Performance at the Urban Periphery

Insights from South India

Cathy Turner, Sharada Srinivasan, Jerri Daboo, Anindya Sinha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000594393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Arte asiático

This edited volume considers performance in its engagement with expanding Indian cities, with a particular focus on festivals and performances in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The editors ask how performance practices are affected by urbanisation, the effects of such changes on their cultural economy, and the environmental impacts of performance itself. This project also considers how performance responds to its context, and the potential for performance to be critical of the city's development, and of its own compromises. Bringing together perspectives from the humanities, natural and social sciences, the book takes a multi-faceted analytical view of live performance, connecting contemporary with heritage forms, and human with more-than-human actors.

The three sections, themed around heritage, everyday life, and future ecologies, will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, heritage studies, ecology and art history.

1 The spaces of everyday performance

Narendar Pani

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023852-2

Walking down a street on a warm summer evening in the south Indian metropolis of Bengaluru in 2018, I suddenly found myself in the midst of an orderly group of sword-wielding young men dance-jogging in formation around a man dressed as a woman carrying a floral pyramid on his head. The formation, one of the subsidiary processions of the city’s Karaga festival, had entered the street by crossing a major commercial centre in Bengaluru — 100 Feet Road in Indiranagar — disrupting peak hour traffic. As the religious formation, a practice that went back centuries, moved towards one of its destinations, a temple in the now urban village of Doopanhalli, the usual unruly mass of expensive cars, three-wheeler public transport, motorcycles, cycles and pedestrians all made way. The difference in the behaviour of those in the religious formation and of the people around could be seen as evidence of a distinction that is sometimes made between theatre where an actor is playing a role and performance where she represents only herself (Hamilton, 2019). The formation would then be an act of theatre. The members of the formation all had other jobs and were taking on a different role when they participated in the festival. In contrast, the passers-by in vehicles and on their feet, who were simply ‘being themselves’ and accepting their passive role on the street for those few minutes, could be seen as a part of a performance.

Such an interpretation of performance would include the actions of everyday life, taking us into the realm of anthropology. The act of making way for the dance-jogging ritual is, in fact, quite consistent with the six points of contact between theatre and anthropology that Schechner explored (1985): transformation in being and/or consciousness, intensity of performance, audience—performer interaction, the whole performance sequence, transmission of performance knowledge, the generation and evaluation of the performance. The consciousness of a person on the street who came across the ritual could be affected in a variety of ways, ranging from a surge of religious feeling for the believer, to a more secular sense of diversity that a street can suddenly demonstrate. The simple act of making way for the ritual would also have an intensity, which could vary from paying obeisance to treating it as a casual necessity. The audience for those making way would also range from others among the passers-by to those in the ritual, influencing the interaction between the two. The whole performance sequence would begin with, say, a person returning home from a difficult day at the office and going on to responding to the ritual to getting back to the daily routine. The performance knowledge of those making way also does not follow a written text but oral traditions. And the response of the person on the street to the ritual is also evaluated by others around her. This evaluation — whether conscious or subconscious — gives us a sense of the place as a whole. A city where people perform the action of waiting in a queue for a bus provides a very different sense of a city than one in which they do not. Everyday performances give us insights into the culture of the city. Everyday interactions between individuals and groups in urban spaces influence, if not determine, the nature of the city. Within this vast canvas are the negotiations for the culture (or more commonly in Indian cities, cultures) of a city, including those related to the role of traditional beliefs in an emerging modern city. Such negotiations can take place on the streets. The Karaga-related procession in Indiranagar was an example of modernity temporarily ceding absolute space to a traditional custom, but these concessions can also be permanent. It is not completely unknown for Bengaluru, and its global metropolitan conception as Bangalore, to have a small temple in the middle of a major road.

This chapter explores the role of performance in the negotiations over culture in the south Indian city of Bengaluru. It first outlines some of the concepts that this exploration needs. It then takes these concepts to two starkly different cultural groups in the city: the residents of the old city with their twenty-firstcentury commitment to traditions that run deep into the five-hundred-yearold history of the city and the beneficiaries of globalisation who have little place for that history in their twenty-first-century urban negotiations. The often-contrasting everyday performances of the two groups, and the ways that they are arrived at to deal with possible conflict, determine the course of the cultures of a city.

Nature of space

Arriving at a universally acceptable concept of culture — if that is at all possible — would take us well beyond the scope of this chapter. We would be better served by confining ourselves to the concepts that are relevant to our discussion of performance. The wide range of issues that performance can influence would suggest a need for a broad all-encompassing definition of culture. We could go all the way back to Edward Tyler’s definition of culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor, 1871). The advantage of comprehensiveness in this definition can, however, also be a weakness in the study of cultural conflict. It tends to focus less sharply on the specific processes of cultural conflict that are of interest to this chapter. When exploring the role of performance in the negotiations between cultures in an urban setting our concern is more with social behaviour, rather than individual capabilities and habits. And while we will return to comment on the culture of the city as a whole, this overall picture is the result of negotiations and conflicts between the cultures of different social groups. We would then be better served by going with Margaret Mead’s definition of culture as ‘the total shared, learned behavior of a society or a subgroup’ (Mead, 1953:22).

