A Dalit Professor of History in America, Shailaja Paik, has won a 'genius grant' from the MacArthur foundation. She is the author of 'The vulgarity of caste' from which Scroll.in excerpted the following
Tamasha and Tamasha women
(i.e. entertainers popular with the working class)
were central to male bonding and to constructing manliness and male sexuality.
This is an important historical discovery. The Taliban has banned any such burlesque shows in Afghanistan. The consequence is that men have stopped forming bonds. They are no longer manly. Their testosterone levels have dropped and thus they can no longer grow beards.
Women cultivated this dhanda (business) of Tamasha and provided the service
of sexual pleasure to men.
Who were willing to pay for it. They didn't bother with dudes who demanded to be paid for having to witness such performances.
Beyond the sexual and the voyeuristic, this service generated the pleasure of belonging, bonding, and male homosociality.
Lacking such services, Taliban men have become loners who only form romantic attachments to goats. This is the reason their regime will soon fall apart. Also, Hamas and Hezbollah will lose all their martial qualities unless Tamasha girls are shipped out to them immediately.
Men laughed, joked, patted each other on the back, and sat with their arms around each, having a good time watching Tamasha.
This was because the Tamasha girls were entertaining. They told good jokes and performed lascivious 'item numbers'. However, the Tamasha theatrical tradition had also been used by social reformers and political activists.
Why did people paying to watch professional entertainers display pleasure and enjoyment? The answer is that they were men and could only gain manliness and 'homosociality' by watching women dance in a vulgar manner. This is why Indian men are still able to have sex with their wives. In Afghanistan, lack of Tamasha dancers has caused men to become impotent and to remain aloof from each other.
They enacted their manliness and male bonding in the enjoyment of degrading Tamasha women.
They paid money to see professional entertainers entertain people in a customary manner. They were not 'degrading' the entertainers by raping them or shitting on their tits.
In other words, Tamasha women were central to the construction of the male ego, virile manliness, muscular masculinity, and male bonding.
In which case, Taliban men must have zero manliness and lack muscles and be incapable of waging war as a military unit.
The plain fact is, Maharashtra has plenty of pious Muslim and Hindu men who don't waste their money on burlesque shows. But they are virile and muscular.
Tamasha women were successful if they made men feel appreciated, approved, loved, and recognised, and this success perpetuated economies of caste, class, gender, and sexuality.
No it didn't. Only a small percentage of the population waste their money in that way. What perpetuates 'economies' is economic forces. The fact that a dancer waggles her booty does not perpetuate Neo-Liberalism or Patriarchy. Even a MacArthur 'genius' must be able to understand this.
In the mid-1990s, a group of men straight and gay – started experimenting even more with Tamasha by introducing troupes called Bin Bayakancha Tamasha (Tamasha without Women) in Mumbai.
There was a long tradition of boys taking female parts in such plays. At a later point this was reversed. In Tandon's Bhakta Nandanar, a female played the role of the Dalit saint. This did not go down well with the audience. The Saint would have been a well built man with a broad chest and powerful voice.
Madhusudan (Madhu) Shinde, a Dalit-Chambhar (leatherworker caste), transgender, plump, jovial artist in his early 50s, reported, “Some [dominant-caste] artists like Anil Vasudevan and Pramod Kandalkar – both of whom were trained as Bharatnatyam [classical] dancers – experimented with Bin Bayakancha Tamasha.” Vasudevan and Kandalkar made innovations to their own dance programs by appropriating Dalit arts and eventually organised an all-male dance troupe. As a result, some leading straight but mostly gay male artists worked with other men, trained them through repeated rehearsals, and reintroduced them to perform as women. Many gay and straight men attended these shows.
Because they liked that form of entertainment. It wasn't the case that Neo-Liberalism or Patriarchy or Manu Smriti forces people to watch a drag show so as to perpetuate the incessant sodomy of trillions of innocent Netan-Yahoos by a toxically masculine Joe Biden. Incidentally, Kamala Harris is not a Tamasha girl. It is Lloyd Austin's lasciviously twerking which fires up sleepy Joe's priapism.
