The primary objective of the Akademies is to promote excellence in the fine arts and literature, and to help in the process of conserving and disseminating our cultural heritage… but between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.

Haksar Committee Report 1990¹ 

We wanted to join the festival called freedom, offer our ideas, our philosophies, our vision of India, but we had already been museumized or criminalized. We went as philosophers and were dismissed as savages…² 

HAVING received little public discussion, the Haksar Committee Report (1990) on the working of National Akademies and the National School of Drama remains a remarkable document in several ways. In the critical view that it took of the working of these institutions as well the reluctance with which its recommendations were met, its trajectory was entirely consistent with those of preceding reports by the Homi Bhabha Committee (1964) and the Justice Khosla Committee (1972). However, what marks it apart was the evident ways in which it was able to bring a deep and scholarly understanding of India’s cultural past to bear upon its reflections upon contemporary cultural processes and the challenges of defining the role of the state in devising cultural policies and structures that would foster diversity as a means of sustaining Indian democracy. Several of its observations resonate with a discerning edge beyond the level of pertinent (but general) observation characterizing the earlier exercises.

This essay argues that so far cultural historians have not addressed the full significance of the 1940s and the 1950s as important decades when crucial cultural transitions were being put in place, particularly, within regional cultural spheres, in ways that were soon mobilized to define avenues and categories for patronage at the national level. Above all, the Haksar Report emerges as a critical resource in thinking through some of these shifts because of its deft ability to speak from a historically nuanced view of the pre-colonial and colonial past outside of a nation-statist perspective advancing a modernizing imperative.

Consider, for instance, its early observations emphasizing that while efforts to restore institutional frameworks of survival to the crafts had Registered an appreciable degree of success, ‘comparable on-going efforts for folk art and culture are not visible on a national scale, the activities of a number of institutes of tribal culture notwithstanding (p. 20, emphasis added). Or again, while evaluating the achievements of the institutional frameworks devised in the 1950s, despite the formidable presence and passionate efforts of a key figure like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya at the helm of institutional arenas set up to promote the performing arts and Indian handloom and handicrafts, respectively, the report notes that the domain of folk art and culture cannot claim any impressive success, even as the recent emergence of a host of ethnic identities and tensions highlighted the national urgency in this regard (ibid).

 

Through many such reflective hints, the report opens up a space to consider how indeed the above noted discrepancy in the fortunes of the so-called ‘folk’ performing traditions vis-à-vis the relative successes of the crafts sector in negotiating the domestic and foreign market for cultural goods may be read. If a range of weaves, embroidery crafts, furnishing products and artefacts have been marketed successfully to claim a significant niche in markets catering to the upwardly mobile middle classes, why is it that the regional performance forms have not been able to cash in upon the boom for urban chic in comparable ways? Here I will address some of the deeper issues about the negotiation of cultural forms and marginality within developmental frameworks of Indian democracy that this question raises.

 

Drawing upon the Kumarrappa diaries, in his above cited lecture, Shiv Visvanathan points out how the debates around the Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP) between the Chotanagpur tribals and Nehru’s team became one of the most vibrant dialogues about the future of India. According to him, what struck Kumarrappa was that, as an interest group, the tribals did not begin with their sense of victimhood, of wrongs to be righted, but with democracy as a funda-mental question. Further, as Prathama Bannerjee comments, within the more recent context of the struggles over diversity, equity and sustainability, ‘the adivasi has come through as the ultimate radical critic in contemporary politics’.³ 

A core question that any reflection upon the health of India’s cultural institutions, and in particular, a review of the categories posited by the 1956 Drama Seminar would need to address is to ask, given the apparent political visibility of tribals and other marginal communities within the structures of democratic governance, how then could we begin to understand specifically why the story of the survival of performing arts, designated as folk traditions, has remained such a troubled one. Or to put the question in another way, in what ways might the continued political visibility – and marginality – of such groups tied to how their cultural identities get defined and reproduced within the structures of the modern nation state?

