Paper short abstract:

This paper will look at the cultural politics of Kobigaan, a performance genre in West Bengal and Bangladesh by considering the aspects of text and its communication, and contextualizing the urban-rural social framework within which the performance is historicized and nurtured.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will look at the cultural politics of Kobigaan, a performance genre (within the broader form of verse-duelling or poetic contests) in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh by considering the aspects of text and its communication, and contextualizing the urban-rural social framework within which the performance is historicized and nurtured.

Postcolonial writings of performance have often been blurred by the colonial binaries of the "modern" and the "non-modern". The negation of such binaries (Latour, 1991) and the proposition of looking at "hybrid" categories instead, within the networks of time and space allow one to challenge the existing ways of looking at performance. One of the major focuses in this paper is to re-locate the performer-audience dynamic within the shifts of space and time. The "acceleration of memory" (Nora, 1989) involves playing with the vestiges, ordering them in the process of "forgetting" (actual memory) and "un-forgetting" (documentations, memoirs, films, photographs, interviews, and so on). The aim in this paper is to situate Kobigaan within the folds of these variants of memory and analyse how the performer's memory of/in the act of the performing gets merged with the audiences' memory of the performance. While the cultural memory of the performance aligns directly with the obtained historical data—memoirs, historical sketches, song-texts etc.—the performance memory underlines the singularity of a performer and performance. This paper will look at case studies of documented Kobigaan performances in West Bengal and Bangladesh, both urban and rural, in order to foreground this relational performer-audience-memory dynamic.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the negotiations between contemporary audiences and traditional performers of oral-visual narratives of Andhra Pradesh, through which this practice is able to embed new representations and create new social imageries.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper focuses on an ethnographic account of oral narratives of painted scrolls in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, India. Two features are very unique to Telangana scrolls in relation to other oral narrative traditions from South Asia. One, they are performed by different communities of itinerant bards who travel the region telling legends about the origin of particular jatis (barbers, herdsmen, washermen, leather workers). These legends are drawn from episodes of the Puranas, the characters of which ware claimed to be progenitors of a jati. Two, each jati is narrated its lineage only by a prescribed community of story-tellers. For instance, the 'Virataparva' episode of the Mahabharata is performed only before the Kanbis (agriculturists) solely by the Kakepadegollu community; Katamaraju-katha, the oral epic which traces the lineage of the Golla community (herdsmen) is performed before the Gollas only by the Mandaheccollu.

These itinerant practices can drawn attention to the many ways of imagining the historical in South Asia, by providing an alternative form of historical representation, within a truly popular medium - the 'local history'. However given that many from the audience communities have relinquished their traditional jati occupations, this paper will attempt to address the following within the contemporary conditions of this practice:

How are the negotiations between the performers and their 'new publics' regarding the verification and authenticity of the histories constructed?

Can these oral narratives be imagined as inter-textual, having no real boundaries, but waiting to embed new representations and create new social imageries?

Paper short abstract:

This paper will reconstruct a social history of musicians working in Bengal in the early decades of the 19th century, and will underline the role of smaller centres of patronage and forums of repertoire exchange.

Paper long abstract:

When commercial gramophone recording took root in India in 1902, Calcutta was an established centre of Hindustani classical music. The city's artists and patrons were shaping the fashions and repertoires of contemporary music for the rest of the subcontinent, and defining its canonical history. However, this was a relatively recent development: before Calcutta became the administrative capital of imperial India, the relationship between performers and the colonial city was less certain. This paper will reconstruct a social history of musicians in the early decades of the 19th century, and will underline the role of smaller centres of patronage and forums of repertoire exchange.

In particular, I will discuss the early history of the 'Bishnupur gharana', celebrated to this day as a lineage of court musicians from provincial Bengal, and custodians of distinctive dhrupad and instrumental traditions. By examining the economic context of their original patronage, this paper will explore the strategies such performers employed in elevating their social standing, separating themselves from other categories of artist or entertainer, and securing a patron in uncertain times. This will indicate how reputations were generated in early colonial society, according to the demands determined by a shifting social landscape. The example of this lineage will indicate how a class of small landholders, neither kings nor urban elites, played a significant role in the transition of music from late Mughal to colonial cultural regimes. This approach will therefore indicate how patrons and performers informed each others' appeals to region, repertoire, and elite status.

Paper short abstract:

The Burhva Mangal, a boat festival featuring Hindustani music and dance in Varanasi was one of the central cultural events of the city publicly patronised by the gentry. Its original form as well as its current revivals will allow us to reconsider the ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ distinction.

