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FORTHCOMING
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Stigmas of the Tamil Stage:
An Ethnography of Special Drama
Artists in South India
Susan
Seizer
Performance
Studies / Anthropology / South Asian Studies / Gender
Studies
Rs 750 (pb)
ISBN 81 7046 321 1 |
A
study of the lives of popular theatre artists,
Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first indepth analysis
of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost
Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout
the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m.
until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama;
individual artists are contracted “specially”
for each event. The first two hours of each performance
are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy
that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours
present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth
and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all
ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the
one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class
status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled
their entrance into the field.
Special
Drama is looked down upon by the middle and upper classes
as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.”
The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public
and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most
heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public
women” by their participation in Special Drama. As
Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary
ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humour
and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular
directly address questions of class, culture, and gender
deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them.
Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors,
audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful
readings of live Special Drama performances in considering
the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage
and off.
“Susan
Seizer’s moving and unique perspective on the fate
of popular cultural practices in an age and society dominated
by the norms and prescriptions of bourgeois modernity makes
her work important and insightful not just for scholars
of South Asia but for all those who are interested in the
general problematic of popular culture, performance traditions,
and modernity globally.” —SUMATHI RAMASWAMY,
author of The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies,
Catastrophic Histories.
Susan
Seizer is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture
at Indiana University.
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Beyond Lines of Control: Performance
and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh,
India
Ravina
Aggarwal
Performance
Studies / Anthropology / South Asian Studies / Gender
Studies
Rs 750 (pb)
ISBN 81 7046 321 1 |
The
Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute
between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost
thousands of lives. In this innovative ethnography, Ravina
Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the
conflict—which tend to emphasize geopolitical security
concerns and religious essentialisms—to consider how
it is experienced by those living in the border zones along
the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India
and Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region
in northern India’s state of Jammu and Kashmir. Located
high in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, Ladakh borders
Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how
the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim
communities in Ladakh, Beyond Lines of Control is an impassioned
call for the inclusion of the region’s cultural history
and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir.
Aggarwal
brings the insights of performance studies and the growing
field of anthropology of international borders to bear on
her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social
and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier,
how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state,
and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional
control that are legitimized through discourses of religious
purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in
lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted
in particular cultural performances such as national holidays,
festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery
games. By placing cultural performances and political movements
in Ladakh at center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard
plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.
“Beyond
Lines of Control is an informative book about a region that
is understudied in both anthropology and area studies. By
moving back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary,
the mundane and the memorialized, Ravina Aggarwal asks us
to reflect on the politics of memory for region that sees
itself as forgotten and liminal in the history of the Indian
nation-state.” —KAMALA VISWESWARAN, author of
Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.
RAVINA
AGGARWAL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith
College. She is the editor of Into the High Ranges: The
Penguin Anthology of Mountain Writings and the editor and
translator of Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh by
Abdul Ghani Sheikh. She was a founding editor of the journal
Meridiens.
NEW
INDIAN PLAYWRIGHT
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