A Ritual Identity and Mode of Expression Under Bourgeois Cultural Appropriation (With Special Reference to Warli Art)
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SITUATION AND SYMBOL: A RITUAL IDENTITY AND MODE OF EXPRESSION UNDER BOURGEOIS CULTURAL APPROPRIATION (WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WARLI ART) RANJIT HOSKOTE This paper takes as the object of study, a tribal society with a primitive agrarian economic base and a sacral, ritual art which flows from its perceived existential situation. This society is studied at a point in its history when it finds itself sited on the margins of an expanding capitalist economy, allied with a social formation in transition from feudalism to a version of bourgeois identity. At this point, the tribal society is subjected to severe strain — its economy is subordinated to that of the conquistador nation-state; as is its culture. In the process, the cultural component is reified, appropriated into the so-called national culture; whilst the actual humans, who are the repository and agents of that culture, are systematically destroyed by the resource, and the labour-hungry apparatus of the nation-state. Such a society under repression is that of the Warli tribes of the west coast. Ranjit Hoskote is a well-known art critic. He is currently Junior Assistant Editor of the Times of India, Mumbai. He has written extensively on contemporary issues and is also an acclaimed poet. Introduction This paper takes as the object of its study, a tribal society supported by a primitive agrarian economic base, a sacred culture, and ritual art. It is to this ritual art that we will devote particular attention: it flows from a heightened perception of, and sense of encounter with, the existential situation of the tribals. It follows that this ritual art embodies, even enshrines, a particular understanding of the relations between humanity and the environment. The society described above, is studied at a point in its history when it comes to be located on the margins of an expanding capitalist economy, which is allied with a social formation loosely aggregated from a coalition 80 Ranjit Hoskote of elements subsuming the semi-feudal, at one end, and the bourgeois manque, at the other. Through the apparatus of the post-colonial nation-state, the elite governing this social formation is engaged in the construction of a ' 'national'' identity; its reference parameters for this construction vary from the imagined past of four thousand years ago, to the mode of life associated with the more prominent First World elite. The former parameter is natural to a reversionist politics intent on harnessing the obscurantist tendencies latent in a culture that is still predominantly feudal; the latter is under standable in a comprador ruling class heavily dependent on the linkages of neo-colonialism. At this juncture, a tribal society on the fringe of such a system is subjected to severe strain — its economy and ecology are mutilated, subordinated to the demands of the interest groups which operate the nationally organised industrial network. Simultaneously, its culture is reified into an entity without human moorings, and appropriated into the so-called "national culture". This dual process of brutalisation ensures the systematic destruc tion of the actual humans who are the repository and agents of the tribal culture that is such an important exhibit in the pageants often sponsored by the Indian state to further its own glory. Such a society under repression is that of the Warli tribes of the west coast. Through a study of their unenviable position in the dubious dynamic of development, we may arrive at a clearer view of the unequal combat between two kinds of social constructions of identity — the first, a corpus grown over a long period into tradition; the second a telescoped, Jerry-built attempt at instant, hence superficial, con solidation. The Notion of Culture As an operational definition, we will adopt the thesis that culture is the social structure of meaning — subsuming a variety of understandings, discovery procedures, and a residuum of effective information concerning entities and relations among them. In effect, it may be said to represent the totality of correspondences between phenomenon and significance, that are widely accepted as such by a given collective body. The immediate manifestations of culture would be the symbols, practices and codes through which the accepted version of reality is articulated. This being so, the processes and rites of their culture are the Urgrund from which the Warlis derive their notion of a place in the cosmos, their relations with one another, with other groups, and with natural forces, that is, their sense of meaningful being. The identity of the members of the tribe is predicated upon this cultural corpus, and is necessarily a communally held Situation and Symbol 81 identity, collective and programmatic. The Heideggerian Geworfenheit, the existential sense of having been thrown into the world, is here resolved, not on an individual basis, but through a