Conceptualising Popular Culture ‘Lavani’ and ‘Powada’ in Maharashtra

Special articles Conceptualising Popular Culture ‘Lavani’ and ‘Powada’ in Maharashtra The sphere of cultural studies, as it has developed in India, has viewed the ‘popular’ in terms of mass-mediated forms – cinema and art. Its relative silence on caste-based cultural forms or forms that contested caste is surprising, since several of these forms had contested the claims of national culture and national identity. While these caste-based cultural practices with their roots in the social and material conditions of the dalits and bahujans have long been marginalised by bourgeois forms of art and entertainment, the category of the popular lives on and continues to relate to everyday lives, struggles and labour of different classes, castes and gender. This paper looks at caste-based forms of cultural labour such as the lavani and the powada as grounds on which cultural and political struggles are worked out and argue that struggles over cultural meanings are inseparable from struggles of survival. SHARMILA REGE he present paper emerged as a part tested and if viewed as a struggle to under- crete issues of the 1970s; mainly the re- of two ongoing concerns; one of stand and intervene in the structures and sistance of British working class men and Tdocumenting the regional, caste- processes of active domination and sub- youth, later broadening to include women based forms of popular culture and the ordination, it has a potent potential for and ethnic minorities. By the 1980s cul- other of designing a politically engaged transformative pedagogies in regional tural studies had been exported to the US, course in cultural studies for postgraduate universities. This is of course a long-term Canada and Australia [Blundell et al 1993]. students. Most of the available frames for project; the present paper is only an attempt The consequent Americanisation of cul- doing cultural studies drew heavily upon to work out through a region-based case, tural studies was marked by a decreasing the American tradition. The focus in such one theme, namely that of popular culture. concern with issues of the political economy courses was invariably on popular culture, of production, dissemination and consump- understood largely as mass mediated cul- Making Culture Popular tion and an unprecedented concern with the ture and on the negotiations involved in fragmentation of cultures and identities. the new forms of cultural consumption. In the 1970s, the issues of class and The last decade and a half also saw The popular, caste-based forms that were culture as they had emerged in the post- unprecedented academic interest in the being documented, seemed to have no war period of Americanisation had come study of popular culture. This interest is place in this kind of cultural studies. Labour to be studied [Williams 1961; Thompson in part a result of the new insights into the concerns in the cultural were so completely 1968; Hoggart 1969] but were yet to be social construction of the world of art and absent that a culturalist turn appears as if collectively christened as cultural studies. the equivalence of texts and theoretical inevitable and natural. Such a turn in the The name was later derived from the Centre positions that privileged the audience over academia is more than dangerous, espe- of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the the creator. The study of popular culture cially in the context of globalisation and University of Birmingham. As Stuart Hall became central to the emergent discipline Hindutva politics, wherein globalisation (1991) has argued the Centre never rep- of cultural studies in the American Acad- comes to be viewed in extra-economic resented a single school of thought but was emy. As Cultural Studies became a viable terms of either cultural invasion or cultural a space for ways of thinking out cultural discipline, the notion of the ‘popular’ hybridisation. The regional and caste-based issues as they emerged in society. In this became distanced from Williams’ concep- forms of the popular are not only com- sense there was no abstract subject matter tion of the ‘popular’ in a capitalist society pletely blanked out in such a culturalist that defined the Centre but what distin- as “never existing outside the relations of frame but also all forms of transformative guished it theoretically was its conceptual domination and imperatives of commodi- politics are reduced to ‘cultures of resis- problematic of culture as being neither fication and yet in these relations the masses tance’. Yet a reading of the formation of distinct from nor reducible to social pro- are never only passive” [Mulhern 1995]. cultural studies revealed that its bound- cesses. Most of the projects emerged from In highlighting the important notions aries and frames have always been con- a critical political involvement with con- of participation and subversion, such a 1038 Economic and Political Weekly March 16, 2002 conception of the ‘popular’ had made an of European society and ideological de- condemned as one more variety