The selection of certain performance forms as ‘classical’ and others as ‘folk’ through the 1940s onwards was formalized through the operations of policy, which in turn have been subsequently naturalized within cultural arenas as well as critical discourse. There is plenty that has already been said to interrogate the bases of hierarchization of cultural products through the binarist categories of ‘folk’/‘classical’, particularly, on how these boundaries were renegotiated through colonial discourse and policies, and the underpinnings of such initiatives in colonial anthropology. I will not enter that debate here. However, for my purposes, I will simply recall the important ways in which the fault-lines of Indian modernity and nationalism were primarily shaped on the plane of culture, particularly the domain of the vernacular spheres, while ‘politics’, per se, was subsumed under the paradigms of education, improvement and modernization.

 

How this played out in the 19th century is now quite well known. However, to return to an earlier point: what is not equally well understood is how, from the 1940s onwards, the significance of the vernacular sphere gets subsumed within the need to regulate the centre’s relation with the states/regions as an the imperative of a model of planned national development. If the vernacular cultural spheres thus becomes the axis around which regional identities within the new nation get fixed, major contradictions emerged as this became the mobilizing vision of the cultural institutions set up in the early/mid 1950s with a near monopoly over the disbursement of cultural patronage from the Centre to the regions from then onwards.

Critically, and quite persistently, the distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘folk’ performing traditions also gets mapped on to the Centre/region axis, such that the ‘classical’ signifies that which is eligible for national level patronage, while the survival of ‘folk’ forms, ostensibly as a residual category, will be managed at the regional level under directives from the central Akademies. The question of patronage thus becomes a key critical issue to make links between how the procedures of the differentiation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms might intrinsically affect chances of their effective survival.

 

Taking its cue then from the adoption of developmentalism as a national goal, post-1947 policy discourse across the spheres of education, language and most importantly, economic planning, rapidly and successfully cast the emerging relation between the centre and the regions as an antagonistic face-off. These were tectonic discursive shifts being put in place in the early years after Independence, whose intellectual and political spin-off, however, are yet to be fully understood.

While the political consequences of such a view of federalism may have been commented upon, its deeper underpinnings within larger intellectual debates or repercussions upon the cultural possibilities within Indian democracy remain only barely acknowledged both within official discourse or cultural studies in India. Surely, this inability to problematize such an emerging architecture of Indian nationhood is intrinsically tied with the grand hesitation, ushered in by Independence, to reopen cultural issues beyond their inscription within officially sanctioned discourses on cultural authenticity and the sanctity of tradition. Additionally, however, a measure of the extent to which this cultural closure has proved hegemonic is the fact that it has, as yet, largely remained uninterrogated within contemporary social sciences agendas pertaining to India.

 

Questions about the cultural hierarchies that acquired a fixity in the decades immediately before and after 1947 must be grounded in an understanding of this period as a crucial phase that saw various literary forms and cultural media transiting from their pre-Independence form as the means of mass entertainment and anti-colonial political mobilizing, to their accommodation within the institutional regimes of the Independent nation. Unsurprisingly, these years also witnessed moves by regional elites to negotiate and legitimize the claims of ‘their’ regional forms for recognition towards state patronage, particularly, at the national level.

In this context, interesting contrasts emerge in noting regional variations between the fortunes of different forms during these key years, tied significantly to the nature of interest that respective regional middle class intelligentsias took in the advancement of such claims. Pointing thus to the distinctive trajectories through which emerging regional middle classes deployed their potential to mould official discourse and the course of state patronage in ways that bolstered their own cultural ascendance, these regional variations deserve careful attention.

Take, for instance, the ‘fate’ of the lavani in comparison with other comparably ‘degraded’, erotically laden performative traditions such as sadir/dasi attam and kathak in South and North India respectively. No doubt, the performative context of ritual worship, aided the remaking of dasi attam as bharat natyam. The Madras Music Academy was the primary arena through which bharat natyam and Carnatic music were purified of their erotic excess and redefined now as worthy of middle class respectability, and soon, of classical status. In contrast, however, the interventions of Marathi intellectuals within the comparable arena of the annual Marathi Natya Parishad (first convened in 1905) did not aim to ‘upgrade’ the performative idioms of forms such as the lavani or the tamasha, which had fed into the sangeet natak, the dominant cultural form to emerge in the Marathi speaking region.