Madhusudan
which means slayer of the demon Madhu
preferred to be called “Madhu” (honey) – the ambiguous twist being in the name, which could be a woman’s or a man’s name and it means sweet as honey.
It could also mean mead- an alcoholic beverage.
Madhu wanted themselves and their co-workers to portray the “perfect” and “real” woman: “My dancer friends think by increasing the size and lifting up their padded chests, they look sexier [like women]. However, this picture of breasts – big, tight, with upward push – is artificial. Had you seen them earlier, you would have laughed your head off. One of the fundamentals of portraying a woman is to have ‘downward-slanting small breasts.’”
Fuck! This dude just described my pendulous man-boobs. Maybe I should give up twerking and become a cross-dressing lavani dancer.
Along with dancing, Madhu is also a choreographer, arranges for dance costumes, and manages dance performances for the government, schools, private housing societies, and so on.
Thus perpetuating Neo-Liberalism, not to mention Joe Biden's sodomizing of trillions of trembling Netan-Yahoos.
Bin Bayakancha Tamasha queered Tamasha and Lavani and mocked the ashlil of Tamasha through an exaggeration of heteropatriarchal assumptions in neoliberal India.
Ashlil means indecency or vulgarity. I suppose the 'heteropatriarchal' assumptions in neoliberal India is that women aren't as ugly as shit. This is unforgiveable mockery of not just Indian women but also trillions of Netan-Yahoos being brutally sodomized by Joe Biden.
The dancers experimented with new ideas, new sites of contestation and variability,
by wiggling their behinds in a manner deconstructive of the catachresis of the imbrication of the ipseity of the anterior posterity of the mimesis of Biden sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos- much to the disgust of Hamas.
new performativities, to once again both transgress and reinforce gender boundaries
transgressing gender boundaries weakens them. It does not reinforce them. That is why, if your wife shows you her dick on the wedding night, you should get a divorce.
and hyperpatriarchy,
crossdressing does not reinforce this. That's why Daddy isn't thrilled if sonny boy puts on his sister's frock and has sex with sailors.
thus signaling a need to inquire into the formation of homosexualities in Tamasha and in India.
I have never felt any such need. The fact is, our sexuality, like our gender, is mainly a matter of genetics.
Bin Bayakancha Tamasha exposed the failure of heterosexual regimes and brought into relief the supposed quality of heterosexual performativity.
Whereas the Chippendale dancers exposed the failure of Lesbian regimes of being joyless shitheads.
Anand Satam, a Vani (grocer, high caste) transgender (or “TG” as they called themselves) artist who worked with Bin Bayakancha Tamasha for seven years, emphasised that Vasudevan and Kandalkar said, “This idea is going to fly, just [wait and] watch! And it did, eventually. You attended the performance and you found it fantastic and successful!”
This woman is obsessed with caste. Homosexuals aren't picky in such matters. It is a dick's size which counts.
Similarly, Ravi Sangamnerkar, a male choreographer training Tamasha and Lavani women, was ecstatic about Bin Bayakancha Tamasha: “Look how [these men are] outperforming women,” he stated, and yet he forgot how gay men were excluding women
from their dicks
but also preserving the figure of the Tamasha woman through their exaggerated feminine identity, thereby contesting and reproducing norms.
and gaining access to dicks. Did you know that any time a rent-boy gets a customer, he is taking the food out of the mouth of a hard-working prostitute?
Bin Bayakancha Tamasha people appropriated Dalit Tamasha legacies and reconstructed the hypersexualised femininity as a fundamental function of dominant-caste patriarchies and re-idealised bourgeois forms of heterosexual exchange by inhabiting idealized notions of sexuality.
This 'genius' historian forgets that women had appropriated male dance forms like Kuchipudi or else had received instruction from male dancers who established the canon. It was not the case that Dalit women developed any such types of commercial entertainment precisely because they lacked working capital and social connections. However, certain banjara (gypsy) communities may have had their own indigenous repertoires.
However, at the same time, some like Madhu repeatedly mocked, inverted, and invaded patriarchal power with their swelling feminine presence and breached it with the plump belly that could not be controlled by the waistband.
