Prakash, Brahma. “But We Will Not Give Up the Categories!

(De)valuing the
Categories in South Asian Performance Traditions” Global Performance Studies, vol.
5, nos. 1-2, 2022, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv5n1-2a112

But We Will Not Give Up the Categories!

(De)valuing the Categories in South
Asian Performance Traditions
Brahma Prakash

Introduction

This article aims to offer a critique of the existing categories widely used in the
nascent field of Theater and Performance Studies in India and the larger field of
study of cultural performances in South Asia. In most cases, scholars working in
Indian and South Asian contexts continue to use the categories of dance, music,
and theater while also considering divisions based on modern, traditional, and
contemporary grounds. It is possible to extend this list further to include the
categories of rural and urban, sacred and secular, ritual and theater, textual and
oral, and so on. These categories become so normative in their values that all rural
communities-based performances necessarily become “traditional” and “ritualistic,”
and urban performances “secular” and “modern.” This classification immediately
creates a spatial and temporal hierarchy; indigenous performances are discussed
using the discourse of ritual and community studies, and urban elite and middle-
class performances from the perspective of colonialism, democracy, and
citizenship. I analyze the values enshrined in some of these categories and
investigate how they continue to perpetuate hierarchical values in terms of
aesthetic and cultural taste. Several such categories have colonial legacies but
continue to define the works of postcolonial and decolonial scholars.

I believe that devaluing these categories would be one step toward decolonizing
existing discourses. While past postcolonial analyses have raised these problems,
they did not seem interested in disrupting these underlying categories. This
perpetuation is also associated with the effects of language and the limits of
translation, which attempt to find categories similar to indigenous practices in
Euro-American performance traditions. Analytical categories are informed by the
dominance of the English language on the one hand and the Brahminical-
influenced Sanskrit, Hindi, and other regional languages of the native elites on the
other.[1] The problem also relates to the reasons behind the failure of decolonial
discourses to make a similar impact in their home countries, which have instead
largely become part of diasporic discourses, with what G.N. Saibaba describes as a
“conflated idea of Indianness as a style, a diction, a theme, a worldview” (64). More
dangerously, there has been a surge in the right-wing appropriation of the rhetoric
of decolonization in India. This can be described as reverse decolonization and
consolidates the discourse of cultural nationalism, or the idea of “Indianness”
through majoritarian ethnocentricism.[2]

Against this background, and drawing on the works of Walter Mignolo, this essay
asks what an “epistemic reconstitution” should be based on in the case of Indian
and South Asian performance culture. Using the performance works of Kabir Kala
Manch and Samta Kala Manch (two cultural organizations based in the Indian state
of Maharashtra), I discuss the problems with decolonial discourse in India and
South Asian studies. I assess the blind spots of these categories that reproduce the
hierarchies described above. Adopting a Fanonian approach and drawing on my
previous works, I discuss the “4D model of decolonization” in the following ways.
First, decolonization by rejecting the supremacy of the Western model of theater,
performance, and aesthetic categories at the level of denaturalizing these
categories. Second, decolonization through de-brahmanization, taking Brahminism
and the caste system as a structure of internal colonialization seriously. Third,
decolonization through the de-elitization of cultural institutions, language, and
artists to break the aesthetic hold of the nationalist bourgeois. Fourth,
decolonization through the democratization and diversification of art and cultural
practices (Prakash, Cultural labour 249).

To begin with, I seek to lay out the hierarchies and exclusions of existing categories
in relation to the policies and funding of postcolonial institutions, university
departments, and scholarly engagements. Although I discuss this problem with
regard to the categories of dance, music, and theater, the problem pervades artistic
genres, including the division based on arts and crafts in India.

Regarding postcolonial institutions, I recall that in 2021, a South Asian scholar

based in the USA asked me if I could suggest the name of a dancer from the Indian
Adivasi (Aboriginal) communities. To my surprise, I did not know anyone. But I know
that naach (dancing) is a fundamental mode of expression to Indian Adivasis’
knowledge, culture, and aesthetics, and the organization of their communities.
Indeed, they have a slogan that says nachi se baachi (“one who will dance will
survive”). Yet it was difficult for me to name a single practitioner who might be
considered a “dancer” within the category of Indian dance. This is the travesty of
Indian aesthetics, where others’ aesthetics do not appear or, despite their presence
in cultural life, are made to disappear within dominant categories of aesthetic
practice. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) terms this “the sociology of absences,”,
in which practices and experiences of the lower orders are rendered invisible as if
they do not exist as part of larger narratives (15). Elsewhere, I have argued how
even postcolonial scholars keep reproducing the same hierarchies:

[...] scholars have maintained general silences around immense

variety of knowledge and experiences. They have also actively created
these silences through particular processes. Some of the aesthetic
experiences and discourses were not allowed to exist in the first place
in the hegemonic presence of the monoculture of knowledge, in the
name of merit and rigour, and through the exclusive canons of
production of artistic creation. (Prakash, “Dialogue with a Dancer” 17)

Naming and categorization are some basic criteria through which others are pushed
aside. Institutional claims such as your movements are not dance; your rituals are
not theater; yours is song, not poetry, become the usual rhetoric through which
artistic and cultural activities are disseminated and dismissed. Royona Mitra has
raised this problem of categorization in relation to the label of “kathak” used by the
British Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan. She argues that “Khan’s kathak becomes
contemporary only when it comes into contact with his western dance training” (32).
Similarly, cultural institutions create a framework in which only individual artists or
those trained in “legitimate” institutions are recognized as dancers, musicians and
theater makers, in a society where marginalized sections remain uneducated. In
this regard, Anna Morcom has critiqued genre as a frame for research in the south
Asian context, arguing that genre-based classification is leading to classicization of
Hindustani music. Instead of this genre-based classification, she advocates
emphasis on the “immersion in performing” and the use of “performance
methodology” in research (472). Morcom’s reference is classical Hindustani music,
where genre becomes the basis of selection. In folk forms and popular cultural
performances, genres remain important, but they tend to crossover and maintain
more organic links in comparison to the categories and genres borrowed from
Western categories such as dance, music, and theatre. The same challenges also
come to the fore in the community-centric production of art and culture, where the
role of the individual is accentuated.

My second reflection concerns scholarly engagement, primarily informed by Euro-

American White scholarship. Here, I wish to recount a personal experience. I was
unfamiliar with bell hooks’ works before she passed away in 2021. Indeed, I was
surprised that I had not encountered her writings before. While I blamed my
ignorance, the fundamental problem is perhaps attributable to the teaching and
pedagogical practices of universities in South Asia. My education at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, one of India’s premier universities, did not expose me to this
work, nor did my doctoral studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, in the
United Kingdom. The writings of Euro-American White scholars dominate the
teaching and pedagogical practices of universities across South Asia. These
scholarships tend not to engage with the works of cultural and performance
practices and theories from non-Western parts of the world, or the writings of
scholars of color in Euro-American contexts. While independent Dalits and anti-
caste movements in India are strongly influenced by Black activism and
scholarship, for the most part, these writings do not yet form part of academic
curricula (with some exceptions). I am not advocating that one search for “pure”
categories and formations based on native culture and traditions. Instead, I am
suggesting a diversification that decenters the West without rejecting its immense
contribution to this field of knowledge.

Another concern relates to the language of decolonial scholarships and their

translation for global readers—a necessary but complex act of scholarly exchange.
Almost all Indian languages have their own terms for diverse cultural enactments,
and often the worldviews of those cultural enactments are incommensurable with
Euro-American categories of performances. Most often, the dominance of Euro-
America categories shapes this field, but only by decontextualizing their meanings
from local and regional cultural and aesthetic contexts. They are used as generic
categories. On the one hand, artists and scholars must make compromises to fit
their artistic and cultural practices into the inherent colonial categories in the new
globalized economy of performances. On the other hand, in the name of
decolonization, native scholars often go back to the traditions and attempt to
impose different hierarchies, informed by the regressive ideology of Brahminism
that legitimizes caste and gender hierarchy. The diversity of languages and
hierarchy within native languages form a further hierarchy. Indeed, this makes a
decolonization process difficult for scholars who are genuinely committed to
undoing both caste-based internal colonization and Eurocentric hierarchies.
Whose decolonization is it anyway?

Let me start with a plain provocation that decoloniality in Indian and South Asian
Studies is a discourse of the diasporas. It is the discourse engaged with by
privileged, upper-caste scholars trying to escape India’s social reality of caste, class,
gender, and other hierarchies. One hardly finds Dalit-Bahujan, indigenous, minority,
or Marxist scholars engaging to the same extent with the discourses of
postcolonialism or decoloniality. There are significant reasons behind this
discomfort with the current decolonial scholarship, as it has also led to an
immobilizing ideology. As described above, conservative right-wing forces have also
appropriated the rhetoric of decolonization. For example, Rakesh Sinha, an
ideologue of the Hindu right wing, used the well-known phrase “decolonizing the
mind” to justify the ethnocentric Hindutva project (see Sinha).