 

In other words, their efforts sought primarily to negotiate a position of normative and critical advantage over performing arenas and traditional professional practitioners, including shahirs, lavanikaars and tamasgirs, and not to appropriate the ‘lower’ forms per se as part of the regional middle class identity. Interestingly, like kathak, the sensuous music and dance form of the lavani had enjoyed court patronage during the Peshwa period. However, in an interesting contrast with the lavani, and despite the lack of an association with ritual worship, the classicization of kathak proceeded smoothly as regional elites in the Hindi belt were able to manoeuvre its combination of a courtly past and sublimation of erotic excess within Vaishnavite frameworks into cultural capital that could be encashed to claim the attention of political elites in Delhi.

Arguably, the pliancy of the kathak and bharat natyam traditions in accommodating themselves to regional upper caste/middle class reformist initiatives enabled their incorporation into the post-Independence canon of Indian classical dances that would be recognized as part of the national heritage, and deemed worthy of national-level patronage. Interestingly, the only state-run dance schools set up were the Kathak Kendra in Delhi, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Academy of Manipuri Dance in Imphal, both started in 1964. Similarly, the incorporation of kuchipudi, with its upper caste associations, and the traditional theatre form of kathakali into the classical canon, as against the designation of the elaborate dance-drama form of coastal Karnataka yakshagana as ‘folk’ seem impelled by historical and taxonomic imperatives that were hardly synonymous with pure aesthetic considerations.

 

Thus, on the one hand, some regional forms could hope to make it to the classical canon that the new nation state would claim as its cultural ‘core’. On the other, combined with the marginalization of traditional lower caste/tribal performing communities that had proceeded since the late 19th century, the decline of professional theatre companies against the advent of the talkies ensured that, by the late 1940s, amateur theatre addressing urban middle class audiences in the cities and big towns across the country could emerge as the sole claimant to the category of modernist theatre.

Within this scenario, it would seem that the ‘folk’ as invoked in post-Independence cultural policy discourse (and by the film industry) had lost its earlier definitive character of forms working within an immediate community performative context using old narratives and staging/acting and rhetorical techniques. Rather it had become a kitschy, catch-all rubric through which a disparate mix of regional forms from across the country that had had to contend with elimination both from the classical grade and from claiming a stake in the realm of an authentic modernist theatrical practice would now jostle for a meager share of the almost non-existent patronage pie.

Like the jatra, in trying to keep up with the demands of a commercial circuit and the changes brought in by cinema, the tamasha and lavani had evolved formats that had long shed their earlier folk character, and were now best regarded as a form of semi-rural/mofussil entertainment. In analyzing how key cultural categories that determined access to patronage acquired an institutionalized status, I have argued that these processes were fundamentally tied to the management of regional considerations in keeping with the dominant paradigms of policy-making in Nehruvian India. In this context, it was not just mere coincidence that between the early 1940s to mid 1950s, Pune saw a flurry of initiatives to establish a canon for the lavani form alongside other attempts to regulate the performance and reception of the low caste lavani and tamasha, whose robust popularity has evoked persistent anxieties from upper caste cultural and political elites.

 

Against this, the concluding section will offer an account of how the ‘folk’ status of the lavani and tamasha and their access to patronage were intrinsically tied to how these forms have been treated, in the first instance, by cultural and political elites in Maharashtra, ranging from upper caste nationalist/Dalit/left leaderships. This account revolves around the career paths and posthumous reputations of two of the most popular practitioners of the lavani and tamasha forms in the pre-Independence, shahirs Patthe Bapurao, a brahmin, and Annabhau Sathe, a matang. Strikingly, Patthe Bapurao has enjoyed a pre-eminent iconic status, towering over the subaltern legacy of more radical, lower caste performers like Annabhau Sathe, who is only nominally acknowledged even within the performing tradition. This discrepancy in their reputations can be traced back to a series of events held in 1942-43, when leading members of the Pune literati and an array of political leaders presided over efforts aimed at recuperating the legacy of the Brahmin lavanikaar, Patthe Bapurao, several years after his performing career had ended in 1911, just a few years before his death in 1945.