This behaviour is reflected in multiple spaces of lived experience. The space where a particular action or event takes place is most visible when it can be seen physically. Yet there are actions that can take place in more abstract spaces such as the individual mind or in collective memory. These spaces have been explored across a variety of disciplines and over centuries, from the seventeenth-century physics of Isaac Newton to the twentieth-century sociology of Henri Lefebvre. The concept of space has also been sliced in different ways. Drawing from this very substantial literature, and modifying concepts on the way, I have found it useful elsewhere to focus on six different types of space: absolute space, the space that determines interests, organic space, the space of imagination, represented space and the space of coping with temporariness (Pani, 2017). And culture can also be seen to work itself out differently in each of these spaces.

Absolute space is the three-dimensional space of architects, geographers and those dealing with material objects. The culture of absolute space has a very clear sense of shared behaviour. The relationship of the individual to a clearly demarcated three-dimensional space is socially determined. In societies that value private property, the demarcation between private and public is recognised in social behaviour; there would be respect for another person’s private property. This respect, together with the other person’s assertion of her right to the property, is reflected in the display behaviour around those pieces of absolute space. In some cultures, the houses could be marked by uniformity of design, as in the shared design of row housing. In other cultures, each building on even very small plots of land could seek to have its own individual design. The houses may be inanimate but through their display are performing the shared behaviour of the groups that built them.

Interest space is that abstract space where individuals decide what is in their interests. This is often seen to be no more than control over physical objects in the absolute space. Once we move to the shared behaviour of culture, and especially the display behaviour of performance, it is clear that interests go beyond physical objects. Attitudes to women could be determined by learning a shared behaviour. And individuals may display their commitment to a shared behaviour through extreme actions. It is, unfortunately, not unknown for the head of a family to display his commitment to a shared discrimination against women by going as far as killing a daughter in the belief that he is protecting the honour of the family. The conflict may play itself out in the absolute space where the act is carried out, but there is also a deeper conflict of interests at play within the individual. There must be, to whatever minimal extent, a conflict between his affection for his daughter, howsoever limited it may be, and his felt need to protect the family honour. Such conflicts of interests are evaluated and decided upon in a space within an individual’s thinking. While this space is deeply rooted within the individual mind, it is not independent of social influences. Indeed, the idea of family honour is only relevant in relation to others outside the family and is hence a social construct. The decision that this brutal performance, of killing one’s daughter, is a necessary display of commitment to a shared behaviour emphasises that the interest space cannot be mechanically reduced to conditions in absolute space.

Organic space is the space associated with the five basic senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell. While this space may seem entirely personal, in reality, there is considerable space for shared and learned behaviour. The idea of what is desirable, and what is less so, in each of the senses is not independent of social norms. Shared behaviour can include extreme exclusion like untouchability or hiding extreme poverty from view. On the more positive side of things, the choice of music could follow socially determined fashion, as would the taste of a delectable meal with the associated aroma. There are also performances that display commitment to a particular social view of what is desirable, and what is not, in each of the five senses. The practice of untouchability involved a very elaborate performance. Behaviour in a rock concert is a public display of appreciation of a particular form of music. Audience behaviour on viewing a traditional dance performance would also follow social norms. Dietary restrictions in particular areas, say a vegetarian restaurant, ensure the display of a particular form of behaviour with regard to taste. And social norms on behaviour with regard to smell can be more strinyent.

The space of imagination lies beyond what can be felt through the five senses. It is a space that a person can be part of without using any of the five senses. These imaginations could be influenced by what an individual has experienced previously through her five senses. Her having seen something beautiful could lead her to imagine something she has not seen, to also be as altering; she could imagine music she has never heard before to be an extension of something she has heard; she can imagine touching a piece of cloth that feels like satin, only more so; she may imagine a dish to have a taste and aroma though she has never tasted or smelt it. A person can treat the happenings in the space of her imagination quite separately from her actions. Whatever happens in the space of her imagination then need be no more than a daydream. In other cases, she may allow the happenings in the space of her imagination to influence her actions. The happenings in this space can themselves be influenced by conditions beyond the individual. A person in the midst of extreme social conflict can find the space of her imagination defined by that fear. At the same time there may things she can imagine that give her hope. The particular mix of fear and hope that is imagined would vary from person to person. Some could imagine rational outcomes, while others may fall back on the supernatural. Whatever the final action that emerges, they are dependent on what she can imagine. And these boundaries are determined by, among other things, the knowledge that a particular social situation provides her. A social situation of great personal stress can push her towards imaginations that ease her fears. It can lead to the performance of rituals that are expected to help generate imaginations that remove fear. The socially determined boundaries of the space of imagination thus define what is imagined, and then acted upon. Religion is sometimes a shared and learned behaviour that calms these fears.

