Abstract
Brahma Prakash’s book puts before us an unusual, gripping, yet somewhat mystifying assertion about the value generated through the contemporary practice of traditional Indian folk arts. Initially written as a doctoral dissertation at the Royal Holloway University in London, it consists of four richly detailed chapters offering intimate field observations and analyses of contemporary Dalit cultural practices in rural Bihar, followed by the fifth chapter that appears to veer off to engage with a decidedly different sort of performative politics in Telangana/Andhra Pradesh. The four initial chapters examine a range of folk performances that the author has witnessed from his childhood days; and returning to them now, as a researcher, he discerns in each of these performances a deeper social significance: the battle over territorial claims in Bhuiyan Puja, the commemoration of the experience of displacement in Bidesia, the assertion of the right to perform in the Dugola, and the re-fashioning of the community’s self-esteem through a new interpretation of the popular play Reshma-Chuharmal. The fifth chapter broadens the ambit of investigation: partly inspired by the author’s witnessing of a rather distinct folk-based and class-inflected political performance during his university education at the national capital, he sets off to study the radical groove of the Jana Natya Mandali (People’s Theatre Troupe) led by Gadar, the famous ultra-left Dalit balladeer from Telangana. Each of these chapters is packed with historical information, descriptions of both on-stage performances and off-stage reactions, all framed within a profusion of analytical approaches that are sometimes quite illuminating and sometimes merely perplexing. When we finally put the book down, we are left to grapple with the author’s ambitious, yet enigmatic project announced in the subtitle: ‘conceptualizing the “folk performance” in India’.
One of the major strengths of the book undoubtedly emerges from Prakash’s drawing on, and reflexively reframing, his familiarity with the cultural practices he had witnessed—and somewhat unenthusiastically participated in—while growing up in mofussil Bihar. Returning to these familiar sites years later as a researcher, he is aware that he has a doubly ‘privileged’ access to these performances: as an insider catching up with old acquaintances to get a ringside view of the proceedings; and as an outsider equipped with theoretical trappings and concerns that provide the necessary distancing to examine the broader significance of what the practitioners do and achieve. The warmth of homecoming, the bitter–sweet reproach from a friend about the author getting off his disdainful high-horse and finally recognizing the value of his community’s traditional rituals and arts, and the author’s own effort to grapple with the familiar in order to recognize a value that had hitherto remained unfamiliar to himself and his friends—the accounts of all these make this book much more fascinating and insightful than many standard ethnographies about provincial mores of subaltern communities. Breaking away from essentialist anthropologism, in which the specialist assumes that the natives have a stable and definitive ethnic identity, Prakash is able to play around with the idea of the native informant by bringing together his older memories of community life and a newer awareness of caste politics in contemporary India.
The basic ambition of the book is to bestride, not bridge, the gap between two concepts that arguably once shared a common origin but have over time drifted apart in the routines of various social groups and the approaches adopted by social analysts—the gap between culture and labor, and the related gap between aesthetic and economic approaches to the question of value. Prakash devotes almost a third of the book in offering an elaborate account of the historical, disciplinary, and social dimensions of this gap in India, in order to make the case for the significance of the counter-narratives that he explores in the rest of his book. The foundation for the argument is laid through a couple of self-evident observations: both aesthetics and labor are involved in ‘the production of values’; and folk-performance may be viewed as labor ‘because it provides social and artistic values’. Upon this unexceptional set of axioms, the author builds his rather distinctive set of claims about a hybrid notion which he terms cultural labor. This specific form, according to him, does not merely provide leisure-time entertainment (since they are almost always tied up with the social contexts of production) nor is it reducible to distractive or mindless immersion in ritual enactments (which would of course render them totally unproductive). Prakash argues that the folk performance in India needs to be reconceptualized as cultural labor because it originates in, and is closely connected to, the agrarian productive processes of the countryside, but also because it plays a crucial role in the production of ‘taste, judgment, cultural status, and social life’. Therefore, asserts the author, we need to steer clear of the two prevalent and reductive ways in which folk performances are usually framed: as spectacles betokening the pacified diversity of national culture (for example, in parades and celebrations organized by the Indian state), or as quaint vestiges of artisanal life in an age dominated by the capitalist ‘creative economy’ (based on a brusque distinction between practices regarded as economically productive or unproductive). Prakash argues that we must attend to the chain of associations stimulated by cultural labor in the hearts as well as the habitats of its performers and audiences. The ‘values’ that Prakash attributes to such labor remains indistinct and ambivalent, at best: according to him, they can be ‘enslaving or liberating or both’. And the performers themselves can either become ‘willing slaves of the powerful’ or they ‘may subvert the power relationship’. The author’s phrasing of the matter signals a sense of undecidability. His approach at times seems burdened with a concern for descriptive fidelity: several contradictory views and realities co-exist in society and a scholar needs to portray these accurately—instead of, for example, committing to what Badiou would term a truth-procedure within which all views or opinions would not have the same validity. At other times, one gets a sense of value-neutrality: for instance, the author does not discuss in axiological terms whether what he terms the ‘subversive force’ of a performance is to be considered better than a cautious adherence to convention; in what ways either choice might be a good-in-itself, and how such preferences alter one’s judgment of the performance being studied.
Part of this undecidability appears to result from the eclectic juggling of theoretical models. Marx’s argument about capitalism’s creative economy is invoked but cursorily set aside—Prakash does not specify how his claim regarding the value generated and socially circulated through the performance of cultural labor stands in relation to Marx’s insight about the expansion of capital through the accumulation and inheritance of value (including especially through dead labor). It is, of course, a central tenet of Marxian analysis that any mode of production is sustained through the means and relations of production as well as through the appropriate reproduction of these two primary elements. Prakash often refers to Raymond Williams’ notion of structures of feeling but sidesteps the crucial and very bitter theoretical stand-off that later ensued within early British cultural studies, most notably between E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall over ideology, experience, popular struggle, and hegemony. Gramsci’s insights into how particular practices dialectically relate to the totality that constitutes society at a given point would have enabled the author push his assessment of the significance of folk performances further—in particular, Gramsci’s view of subalternity not as a situation of economic exploitation of the poor but rather as the historical incapacity of the laboring masses to produce their own ideas and critiques (through their own organic intellectuals), an incapacity which renders them dependent of the ideas and values generated by the organic intellectuals of the classes that lead. This is surely an issue that lies at the heart of the direction in which Prakash would like folk performances in India to be re-imagined. A deeper engagement with questions about inclusion and dignity raised by Dalit politics, and debates on Brahminical hegemony in contemporary India, would have added heft to the superbly evoked folk performances described in the book. It might also have been useful to have engaged with recent cinematic and documentary work, for example by Ratnakar Tripathy and Surabhi Sharma, on the cultural politics of new age folk performances.
In conclusion, setting these quibbles aside, Cultural Labour is a book that everyone interested in performance studies, agrarian studies, rural sociology, and cultural theory would benefit from reading. I especially commend the brilliant fifth chapter on the public and hidden transcripts of the play Reshma-Chuharmal as an instance of how popular culture in India might be engaged with.