 

At this time, living in isolation and poverty in Yerwada, relying on petty earnings through his services to troupes visiting the Aryabhushan theatre, Patthe Bapurao was befriended by Jintikar, a postman by profession, and tamasha enthusiast, rental dealer in costumes and other properties and self-confessed participant in litigation to claim brahmin status for guravs to boot. Jintikar went on to transcribe and collect the laavanikar’s compositions, and had them published between the late 1940s and 1950s, to which leading Pune intellectuals and leaders, who had been present in the earlier events of 1942-3 to publicly honour Patthe Bapurao, including Datta Vaman Potdar, Abasaheb Mazumdar, N.C. Kelkar, Kakasaheb Gadgil, Balasaheb Gore and Keshavrao Jedhe, all contributed prefaces. Patthe Bapurao still died in poverty but, clearly, was sufficiently gratified by the turn of events to acknowledge them in his autobiographical lavani composed towards the end of his life.

Significantly, these events to canonize Patthe Bapurao’s work coincided with a sequence of efforts in the late 1940s to regulate and discipline these forms that culminated in the appointment of the Tamasha Sudhar Samiti, presided over by Datta Vaman Potdar to send in recommendations on tackling ‘obscene’ elements and humour of the form. This was followed by the setting up at state-level of the Tamasha Scrutiny Board in 1955, and the first Tamasha Parishad being convened at the best-known tamasha venue in Pune, the Aryabhushan Theatre on 25-26 June 1956, with the involvement of the same intellectuals who had been at the helm of efforts to resurrect Patthe Bapurao’s reputation. This summary account of the attempts to discipline the lavani through the 1940s might help suggest why Marathi elites had remained unenthusiastic in seizing opportunities to raise the lavani’s claims to inclusion in the national canon of ‘classical’ performance forms: it may be a sobering truism to point out that the lavani’s genuine popularity outside of cultivated middle class circles at this point may have mitigated that possibility!

 

Of a brahmin poet taking to the lavani form, Patthe Bapurao (b. Sridhar Kulkarni 1866-1945) was certainly not the first instance. That by itself could not have sufficed as the reason why the Pune literati found it worthwhile to back him in his twilight years. Rather, it was the astuteness that the lavaanikaar had shown in deploying his upper caste status to emerge on the tamasha performing circuit as a star, embellished, as we will see, with claims to being a ‘casteless’ progressive artiste. This combination seemed replete with symbolic possibilities at a time when the cultural and social status of the lower caste forms was being regulated.

Coming to Bombay in the 1890s, expressly to make a career in the tamasha theatres, Patthe Bapurao soon met Pavla (1870-1939), a mahar artiste supposedly of great beauty and talent, who had apparently come to Bombay with another troupe. At a time when it was s apparently still not common for women to perform on the more public tamasha stage, Pavla and Patthe Bapurao began performing together, and also began to openly live together in flamboyant style. This created quite a stir, something that Patthe Bapurao didn’t seem to mind, as he instinctively realized that such an act of transgression would only enhance their appeal on stage. He was proved right, as the crowds flocking in to see them showed no signs of abating, leading to anxieties about an unruly public situation and possible trouble.