Most importantly, as pointed out by Karthick Manoharan, the Fanonian idea of

decolonization “did not venture into critiquing the discourse of the group that
presents itself as the national group” (165). As part of the process of decolonization,
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests the necessity of moving the center in two senses
—between nations as well as within nations. However, in my view, South Asian
decolonial scholarship has focused solely on Eurocentrism rather than on the
internal problems of the erstwhile colony.

Criticisms of postcolonialism by Marxist scholars are well established in the works

of Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, and Vivek Chibber, while those from the anti-caste
perspective are relatively new. Activists and grassroots movements in general from
the erstwhile colonized countries have been critical of the postcolonial and
decolonial project. They believe that it scarcely engages with wider society and
remains exclusively a project of academia, full of academic jargon and tongue-
twisting exercises. Ahmad and Parry have argued that diverse historical experiences
tend to be reduced to one kind of colonialism encounter. Priyamvada Gopal rightly
points out that while the focus of decolonization remains on the “twin legacies of
capitalism and racism,” such discussions “cannot exclude the question of other
legacies and structures of oppression” (893). From an anti-caste perspective,
Chinnaiah Jangam (2015) has argued that postcolonial studies are anti-colonial but
not anti-caste. Furthermore, Y.S. Alone underlines that “Brahmanical hegemony
produces metanarratives of a nationalist imagination rooted in an intellectual
politics of homogenized pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial Indian tradition”
without questioning their own privileges (140). Karthik Manoharan sees
decolonialization reduced to the discourse of inclusivity and diversity, ignoring
questions of caste and land that are at the heart of the problem in India.
Manoharan writes, the “nation as a project was itself a product of the colonial
intervention.” However, this nation-building project can have “disastrous
consequences for those social groups at the margins of the newly constructed
nation” (164). How can we discuss decolonialization without discussing the
colonizing spheres of caste and the question of land—for example, the
displacement of Adivasi communities?

Furthermore, as Jangam writes, caste “has been an experiential social reality in the
Indian subcontinent for centuries which not only defined the social existence of
millions of people into caste groups but also drew boundaries of accessibility to
political power and material wealth while defining their mentalities” (65). He
further elaborates that the very construction of “the elite,” “the subaltern,” and “the
native” is used as a modernist perspective that overlooks premodern inherited
privileges (65). Caste maintains and sanctions these privileges, thereby rendering
the categorization incomplete as well as skewed. Regarding the intervention of
subaltern studies, scholars have pointed out the fundamental flaws associated with
the failure to recognize caste as a category in the Indian context (see Chandr;
Jangam). Shiasta Patel’s remarks summarize the problem:

Most of the scholars of Subaltern Studies who theorize this figure as

resisting colonialism, continue to be upper-caste people who have yet
to critically engage with the reality of caste and casteist violence and
understand how the subaltern could also be implicated in upholding
the casteist hierarchies even in her silence. (n.p.)

The current discourse absolves Brahminism of its inherited privilege, further

consolidated during the colonial period. This includes the privilege of class, caste,
gender, language, and the very notion of aesthetics based on the discourses of
purity and impurity. In Jangam’s view, “the only way to disrupt the dominant
Brahmanical narrative of postcolonialism is to bring the politics of the oppressed
as a counter-narrative of inquiry” (Jangam, n.p.)

In other words, in Indian and South Asian contexts, the decolonial perspective itself
needs to be decolonized in the first place. The decolonial project must be
committed to the transformative politics enshrined in it; otherwise, this decolonial
discourse reinforces the hierarchies of knowledge. There is an inherent danger that
the decolonial project may become a networking platform for white scholars and
native upper-caste elites, universalizing the interests and experiences of the Indian
upper castes as the Indian and South Asian experience. This problem has already
been discussed in the African and Latin American contexts. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
has criticized scholars who are now in positions of power both at home and abroad
for “building a small empire within an empire” and “strategically appropriating” the
contributions of local and native scholars for their own economic and professional
gain without meaningful dialogue with their counterparts. Thus, they create new
canons in their ivory Global North universities, establishing new hierarchies and
gurus. Rather than the “geopolitics of knowledge,” Cusicanqui discusses the
“political economy” of knowledge” that is “not only an economy of ideas, but it is
also an economy of salaries, perks, and privileges that certifies value through the
granting of diplomas, scholarships, and master’s degrees and teaching and
publishing opportunities” (103). She remains critical of the multiculturalism of
Mignolo and other scholars who, in her view, “neutralize the practices of
decolonization” by using the concept in limited ways (103). While questions of
diversity and inclusivity in the context of the university institutions are important,
they also tend to conceal the hierarchies that exist within them. Gopal succinctly
demonstrates this concern:

