Eating heritage: caste, colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre’s decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures inter-state systems of violence, policies, and discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial aesthetics
• anti-caste politics
• multiple colonialisms
• Indian creative economy
• denotified tribes
• Budhan Theatre

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Dakxin Bajrange, Alexandre Da Costa, Meaghan Frauts, William Gould, Erin Morton, and Nishant Upadhyay for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank Timothy Pearson for excellent editorial assistance. The research conducted for this paper was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dia Da Costa is Professor of Social Justice and International Studies in Education at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger called Theatre (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and Development Dramas (Routledge, 2009).

Notes

1. In a fundamentally anti-Muslim state and society, Dalit Muslim thought and resistance is entirely invisibilized from most scholarship and political critique on India.

2. Even though their suicides are grossly under-counted (CHR&GJ 2011, pp. 9–10), Dalit farmers, and particularly women, suffer disproportionately from policies that intensified cash-crop cultivation, debt, and landlessness, leading factors contributing to farmer suicide (CHR&GJ 2011, p. 20).

3. The sector claims both: that the poor are already creative and that the poor will be trained to compete (GOI 2007, p. 3 and p. 26).

4. I am using the term caste property in Anupama Rao’s sense (untouchability rendered as interiorized Dalit essence) where anti-caste struggles resulted in courts aligning caste customs with liberal property regimes, thereby rendering caste as ‘a property of the self and (real) property an extension of persons’ (2009, p. 116).

5. Oral performances and stories such as Dariya Khan of a Mina girl and Meo boy’s fraught inter-community marriage had also been misread (by colonial officials for use as key source in colonial ethnology) to make the claim that Mina-Meo intermarriage was time immemorial (Mayaram 2000). Colonial ethnology used this misreading as evidence that the Meo is criminal via marriage and blood histories since the Minas were historically considered criminal. This is in contrast to Mayaram’s reading of Dariya Khan as a marriage of alliance between two distinct communities that underscored the profound incommensurabilities that remain in intermarriage rather than a story that proves longstanding intermarriage histories among Meo and Mina (as per colonial representations). On the other hand, Anand Pandian (2009) notes that Kallars who were designated criminal castes in precolonial agrarian life and then labeled as such under colonial law have a complex self-representation of their criminality and virtue in the present. Piliavsky’s account does not help grasp this contemporary complexity.

6. Ramnarayan Rawat (2011) has challenged the ongoing, unverified casteist reproduction of Chamar as traditional leather-workers (read: impure occupation) in the face of archival evidence that the vast majority of Chamars were agriculturalists.

7. A Sanskrit drama device—a host who connects audience to the performance.

8. BT is named after this iconic figure of DNT history. DNTs are still referred to as ‘born criminals’ in police-training manuals.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council (Research Development Initiative) grant in 2010 [Grant number: 611-2016-0001].