series of shared creation myths, regeneration myths, and myths of explication. Following from Marx's (1978) formulation that the social being condi tions social consciousness, we ought first, to place the symbolic and expres sive aspect of culture in the context of the economy in which it is brought about; and further, both culture and economy must be examined in relation to the ecological surroundings in which they are embedded. Shaped by edaphic, climatic, and physiographic factors, the forces of production act with the social relations of production to create certain conditions influenc ing the form a culture may take; in turn, the culture releases resonances that may affect the evolution of these relations and forces, and also the ecological matrix. This multiple interaction is clearly reflected in the Warli pattern of activity. The Warlis Along with other tribes like the Dhodias, Dublas, and Katkaris, the Warlis inhabit the Thane district of Maharashtra. Their major demographic concen tration is in the talukas of Dahanu and Talaseri; racially, they are a survival from the pre-Aryan epoch. However, as will become evident, their articula tion of ethnic identity has very little to do with racial consciousness; rather, it emerges from mediations among the opposed cultures of opposed groups. Warli agriculture is now founded upon the plough, but it has barely outgrown the earlier slash-and-burn cultivation still practised on the hill-slopes. Paddy, the main crop, is harvested once annually; no fertilisers are used, except the ashes of dried leaves and cowdung, to prepare the ground for sowing. The subsistence-level harvest generates no surplus for the next year, and an average holding of two to three acres per family of five does nothing to encourage prosperity. The summer months render other occupations im perative, and an overwhelming majority of the Warlis are classified as landless labourers, easy prey to the exploitation widely practised by landlords and contractors. Illiteracy and disease are endemic. The scenario could not have been particularly removed from this one, in earlier times, except, perhaps, in terms of the magnitude. The Warlis have always been at the receiving end of history: they record an ancient migration under pressure from invasion, the vagaries of weather and forest, the threatening gestures of shadowy, superiordinate authority structures. Accordingly, it can be seen that Warli culture was absorbent enough of influences in the historical past: in its rosters, we may discern echoes of a 82 Ranjit Hoskote bitter war between the chthonic cults of the dark Mother Goddess, and the fair, patriarchal deities of the Aryan invaders. The landscape is one of rival gods, alternately cooperating and clashing; the corridors of myth are lined with memories, curse and counter-curse reverberating through the droughts and famines which descend from the heavens. At some stage, however, this culture seems to have embarked upon a codification into a relatively closed structure, bound strictly in terms of the discourses of organisation germane to a comparable level of socio-economic attainment; sympathetic magic; rites of fertility, wholeness, and/or commun ion with the elements and spirits. We may hazard the conjecture that this retreat into the communal self evolved as an outcome of the depredations to which the Warlis were subjected under the successive regimes of the Portuguese, the Marathas, and the British, from circa 1500 AD to 1947 AD. Although the depredations continue under the benevolent aegis of the Republic of India, the cultural response has been modulated differently in recent years, and is not susceptible of inclusion under the rubric of "retreat''. Warli Art in its Cultural Context Associated intimately with the complex of rite and hymn, is a pictorial mode of expression — which is the mysterium tremendum made visible; the actual, created receptacle into which the community puts its effort, and from which it draws its self-hood. Through this mode are ritually re-stressed, the subtle connections between humanity and the cosmos, as adumbrated by traditional insight. The year is calibrated by events that bring into focus the energies of this symbiosis — the festivals of sowing, rain, harvest, the worship of gods and guardians, the marriage. The events are each accompa nied by their pictorial dimension, which provides a sacramental order to the communal life, embedding it in the life of the universe, affirming its ties with the natural cycles of growth, and of rejuvenation. An excursus into the specificities of Warli art would be pertinent at this point. Materially, the pigments are rice-paste, turmeric, and geru: which provide, respectively, the predominant white linearities, and the touches of yellow and red. The pictographs are never framed, but painted directly on the earth-coloured walls of Warli huts, often in the darkest recesses. The diagrams are meant, in Pupul Jaykar's phrase, to "promote fertility, to propitiate the dead, to fulfill the demands of the ghost-spirits who permeate the dream world of the tribal.