Decolonisation in the university context should not be conceived of

as a sop to ethnic minorities or a concession to pluralism but as
fundamentally reparative of the institution and its constituent fields
of inquiry. As several scholars have noted, it entails re-examining the
definition of knowledge itself—including what and how we come to
know—in very fundamental ways. (880)

Decolonizing the curriculum has often meant including otherwise marginalized or

ignored voices. However, Sruti Bala has shown that this simple move reveals
"thorny issues" in the existing structures and given understanding of knowledge
(336). She describes how "the absence of written classical texts, theoretical
treatises and documents have resulted in the devaluation of so many cultural
practices around the world" (341). As knowledge is canonized, the same division
also persists in the universities of the global South, where there is an attempt to
devalue non-institutionalized knowledge and practices. One of the significant
concerns of theater training schools in India has been how to bring theater and
dance to people who do not have access to it. Theater and some other forms of art
are approached as a civilizing mission. The absence of certain kinds of theatrical
practices is seen as a lack of art and culture, leading toward considering a region
“culturally backward.” Indeed, I have argued that “the existing approaches to Indian
theater and performance scholarship, no matter how admirable and ideologically
progressive, continue to be shaped by residual frameworks of colonialism and its
realistic mode of representation” (Prakash, Cultural labour).

Throughout my experience in academia, I have observed that students working in

Adivasi communities are typically asked to use ritual and religious studies
frameworks. In contrast, students working on urban performances are asked to use
secular, aesthetic, and democratic theories around citizenship. The divisions are
not inherent in the practices; instead, they are conceptual divisions. The
approaches assume that citizenship and democracy discourse does not exist
among the indigenous communities, and that the middle classes and civil society
do not engage in ritual practices. Some categories are so pervasive that they have
come to define fields of research. Consequently, these categories often provide
validation and value for scholarship. However, the framing and division of
performances based on religious, secular, and ritual practices are not only
inadequate but also problematic in a culture where this division does not work
definitively; therefore, categories overlap with one another.

Another reflection relates to the internalization of colonized perspectives and

worldviews. While growing up in the northern Indian state of Bihar, I remember
feeling envious of people living in the “colony,” a common designation for limited-
access communities in India.[3] The community members would proudly proclaim
that they live in a colony, projecting the idea that this was one of life’s most
desirable goals. At the time, I was not aware of the meaning of “colony.” I
understand them as colonies of railway workers, servants, officers, professors,
workers, and so on. I would dream that when I grew up, I would also live in the
colony—or perhaps even own one. I internalized the idea of a colony not as a space
of subjugation, but as a space that enabled a better life than was available in a
village caste society. This corresponds with the wider discourse of the
representation of India’s low-caste groups who think that British colonialism, at the
very least, provided the opportunity for their mobility. In the imagination of the
local subaltern communities, the colonies provided greater access to education,
jobs, and other opportunities and mobility to the oppressed classes. In what can be
seen as a relative colonization coming from limited options, many oppressed castes
in India preferred the colonial system to the caste system. I want to emphasize that
decolonization in South Asia must consider various forms of colonization of life.
Swati Arora has rightly pointed out this concern:

If the premise of decolonisation is to undo histories of colonial

violence, then the critique of systemic injustice needs to go beyond
the white colonial oppressor as the central focus and take into
consideration the multiple forms of racialisations and social
oppressions beyond the Global North—for instance, caste. (14)

