Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the Folk Performance in India

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste based society?
In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (landworship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar and Jana Natya Mandali from Telangana. He examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments.
Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author's own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies, cultural anthropology and aesthetics. 

• First of its kind in India and South Asia, which studies the various aspects of popular folk performance to draw a conceptual framework for ways of seeing.
• It draws on personal memories, ethnographic research, and theoretical works of the culture and performance studies.
• A major theoretical intervention in the ill-researched field of the 'folk performance' in India.
• It covers five major performances: bhuiyan puja, bidesia, dugola, the ballad of reshma-chuharmal from Bihar and the works of Gaddar and Jana Natya Mandali from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
• The work has contemporary relevance in relation to caste, culture, labour and aesthetic discourse.

Brahma Prakash is Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His works focus on the regional theatre and performance traditions of India and South Asia with relation to the questions of marginality, aesthetics and cultural justice.