of Euro- important break from the earlier tradition bates centred round the possibly corrupt- centrism. Radical, left-wing social history, of ‘Kulturkritik’ which had sought to ing influence of the popular forms of in other words, has been collapsed into defend culture from the ills of modernity, entertainment. The term ‘mass culture’ cultural studies and critiques of colonial industrialisation and commercialisation. By came up in the 1950s to describe the culture discourse…” (p 84). There is an exclusion the 1980s subversion had been replaced associated with the ‘lonely crowd’ and of class and the materialist critique of by ‘subversive pleasure’ in the study of eventually as the importance of the mass capitalism from the agenda of such a popular culture, so much so that studies media increased not only as a major form scholarship and the implications are seemed to suggest that the ‘popular’ as a of entertainment but also as ‘ Ideological critical for the academy and politics. site of contestation was as if outside the State Apparatus’ [Blundell et al 1993], the Postfoundationalist studies which put capitalist logic. Culture as a contested term became synonymous with culture forth timeless or undifferentiated con- terrain came to mean a complete equation transmitted by the mass media. The study ceptions of the ‘Indian’ as against a of the cultural to the political, so that if of the ‘popular’ came to be predominated homogenised ‘western’ do often give a an earlier economic reductionism had seen by descriptions of the folkways thereby student a false sense of radicalism, of taking culture only as a political instrument, a overlooking the tensions between the an oppositional stance. The impact that newly emergent cultural reductionism cultures of the popular and the elite; the these perspectives have on those of us dissolved the possibility of politics. As exchanges, albeit unequal, that redefines pursuing feminist and dalit studies is Mulhern (1995) has commented such a the content of the categories even as the particularly dangerous. The gains of the position of cultural reductionism para- categories themselves are kept [Bourdieu women’s rights movements and the anti- doxically arrives at the same position as 1984]. The institutional reproduction of caste movements which had appropriated ‘Kulturkritik’. Both the positions arriving the ‘distinctions’ between the elite and the aspects of the colonial administration as via different routes tend to underline a popular has rarely been the concern of resources [Sarkar 1997] would be com- complete submission to consumer capital- either those studying the folkways or those pletely lost in the binaries of the western ism. The political outside of cultural prac- celebrating the ‘popular’ in the 1980s. and the indigenous. Dirlik (1997) has tice and political society beyond the par- Interestingly, at a time when ‘consumer argued that there is a parallel between the ticularities of cultural differences came to capitalism’ is being forged and is re- ascendancy in cultural criticism of the idea be overlooked. Hence as the study of the negotiating the notion of the ‘nation’, the of postcoloniality and an emergent con- ‘popular’ became a viable discipline it lost popular has again been discovered, albeit sciousness of global capitalism in the its significance as a left political enterprise in its new avatar. The term ‘popular’ is in 1980s. Postcolonialists repudiate structures [Mcchesney 1996]. The study of the ‘popu- the present context of cultural studies, and totality in the name of history but lar’ became what Mcguigan (1991) calls so completely synonymous with the end up as Dirlik argues “a self-referential ‘cultural populism’; the experiences of ‘mass mediated’ that even the cultures of universalising historicism…(projecting) common people came to be viewed as resistance of the marginalised come to be globally what are but local experiences” analytically and politically more important most often conceived only in their mass (p 339). Aizaz Ahmad (1997) underlines than culture with a capital ‘C’. But in mediated forms. the persistence of three themes in the wide arguing thus, the earlier distinction be- spectrum of postcolonial criticism: the tween ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ culture was Of Colonial Discourse and notions of hybridity, ambivalence and eliminated and what followed was an Modernity: Cultural Studies contingency; an assumption of the col- uncritical endorsement of popular plea- in India lapse of the nation-state as a horizon of sure. It is important to note that such logic politics and a persistent underlining of the was well suited to the populist concept of A boom in cultural studies in the globalised electronic culture, seen some- ‘consumer sovereignty’ of the New Right. American academy is matched by a boom times as a form of global entrapment and The postmodern turn in the study of the in studies of third world histories and other times as yielding the pleasures of popular and in cultural studies had arrived cultures, drawing upon the theoretical global hybridity.

Load more