This book explores crafts and performing arts of South Asia through a focus on labour and livelihood. It brings to light little-researched angles of social and political economies of culture and ways in which they have shifted and changed in different historical eras and different political, economic and social formations up to the present.
In particular, through this focus on labour and livelihood, the contributors analyse the extensive parallels and similarities of arts and crafts on the one hand and music and performing arts on the other, ranging from questions of lineage, transmission, class/caste/community, professional versus amateur performers and artisans, to the impact of globalisation, neoliberal reforms and mediatisation. Given the role of gender inequalities and differences within caste/community-based cultural production in South Asia across visual, material and performing arts and crafts, this interdisciplinary perspective will be particularly salient, and link together broader sociological and historical trends in South Asian cultural or creative economies. The book explores labour and livelihood through a gamut of crafts and performing arts ranging from courtly and classical to commissioned to mass-produced, and in epochs ranging from colonial or feudal to globalised and neoliberal. In the process, it revisits, refines or revises notions of social and cultural capital, of socio-economic mobility, of the value, role and agency of crafts and performing arts, and the status of their artisans and performers. Original chapters written by contributors with an interdisciplinary background look at the survival and adaption of traditional artisanal communities, traditional forms of practice, historical shifts such as colonialism, industrialisation and nationalism as well as modern industries and institutions including technologies of mass production and creative entrepreneurship.
The book contextualises current debates within art, craft, music and dance in South Asia. It develops new theoretical understandings of creative culture through a focus on labour, and contributes to a range of social sciences, arts, and humanities disciplines, including South Asian studies, Ethnomusicology, Crafts and Design, Economic Anthropology, (Historical) Sociology and (Historical) Economics, Cultural History, Human Geography, and Creative Industries and Economies.
Creative Vocabularies of Work and Value in South Asia: A Foreword; Living, Adapting, and Creating: Craftspeople and Performers in South Asia: A Foreword; Introduction Living, Adapting, and Creating: Craftspeople and Performers in South Asia; Chapter 1. Musical Unfreedom and the Drummers’ Dilemma: Cultural Labour and the Value of Music in Indian Caste Society; Chapter 2. Uḻaippu: Performance as Labour in a Tamil Theatre Tradition; Chapter 3. Narratives of Craft and Power in Sindh, Pakistan; Chapter 4. Artistic Labour at Stake: The Case of South Indian Courtesans’ Changing Patterns of Professionalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial India; Chapter 5. Women, Crafts and Landscapes; Acknowledging Cultural Rights for Sustainable Development; Chapter 6. The Performance of Payment: Differentiating Devotional, Erotic and Classical Performing Arts in India; Chapter 7. Materializing Insurgency: Walnut-Wood Carving and the Material Culture of Conflict; Chapter 8. The Tawa’if in Colonial India: Changing Livelihoods and Emerging Technologies (1790s - 1920s); Chapter 9. Remaking Labouring Lives through Crisis: Artisan Weaponsmiths in Colonial North India; Chapter 10. Court Music Outside the Court: Defining the ‘Professional’ Musician in Nineteenth-Century Bengal; Chapter 11. The Hand in the Song: Understanding Performative Labour, Gender, and Livelihood in the Arts of Chitrakar Women of West Bengal; Chapter 12. Kashmir’s Crafts Women: Tacit, Embodied Knowledge and its value in Post Conflict Reconstruction; Chapter 13. Kanchipuram as Brand Value: Weaving, Marketing Tradition in South India; Chapter 14. Drumming, Value, and Patronage in a Himalayan Village Economy; Chapter 15. Globalities and Temporalities of Artisanship: Lessons from an Indian Wood Art Industry; Chapter 16. The Gramophone, The Concert Stage and the Hindustani Musician as Commodity-Fetish; Chapter 17. The Business of Kollywood Dance in Chennai, India; Chapter 18. Surviving Revivals: Or Why the Work of Resuscitating Indian Crafts is Never Done; Index
Anna Morcom is the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. She studies performing arts of India and Tibet from diverse perspectives analysing shifting configurations of social power, and has published on courtesans, bar girls, queer performers, and classical musicians in India. Neelam Raina is an associate professor of international development and design at Middlesex University London. Her grant funded research focusses on conflict and post conflict economic reconstruction, material cultures, indigenous knowledge, displacement and gender. Her interest lies in intersectional inequalities and inequities in fragile settings.