 

Interestingly, in the midst of this, rumours escalated in Bombay that on account of his association with Pavla, Patthe Bapurao had effectively ‘converted’ (batla, the Marathi term has connotations of transgression and conversion) to being a mahar. The resulting situation seems to have led a paranoid police force to file charges against Patthe Bapurao for inciting public disorder. The facts of this litigation are hard to establish, but the way the story, which may well be apocryphal, is recounted as though set in stone is that the court hearing for this case apparently created a sensation: when questioned if indeed he was now a mahar, revelling in all the attention in the courtroom, Patthe Bapurao is said to have invited the judge to visit the theatre to hear his answer on the question. Finally, addressing a full house on the set date, Patthe Bapurao is said to have declared that true artistes had no caste, but added that on account of his love for Pavla and her art, he had indeed become a mahar as there was no way she could become a brahmin!

This widely recounted story about Patthe Bapurao’s self-proclaimed ‘inter-caste conversion’ could well be apocryphal; nevertheless as it stands, it still remains important. It was possibly invented by the poet himself as part of his self-narrative, a myth which soon informed the resurrection of his reputation at the hands of the Pune literati in the early ’40s. In either case the important question is, how must we grapple with this self-proclamation by a brahmin poet at the height of his popularity, of having turned mahar, and thus of seemingly having voluntarily relinquished his high caste status by virtue of his relationship with a lower caste lavani artiste, and his great love for the form.

How do we read what is sought to be presented as a startling, if not radical forfeiture of privileged upper caste status, especially in the light of much other evidence that this seemingly sensationally democratic gesture may not have necessarily been tied to a democratic mind-set? Read against the tenor of other autobiographical references within Patthe Bapurao’s lavanis, where he often comes across as egocentric and proud of his own recklessness, with a definite fondness for hyperbole – all of which seem to be at work in this self-aggrandizing proclamation – it is hard not to conclude that Patthe Bapurao’s declaration of having turned a mahar remained largely a basis for the display of upper caste virtuosity, and eventually for reinforcing a parochial cultural/political agenda.

 

Interestingly, similar brave declarations about art and artists recognizing no caste barriers occur in V. Shantaram’s film (1949) based on the life of Ram Joshi, an earlier brahmin laavnikaar of the Peshwa period. In the same vein, Nene’s film on the life of Patthe Bapurao (1950) invests the poet-figure with interesting tinges of Devdas and Guru Dutt in inscribing him as a tragic hero, whose life and work at once exemplify his love for the lower caste woman and the art form, which in the film’s view, makes for a stellar example of how caste prejudice had been transcended. In investing in Patthe Bapurao’s iconicity at critical juncture, it would seem that the Pune literati was thus seeking to endorse and capitalize upon the symbolic value of such fertile discursive and political possibilities extractable from the popularity of the tamasha form.

 

If liberal upper caste Marathi elites have negotiated the popularity of the lavani and tamasha through such strategies that betray their uneasy mix of simultaneous fascination and anxiety, interestingly, another episode about an encounter between Patthe Bapurao and Ambedkar in late 1927 against the context of the Mahad satyagraha helps foreground similar questions about how the vibrancy of these forms have been regarded within the Dalit movement and its quest of democratic frameworks premised on a vision of lower caste emancipation.

Realizing that the temple entry campaign would require funds, Ambedkar had called for donations and contributions from well-wishers of the cause, including Dalits and caste Hindus. Prominent among the respondents were several sangeet natak mandalis (which by this time, were often predominantly, if not homogenously, upper caste) offering to donate proceeds of sponsored shows to the Mahad fund. Hearing of these donations from well-known proscenium theatre groups, Patthe Bapurao apparently contacted Ambedkar saying he too wished to make a contribution. A meeting took place on 10 September 1927, where Patthe Bapurao is said to have arrived, magnificently attired, escorting two attractive mahar women, one on either side.⁴ When offered a donation of the proceeds from eight of their shows, Ambedkar angrily refused, and returned the money, much to Patthe Bapurao’s bewilderment.

The reason Ambedkar apparently gave his associates was that it was utterly insulting and degrading for him to accept money made through a systematic exploitation of mahar women. Interpreting Ambedkar’s position here is not easy, and in the interest of economy, I will merely contextualize it against the direction followed by subsequent Dalit leaders. Read as such, it signifies Ambedkar’s commitment in his public life to jettisoning the cultural resources of lower caste communities as part of a past that needed to be erased as irrelevant to the project of Dalit emancipation. Instead, it was primarily to be advanced through pressing the demands for education, political representation and social dignity.

