STOM: Kalabhivyakti Ka Maadhyam; Special Issue 2, 2024

The paper attempts to situate folk tradition in Nautanki performance through the legend of Reshma and Chuharmal, which is performed across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The legend has many contestations and is performed in the folk ballad form of Nautanki named, "Rani Reshma, Chuharmal Ka Khela" every year in the Chaityamah (Bose, 1985). Among one of the versions, Chuharmal is a hero and god of the "lower castes" Dusadh community (Badri Narayan, 2003). Herein, the paper argues that with the idea of 'superfluous' narrative, myth and legends not only exchange information, but also carves out a memory of its own to life. It is argued that digital memory opens up a new ambit between tradition and technology by indicating a new performative domain of socialization, as it moves away from the notion that they are locked inside specific geography/regional topography. The legend of Reshma and Chuharmal on the one hand, explicates that a unified form of a folklore cannot be found in the same society; and on the other hand suggests, that as "site of mediation" they have a bearing of association, which is born out of a sense of-human beings as equal.