The decolonizing project of theater, dance, and performance studies in India and
South Asia has yet to locate its sites of colonization. It needs to start from the
movement of decolonizing itself. It first needs to ask the fundamental questions
beyond the rhetoric Thiong’o (1986) posed in the African context: “What literature,
what art, what culture, what values? For whom, for what?” (106). Facing these
challenges of the decolonial categories, Bala underlines that the porous
boundaries between theater and performance, and the contexts in which they
emerge, prompt us to question what the university’s decolonization implies for the
field of theater and performance studies (334). She asks us to consider viewing this
hierarchy in relation to what is included and excluded. What is the basis of this
exclusion and inclusion, if not the economy of knowledge and what she terms as
“epistemic privileges” of the Global North? The logic remains the same regarding
universities and institutions in South Asia. Whose plays are written, who has been
part of the state and global funding, and so on?[4] A decolonial perspective must be
found outside the nation and state institutions and, instead, located within the
languages of struggle and culture of resistance. In the next section, I think through
the works of Kabir Kala Manch and Samta Kala Manch, two activist performance
groups from the Indian state of Maharashtra, to suggest that the existing categories
not only create obstacles, but also do not lead to any radical interventions in the
field.

Categories Leak: the Interconnectedness of the Performance

07:00

Forbidden Notes: Documentary film about arrests of Kabir Kala Manch Members. A film by Sonam
Singh, reproduced with permission.

Angrez aaya machine laya

 Mil banaya jhopadpatti
Chamar, Bunker, Lohar, Mehtar
Sab samaya jhopadpatti
Sari duniya ko uncha utha ke
Mazdoor rah liya jhoppadpatti
[…] apni bhasha aur culture bachai ke
Badhti ja rhi jhopadpatti

The English came, carried the machine

Created the jhopadpatti (slums and colonies)
Laboring castes remain lodged in jhopadpatti
From the caste of Tanners to the Weavers,
To the Blacksmiths and the Sweepers
All entered the jhopadpatti
After building the skyscrapers for the world
The workers remained in the jhopadpatti
The slums created their own language and culture
And growing with them is jhopadpatti.[5]

Kabir Kala Manch (KKM) and Samta Kala Manch (SKM) sing and perform the song
“Jhopadpatti” in the Indian state of Maharashtra in various formats. They perform it
as a song, enact it as a theatrical piece, and use it as part of movements. The
cultural groups offer an interesting model of decolonization. KKM was formed after
the genocidal attacks on Muslim minorities in Gujarat in 2002 to engender political
consciousness among those from marginalized communities. The organizations
comprise theater artists, musicians, singers, writers, students, and activists, and the
singers and performers of KKM and SKM often collaborate and perform together on
various issues. They primarily come from the laboring caste social background. In
their decolonizing project, the organizations engage with the questions of class,
caste, gender, imperialism, language, and other issues of oppression that larger
decolonial scholarships tend to miss. Their primary works remain focused on anti-
caste and anti-imperialist agendas and fit within what Banerji and Mitra term the
“undoing of imperialist episteme” (22).

Both KKM and SKM practice ethnography as well as theater. Like trained
ethnographers, they go to a locality, listen to the problems of the inhabitants, and
take notes of those problems. They create songs, stories, and dances for the
communities based on their observations. They identify themselves as anti-caste
activists, feminists, Marxists, and humanitarians who draw their power from the
laboring body and words. They are flexible with their forms and approaches. The
group sings, dances, and participates in educational training, they bring their issues
to the local government authority, and they organize protest music and
performances. They sing folk and urban songs, moving between rural and urban
spaces. They attempt to bridge the gaps that exist between rural and urban,
language and metalanguage. Through the work of these activist, cultural
organizations, I believe that we can critically perceive the politics of decolonization
in Indian and South Asian Studies, expanding the idea of decolonization, which
remains nation-centric. Consequently, decolonization acquires a more profound
meaning when democratizing processes are at the center, as in the case of the
practices of KKM and SKM.

In a short span of time, both KKM (from 2002) and SKM (from 2007) have made a
crucial intervention in language, culture, and political mobilization in the Marathi-
speaking region in India and beyond. The KKM came to prominence after Indian
filmmaker Anand Patwardhan featured some of their songs and performance in his
documentary Jai Bhim Comrade in 2011. Owing to their radical decolonizing works,
they were soon perceived as a threat to state authorities and have faced constant
harassment. As the organization grew in popularity in the region, the state charged
the activities of KKM under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). In 2013
and subsequent years, the state has continued to arrest many of KKM’s members,
and three remain imprisoned on anti-national activities charges, while artists from
SKM have been termed “official offender” by the authorities (see The Hindu;
Haygunde).