 

And so, in contrast to the efforts of formally uneducated, lower caste activist-performers like Annabhau (and notwithstanding the work of jalsa troupes in propagating Ambedkarite ideas), Ambedkar himself seems to have persistently refused the possibility of investing these vibrant performative traditions with any kind of cultural pride. That they could have potentially contributed to the emancipation process, particularly to the important possibility of forging an alliance among the various backward castes such as the mahars, mangs, kolhattis and chambhars, is not a prospect that Ambedkar seems to have ever entertained, even as he and later leaders have remained troubled by the persistent factionalism that marked the Dalit movement soon after its inception.

 

It is not surprising, then, that the radical energy of a proud and talented poet-performer like Tukaram (later Annabhau) Sathe, hailing from a matang family with a significant involvement in tamasha troupes, and who found himself in early 1930s Bombay, when drought forced the family to undertake the long journey from Satara on foot, should have gravitated towards the strong Communist party presence in the working class areas of the city. Earning his way in Bombay through a wide variety of jobs on the city’s casual labour market, Annabhau was emerging as an early radical Dalit writer and a leading figure on the cultural and political scene in Bombay from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s. A founding member of the Lalbawta Kalpathak of the Communist party, and later an important mobilizer in the Samyukta Maharashtra campaign, Annabhau went on to produce some 14 loknatyas or tamashas, 10 povadas, plays, travelogues, 22 short-story collections and 30 novels, including the best-selling Fakira, and 12 screenplays.

Annabhau’s important presence within 1930s Bombay left circles could not have been without its contradictions. Here I will only flag Annabhau’s work with the lavani and powada forms and his experiments to energize the tamasha form with political content as part of his involvement with the Lalbawta Kalpathak, IPTA or the Samyukta Maharashtra campaign. This will help raise the question of patronage from the left for these subaltern performance forms, and understand how the Communist leadership sought to balance the innovative possibilities, popular appeal and the democratizing potential of the lavani and tamasha forms within the party’s political framework.⁵ 

Consider, for instance, the interesting contrast that emerges even through briefly juxtaposing Dange’s Introduction to the anthology of Annabhau Sathe’s work issued in 1952 with an address that Annabhau made to a Dalit Sahitya Sammelan held in Mumbai in 1958.⁶ Both these texts share an implicit understanding about the economic basis of dominance, exploitation and marginality. It is significant, however, that the term ‘Dalit’ figures only once in Dange’s essay, and that too to reiterate what he terms the ‘internationalist’ dimension of contemporary Dalit consciousness, by which Dange means the ability of the working class to seek out international allies, ostensibly the distinguishing hallmark of the Communist poet.

 

Dange draws on his considerable knowledge of Marathi literary history to argue that true art and dissent have always gone hand in hand, and to specifically commend Annabhau’s ‘Mumbaichi lavani’ as a powerful example of how class politics can inform poetry, and praise Annabhau’s povada, ‘Maharashtrachi parampara’ for its celebration of the cultural and political ethos of the Maharashtrian people. And yet, oddly, each laudatory remark is immediately checked with qualifying comments about the need for further improvement: Annabhau is even peremptorily taken to task for not delving beyond conventional interpretations of Marathi history. Dange concludes with the unabashed hope that the Introduction will guide Annabhau and his colleagues in their future work. Seemingly, as reiterated by other testimonies, even within the leftist trade union movement, low caste subaltern activists like Annabhau could not hope to be seen as providing anything more than mere cultural labour that would need to fit pre-given moulds determined by a theoretical elite. No wonder, then, that Annabhau should have felt marginalized within IPTA circles!

