SAST6612 - Performance, Politics, and Power in Modern India

This seminar locates performance in modern India – understood here as music, theatre, and dance – in the context of its social production and the production of its value. On the one hand, the course builds on perspectives drawn from Marx, Bourdieu, and others, and on the other, it examines themes of social hierarchy, taste habits, labor and corporeal exertion, and caste to think about the braiding of the arts and politics in modern India. A primary objective of the course is to de-center earlier nationalist-inflected histories about the arts in modern India, and bridge new thinking on performance across diverse forms of knowledge and critical methods.
The seminar revolves around a number of significant questions for the study of culture in modern India. How does the modern Indian nation-state mediate and mold taste-habits and hierarchies? How do we historicize the making of the hierarchy of so-called “classical” and “folk” performance in modern India? How can we think of the arts as commodities of exchange and vessels of capital in the context of the majoritarian state? To what extent do late nineteenth and early twentieth-century “reform” and projects of cultural reinvention undergird the contemporary practice of these arts, particularly in the age of the majoritarian Hindu state? How do Dalit-Bahujan and minority religious communities claim their pasts and engage in articulatory practices that stage new modes of identity and resistance?