Here, I recount scenarios of their performances to offer a broader sense of their

genres and the various ways in which they invalidate the existing categories used in
the dance, theater, and performance studies scholarships. This account is based on
watching hours of their performances in Delhi in November 2013.

The performance begins as both groups walk together onto a makeshift stage. KKM
members are dressed in red kurta and white payjama, and SKM wear blue kurta and
blue payjama. Suvarna Salve from SKM takes the microphone and speaks about the
ongoing atrocities on Dalits and the nature of unequal Indian societies before they
break into song. Two young women jump from two sides and perform various
pieces mixing song, dance, theater, and comedic skits, blurring the categories of
genres and formats. They march with the protestors, distribute leaflets, and quote
passages from the Indian Constitution and anti-caste literature, much like activists
would do. However, in between, they also improvise songs and compose music that
addresses their new audience and emerging situations. One member sings while
others perform the chorus; alternatively, many take the front microphone. They use
the local dance forms of baalya of the Adivasi (indigenous) community and tarpa
from the local region accompanied by duff, harmonium, and ghunghuru (anklets).
Sometimes musicians take the lead, or they are accompanied by singers and
dancers. The performers keep tuning their bodies to the beat of dafali (hand
drums).

They stop at a corner of the stage where they see a small crowd, intervening and
inviting them to join their performance. They stop and perform a short theatrical
piece and move ahead with songs and slogans. They describe stories of empathy,
compassion, heroism, historic failure, and tragedy, depicting their anger,
compassion, love, and vulnerability. They suddenly break into satire before
returning to seriousness. The groups sing in Marathi, Hindi, and other languages to
reach their respective audiences. They break the defined genres of theater, dance,
and music. They move from oral to print, print to oral, and oral to digital means,
reading song scripts from their smartphones. The performers keep switching from
revolutionary songs to the songs and contents of the everyday struggle of the
oppressed communities. Their audiences are the working class, middle class,
students, and intellectuals. It is difficult to categorize the group either as a
conventional theater group or as a group of singers, dancers, and musicians.

How do we situate the performances of KKM and SKM in relation to dance, theater,
and music studies discourse? Are they doing theater, dance, music, or performance?
How do we place their performances under the rubrics of traditional, contemporary,
and modern, or in relation to rural and urban? As I have indicated, they participate
in stage and street performances and perform folk songs in urban spaces. The KKM
and SKM turn slogans into songs and songs into slogans, switching between orality
and textuality and between song, music, performance, and speeches. They perform
on the historical site of Bhima Koregaon and Diksha Bhoomi, as well as on live
television. Furthermore, their performances break the division between genres,
space, text, and performances. While colonial frameworks insist on these divisions,
the boundaries of the categories blur. This blurring allows these cultural activists to
articulate their performances, making dialogue possible. They create “the
possibilities of bringing the humanities and cultural practices together” (Prakash,
Performers meet the Humanities 25). The problem I am outlining is not only a
problem associated with KKM and SKM, as these shifting genres, spaces, and fluidity
of forms have been part of most performance practices in India. Radical performers
move through the channels created by the blurring of these categories to find a
wider audience and maintain their own survival.

Rather than attempting to impose divisions based on theater, music and dance, if
we use terms such as lila or attam (play), kuttu or naach (dance theater), or gana
(song-music-dance) and gatha and katha (storytelling) traditions, then the
categories are more relevant to the cultures in which these practices are rooted.
However, such nativist and vernacular categories have their own problems; for
instance, they tend to become too parochial and particular and thus can evade
theorization. This can lead to another problematic outcome whereby local and
vernacular are further stereotyped. In this case, the challenge would be to
understand local categories as universal ones or at least as categories that are
possible to generalize for theoretical purposes. Thiong’o (1993) would argue that
“the universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in
the universal.” He provides the example of language “as a universal human
phenomenon not in its abstract universality but in its particularity as the different
languages of the earth” (26). Thiong’o’s observation presents interesting
methodological frameworks in relation to regional cultural and performance
traditions in India. For example, if South Indian languages use atta or attam to
denote specific kinds of devotional performance, then northern Indian ones uses
an equivalent term (lila) to indicate similar types of performances. The problems
arise when approaching translation into English, which may not have the equivalent
category or the sphere of belief in which one performance and aesthetic practice
operates.