The space of temporariness is where a person addresses the reality that the experience of all other spaces is temporary. Some experiences of specific spaces may be such that a person does not want them to end; other experiences, especially those involving great fear, could generate a feeling of it never going to end. Individuals can react differendy to the fact that, for better or worse, these experiences do end. Some could deal with this inevitability with a sense of equanimity, while other reactions could be more extreme. The space of temporariness is that where individuals react to the absence of permanence. The behaviour in this space is expected to follow certain shared social norms. Social and political leaders are expected to display this shared behaviour in a crisis and may display the prescribed behaviour even if they are not so inclined.

Represented space is the space of conceptualisation and presentation of a group as it wants to be seen. This space can be utilised in everyday life, as when a Muslim woman wears a headscarf or a Christian woman a Cross. It can also be done for a specific period of time in the form of a festival. A festival allows for specific forms of display behaviour that highlight a specific aspect of the beliefs of the identity group. This is usually associated with religious beliefs, such as a temple procession. But these festivals need not be confined to religion. They can be conceptualisations and presentations of secular beliefs, as in most literature festivals.

The emergence of the shared and learned behaviour, which constitutes culture, in these spaces is not without its scope for conflict. Conflict can emerge within individuals when they find themselves in more than one space. A schoolgirl may be keen to be lost in the space of imagination when in her class in school, though she is expected to be using at least her sense of hearing and sight to pay attention to what is being taught. Conflicts can occur between persons, as when a rebel tries to break out of an expected shared behaviour. The schoolgirl could choose to dress in ways that the family does not approve of. Of greater consequence are the conflicts that emerge between groups. And an ethnic group could come into conflict with other groups in each of the six spaces that this chapter deals with. There can be conflict over land in absolute space. In the interest space, some groups may believe it is in their interest to champion their behavioural norms against that of others. The battles in the organic space can be more intense. There could be conflicts over diets, especially in societies with powerful vegetarian groups. The organic space can also be the arena for potentially more disruptive conflicts over the sounds of religion, from church bells to the mosque’s call to prayer, to the drums of a modern Hindu religious procession. Imagination may be conceived of as a deeply personal space, but conflicts that emerge from the space of imagination can be intense, as when a community imagines it has been insulted. Temporariness also brings its own avenues for conflict, as when groups that lose power do not come to terms with it. And groups can come directly into conflict in the represented space, as when there is a clash in the celebration of the festivals of different groups.

The scope for such conflict is accentuated when the groups operate in the same space. This again would be most visible in absolute space but can occur in other spaces as well. In India, the conflict has extended to organic space, with groups trying to enforce what others should eat. The conflict over diet has led to extreme actions, including the lynching of those who are, often falsely, said to be consuming beef. When groups operate in completely different spaces, there is less potential for direct conflict. The differences in their shared behaviour may remain, and even grow, but to the extent that they are not operating within the same space, there is less potential for the divergence in interests to be manifested in conflicting actions. Groups that are associated with very different absolute spaces have little scope to come into conflict over land. When the groups follow different behavioural norms in determining their interests, there is less scope for conflict. A group that believes its interests lie in deep personal introspection in a secluded environment can coexist with another that believes its interests lie in the pursuit of monetary goals. Indeed, it is hardly unknown for those pursuing monetary goals to support those in pursuit of spiritual ends. In the organic space, the cultural practices may demand playing music at a high volume, while that of another may need complete silence. As long as the two groups are not required to share the same organic space where they can hear each other, there would be no direct provocation for conflict. Similarly, as long as the organic spaces are clearly demarcated, one group’s practice of vegetarianism does not affect the ability of another group to practice non-vegetarianism. Different imaginations can also coexist as long as the pursuit of one dream is not imposed on another. In short, allowing groups autonomy in each of the six spaces would reduce the scope for conflict between the shared behaviour of different groups.

Cities, by their very nature, tend to challenge the emergence and preservation of the autonomy of the shared behaviour of individual groups. Whether we are willing to identify cities solely with the processes of agglomeration or not, agglomeration does represent a critical part of being urban. This is particularly true of the emerging cities of the global South. These cities grow by attracting people from a wide range of areas, including villages. This migration can occur in groups, and even when they occur individually, the migrants can identify with groups and begin to share their patterns of behaviour. Each group would have its own absolute space; its members would have their own shared norms for determining their interests; they could define their own organic space including their dietary habits; they could have their own spaces of imaginations with shared norms, if need be; they could share ways of coping with temporariness; and they could have their own festivals. There would be a tendency for the more dominant of these groups to advocate its shared behaviour as that of the city as a whole. This could be resisted by other groups that seek to preserve their auton...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• List of images
• Introduction
• 1 The spaces of everyday performance
• Photo essay 1: Maha Shivaratri, 2018: a journey through Bengaluru
• PART ONE Heritage
• PART TWO Everyday life
• PART THREE Environment
• Index