 

As against this, Annabhau’s forceful foregrounding of caste as class in his opening remarks to the Dalit Sahitya Sammelan provides an interesting counterpoint. It is true that none of what he says deviates explicitly from the underlying assumptions of the party position, and could even lend itself as a useful corollary to the official line. However, Annabhau’s speech does point in directions that Communists were clearly not prepared to go, at least in the 1950s. He points out that a separate Dalit literary meeting was necessitated precisely on account of the widespread tendency to disavow caste as a category of marginality and the implicit refusal to recognize Dalits as a large and distinct class whose cumulative experience and labour in fact constitute the social and cultural foundations of the nation, but even now remain marginalized and invisible within mainstream regional literatures.

As a Dalit intellectual, Annabhau was to later clearly acknowledge his debt to Ambedkar, even as his work seems to strikes a perceptibly distinct note from the emphasis on Dalit ‘victimhood’ that formed part of the dominant rhetorical strategies of later Marathi Dalit writers. A brief mention of Annabhau’s best-known novel Fakira will show this. First published in 1960, and currently in its 19th edition, it is an account of mang valour set in the early 20th century, depicting the principled resistance offered by its young hero, Fakira, who dies fighting against unjust colonial laws seeking to criminalize his community. The novel valourizing pride in being a mang is dedicated to Ambedkar with the lines: jag badali ghaluni ghav/sangun gele mala Bhimrao (Rupture and change the world/Was Bhimrao’s message to me.) From all this, it seems that Annabhau found it difficult to accommodate his great need to write about caste within the possibilities opened up by his progressive experiments with the tamasha/lavani forms during his long association with Bombay left circles.

Tragically, however, any acknowledgement that Annabhau’s work has had from the Dalit leadership has been belated, sparse and almost entirely nominal.

 

Thus while various political parties across the spectrum, including the Communists, the Socialist Rashtriya Seva Dal, the Ambedkarites, and Congress have deployed popular performative forms for purposes of effective mobilization, much of that attention seems to have been either ephemeral or based on a purely instrumental approach towards these forms. The continued marginalization of lower caste performers and performance traditions, even as some elements from these forms are appropriated for political, commercial or creative ends is, of course, part of a larger story of how the ‘backward-looking’ discourse of caste has been, at once, variously subordinated within the ‘higher’ discourses of nationalism, development, modernization and citizenship, even as it has been exploited in non-transformative ways by parties/leaders of all hues since at least the 1940s.

The current paradigms within cultural studies, or policy discourse, it seems, will not allow these complex processes of subordination to be adequately interrogated.

 

Footnotes:

1. Report of the High-Powered Committee Appointed to Review the Performance of the National Akademies and the National School of Drama, Department of Culture, Ministry of Human Resource Development, July 1990, p. 28.

2. Cited in Shiv Visvanathan, The Tribal World and Imagination of the Future, Verrier Elwin lecture posted on http://www.indiatogether. org/2006/nov/soc-verrier.htm, accessed on 23 July 2008. The comments belong to Raphael Horo, a member of the team representing the tribal communities of Chottanagpur invited to meet with Nehru and other government leaders at Teen Murti Bhavan in late 1947. The meeting was arranged as part of the debate initiated in the context of efforts to frame the Directive Principles of State Policy.

3. Prathama Bannerjee, ‘Culture/Politics: The Irresoluble Double-bind of the Indian Adivasi’, Indian Historical Review, 33(1), January 2006, pp. 99-126.

4. See C.B. Khairmode, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkaryanche Charitra, Vol. 3, Bombay, 1964, pp.141-2. I am indebted to Ram Bapat for this reference.

5. Veena Naregal, ‘Lavani, Tamasha, Loknatya and the Vicissitudes of Patronage’ in M. Naito, I. Shima, H. Kotani (eds.), Marga: Ways of Liberation, Empowerment and Social Change in Maharashtra, Manohar, 2008, pp. 329-356.

6. Arjun Dangle (ed.), Lokshahir Annabhau Sathe Nivdak Sahitya, Maharashtra Sahitya ani Sanskriti Mandal, Mumbai, 1998.