Similarly, one would need to take a different approach to textuality and orality,
which do not necessarily function in the same way in South Asian contexts as in the
Euro-American context. Recitation traditions in South Asia complicate this binary
understanding of orality and textuality, undermining the role of the text and
narratives in many South Asian performances. Essentializing orality dismisses the
role and scope of text in performance and discredits the significance of the body,
space, and material culture. For example, Stuart Blackburn’s study of bow song
illustrates the significant role of text and narrative in folk performance. He believes
that “no approach can afford to downplay the narrative force” in folk performance
(xvii). Blackburn’s “total incorporation of context into the text” (148–149) reiterates
the vitality of text in performance. Moreover, one also must understand this
relationship in other ways, to consider the extent to which performance propels
and interprets a text depending on the time, space, and communities in which it
occurs. A more nuanced analysis than Blackburn’s would also need to recognize
how the texts of bow songs are different from the canonical and textual narrative of
the elite culture found in the shastras. Narayan Rao accurately notes that, despite
being oral, “the puranas have a literary quality so that their orality is different from
that of folk narratives” (95). In this regard, one must differentiate between the
recitation of the text and the singing of a text—that is, thinking this relationship
beyond the binarism of textuality and orality.
While the study of cultural performances based on categorization into dance,
theater, and music, or into sacred and secular, is too narrow and
compartmentalized, the approaches based on performance studies become too
broad, undermining cultural specificities. Performance studies, with its wide
spectrum, have provided a new opening to see the creative expressions in dialogue;
however, it becomes so unspecific that it tends to undermine the specific
formations and analysis of the body and materials embodied in particular cultural
practices. The approach often becomes ahistorical as well as an oversimplification
of performance as embodied knowledge. Here, I am suggesting to bring global and
vernacular categories in a dialogue and seamlessly moving between them without
atomizing the field —the field itself is inherently organized through its cracks and
networks.

That being said, this does not mean that we do not require categories at all. South
Asian performance studies needs to identify the fundamental problems and
categories in the field for a specific cultural context. One of the interesting ways in
which South Asian performance studies can challenge and reshape themselves is
by emphasizing the border, margin, and transition. As local traditional
performances are mobilized and radically constituted to address new challenges, it
is becoming difficult to make such obvious distinctions between traditional,
modern, and contemporary, as well as between ritual and secular. The works of KKM
and SKM, and community-based performances in general, do not fit into these
categories.

Conclusion

In this article, I sought to address the problems of South Asian performance

scholarships, and more precisely, what is usually termed Indian dance, theater, and
performance scholarship at the outset of decolonial discourses. The questions I ask
are fundamental to the discipline. Can we decolonize the field without decolonizing
the established approaches and categories? What do dance, theater, and music
studies in South Asian contexts mean when the genres overlap? How can we hold
onto a radical idea of decolonization in a context of right-wing political parties
using the rhetoric of decolonization to pursue the agenda of hyper-nationalism?
Decolonial scholarship in the field of theater and performance studies should
continue with the task of decolonization of the Euro-American-centrism of
performance theories. However, it also needs to challenge their positions and
privileges concerning local knowledge and practices for better moral claims and
emancipatory dialogue. Otherwise, the empty cultural discourse of decolonization
evades not only the questions of caste and class, but also the more profound sense
of cultural injustices in the garb of nation and nativism.

Notes

[1] They also include specific usages of Indian languages such as Sanskrit-
influenced Hindi and Malayalam.

[2] Self-proclaimed decolonial scholars J. Sai Deepak and Rakesh Sinha represent
this new trend.

[3] It would be difficult to determine the first use of the term “colony” to describe
settlements in India. However, from all accounts, we can say that it came into
existence during the colonial period. In some of the first instances, the term was
used for residences allotted to accommodate railway workers. Later, the term
“colony” was widely used for all other settlements, such as those of workers,
professors, and officers, as well as the caste-based colony, usually for the
settlements based on the same class of professionals. The term also reinforced the
existing settlements based on caste division in India.

[4] Extending Bala’s question, one must also ask why Indian and South Asian
scholarship recognizes the works of artists and directors people who worked with
national cultural institutions such as National School of Drama and not the works
of Kabir Kala Manch, Samta Kala Manch, and the marginalized artists who remain at
the forefront of fighting authoritarianism and decolonizing knowledge.

[5] The “Jhopadpatti” song is written and composed by the artists of Kabir Kala
Manch and translated by the author from Hindi to English.

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