Paper long abstract:

The Burhva Mangal, a boat festival featuring Hindustani music and dance in the city of Varanasi, was throughout the 18th and 19th c. one of the central cultural events of the city. The performances of the musicians and courtesans organised on houseboats possessed or hired by the rajas, landlords and merchants from the city and other nearby urban centres were central to the event. Thousands of people from the City and from the whole region gathered on the river shore or on smaller boats to witness this gentry's entertainment.

In the first decades of the 20th c., the Burhva Mangal collapsed, progressively abandoned by the city gentry and targeted by heavy critiques from the reformist-oriented local press, which considered it as an archaic and immoral practice especially embodied by the presence of courtesans. After several unsuccessful attempts, it was recreated in the 1990s by the Uttar Pradesh Government and also, during the last four years, by an informal group belonging to several local powerful families of music lovers and patrons.

From the cross-analysis of the written and oral sources and of the ethnography of its revivals, I propose to investigate how this festival, in its original as well as revived form, allows us to question the link between patronage patterns and power, thus reconsidering the 'elite' and 'popular' distinction. As an ambiguous apparatus of power and prestige, the Burhva Mangal will also help us by enriching the debate on how North-Indian elites use public cultural performances as a way to assess their place in the city's power relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the modus operandi of 19th century Parsi theatrical companies that worked at times along communal lines in their efforts to garner profit. The analysis thus focuses on the ruptures in what has been described as a quintessentially secular theatrical phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

From its origins in 1853 as a tool for reform in Bombay, the Parsi Theatre grew into a pan-Asian theatrical phenomenon that catered to the growing needs of a new Indian middle and industrial working class. Although much has been written about the theatre's purportedly secular fare that comprised of and catered to people of all religious denominations, journalistic evidence at times tells a different story. This paper analyzes the manner in which Parsi theatrical troupes worked along pre-existing communal lines in their appetite for profit, marked by Dādābhāi Sorābjī Paṭel's decision in 1871 to produce the first Urdu play of the Parsi stage, Sũnānā Mulnī Khurśed in order to specifically attract Muslims to the theatre. Through its representations of Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian deities, prophets and royalty and its re-enactments of historical and mythological episodes the Parsi Theatre invented tradition, advertising and propagating new modes of veneration and worship particularly during times of religious festivities. However these representations and re-enactments occasionally served to ignite the ire of the communities that the Theatre aimed to please and ultimately contributed to the distancing of the Parsi community from the popular Parsi Theatre. The analysis will conclude with the study of emergence of sub-genres such as that of the Pārsī Sansārī Nāṭak which arose in the 1890's as a reaction to the increasing Hindu and Muslim presence within the Theatre and which served once again to create an interdictory space where the Parsi community's anxieties were articulated and negotiated.

Paper short abstract:

I examine through time the tension between the stereotype of the rustic Punjabi, and the ironic ‘popularity’ of classical music in Punjab, as symbolised by Harballabh. The gendered space and historically changing character of performance are connected to wider socio-political currents.

Paper long abstract:

From a 'mela' of the late 19th century, to a proto-'sammelan' in the first half of the 20th and finally the metamorphosis into the full fledged 'sammelan' from the 1950s onwards, the Harballabh "Musicians' Fair" has held different connotations as a festival of Hindustani music though its long history. Here, I primarily examine transitions in the performer-audience relationships fostered at this festival over broadly a century. Mining oral testimonies, newspaper reports, accounts of colonial ethnographers, hagiographies of the festival, personal memoirs (cf. Sheila Dhar's), souvenirs and notices of the festival, etc., I delve into the shifting connotations the Harballabh has held for a diversity of groups of patrons, performers and audiences through time. Beginning with the mystic-cum-bucolic origins of the festival in the late nineteenth century and its primarily peasant attendees, I move to efforts of Jallandhar notables (partly as a result of Pt. V.D. Paluskar's visits) in the 1920s to 'modernise' the festival on the lines of Lahore concerts, examine the post-Independence disciplined professionalization of the festival under Ashwini Kumar, and finally analyse the 'moment of arrival' of the festival in the 1970s, with the showcasing of talent (famously, Pt. Ravi Shankar) which was now internationally renowned. The paper investigates the persistently gendered contours of the space of performance at the festival. It ends with an attempt to historicize the dominant stereotype of the 'rustic Punjabi', while analysing its recurrence in popular associations with the festival through a theoretical use of what Edoardo Grendi calls the 'exceptional normal.'(Ginzburg 1993:33)