Caste and Sexual Labor: Investigating Lives of Tamasha Performers in Maharashtra

• In Event: Caste Identities and Life Narratives in India and its Diaspora

Abstract

Over the past three decades there has been an increasing academic and non-academic interest in the field of popular culture and cultural studies. However, in the Indian context there is little systematic historical study about the popular practices of caste-based cultural forms, and social and sexual labor. Most significantly, scholars have yet to investigate Marathi Dalit and low-caste art, aesthetics, and culture. Some bourgeois forms of art, literature, and entertainment have historically looked down upon, marginalized, or even excluded Dalit cultural forms. By drawing upon archival sources, biographies, and oral interviews with two leading Dalit tamasha (folk theatre) artistes, my paper examines the artistes’ everyday living to uncover the intimate relations between Dalit women artistes’ “deviant” sexuality, labor, their struggles for survival, and the community’s social, cultural, and political battles. I illustrate ways in which popular cultural practices emerge as significant sites on which lower castes have carved out spaces for themselves, refashioned themselves, as well as waged their social, cultural, and political struggles against dominant castes and the state.

Author

• Shailaja Paik, University of Cincinnati