Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India

There are performers of the subaltern communities in India whose work is neither considered ‘art’ or ‘culture’, nor ‘labour’ in the discourse of aesthetics and labour. They are folk performers who largely come from the lower strata of the Indian caste-based society. What do they create? What do they do in the field of culture? What do they produce in terms of labour and aesthetics? They produce a set of relationships, meanings, and values. Their songs and stories create the landscape and make its spirit come alive. They give a name to the unnamed and unmarked. They may get enslaved in the cultural practices, but they have potential to change the cultural landscape. This book examines various ways in which these meanings and values are engendered in cultural and social lives of the subaltern communities through ritual, theatre, performance, and enactment. How shall one understand a cultural field, which is full of contradictions? Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experiences of being part of the community for twenty years, the book studies five different kinds of folk performances to understand the folk conceptions of the world and life in the light of our contemporary understanding. Cultural Labour offers a groundbreaking conceptual framework and methodological lens to bring art, culture, and labour together to study these cultural practices, which remain marginalized in the scholarly discourse for various reasons.