Patriarchal power is not breached by a dude with a pot belly even if he is as queer as fuck. I hope this lady spends her MacArthur grant money testing her hypotheses about the link between Tamasha girls and 'hyperpatriarchy' in Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
In the new millennium, touchable transgender communities
It simply isn't true that transgender Indians practice untouchability that too 'in the new millennium'.
have increasingly turned to Tamasha and Lavani as modes of sexual expression, art, and livelihood.
That may have been a fad in one or two districts.
In doing so, they exceeded the limitations of dominant culture,
this is a subaltern, not a dominant, culture.
broadened the coordinates of the Dalit struggle,
because what Dalits are really worried about is transgender folk taking their jobs
and opened a space for new alliances, solidarities, and politics.
between drag artists and the Taliban?
And yet, none of TG artists I interacted with said anything about their reinventing and mobilising of Bin Bayakancha Tamasha being rooted in the sex-gender-caste complex that led to differentiation, exploitation, and stigmatization.
Because that shite only existed in this silly lady's mind. Still, the Americans are a credulous people.
At least, they did not mention it.
Whereas, her hairdresser would talk of nothing else.
Sexuality is not free floating, and we need to analyse it in the contexts of caste violence and caste patriarchy.
No we don't. If you move from a place where there is caste violence and caste patriarchy to America where neither exist, your sexuality does not change. On the other hand, your wife may leave you when she finds out about community property and alimony and the fact that, in America, men don't demand a cooked breakfast in return for sex.
The all-male sociability that Bin Bayakancha Tamasha invites and constitutes persists, eliding the Dalit woman performer’s labor and the sexual-caste logic that dictates it
Nobody gives a fuck what caste the performer belongs to. Also, it appears, they don't care if she has a vagina. It seems, all they want is entertainment.
. Like Dalit Tamasha women, transgender men rearranged complex ideological relationships of assimilation, appropriation, and challenge for a different purpose and political possibility;
Neither female nor male entertainers gave even a second's thought to stupid shite about 'ideology' which this crazy lady is paid to gas on about.
however, they did not adopt an anti-caste perspective or worldview or pay attention to the logic of the caste order and brahmanism that transcends individuals.
Because they were making money by telling bawdy jokes and shaking their booty. Similarly, lap-dancers in America are not paying attention to the chrematistic effect, on dollar denominated portfolios, of prolonged contango in critical Commodity Markets. This is not because there is no such effect. It is simply the case that earning money by waggling your buttocks is difficult enough without having to fill your brain with nonsense.
Nevertheless, no one vision, one anti-caste thought, or one resolution is possible for this history.
This stupid woman neither knows or cares about the actual history of what she describes. She is an entrepreneur in the Grievance Studies racket who spouts some illiterate faux-Marxist jargon so as to cover over the utter worthlessness of her 'research'. Still, she is genuinely Dalit and genuinely stupid and thus deserves affirmative action.
The supposedly rational, scientific, and academic approaches to Tamasha artistry
don't exist. The thing is low-brow entertainment and either makes its practitioners a bit of money or else is abandoned.
represent new wounds in the battles between the proponents and opponents of shil-ashlil-manus-assli and continue to hurt hereditary Dalit artists whose lives were easily indexed as backwards, disgusting, dirty, vulgar, and corrupt.
Easily indexed by this Dalit lady who managed to get a scholarship to the US. Only if all Tamasha artists can gain Green Cards in a similar manner will there be any real battle or real wounds suffered in that conflict.
Dalits cited, twisted, queered, and deeply engaged with the assli discourse of the Marathi state and painfully reiterated elite norms.
Sarkar is not content to fuck over Dalits. It is now turning them Gay! British should return to rule over India to end such atrocities.
The success of their politics lay not in producing a pure, political opposition
because they kept quarreling with each other
but in forging possibilities for their futures from presumably impure resources and precarious positions and expanding categories of manus and assli.
So, they forged nothing worth talking about. By contrast, Kalpana Saroj- a Dalit from a more deprived background than this lady- got a micro-loan from the Government and became an entrepreneur. She is worth more than 100 million US dollars. A dozen years ago, she produced a movie on the Khairlanji massacre of Dalits.
There are Tamasha girls who made wise investments and whose families have prospered. But Kalpana Saroj, not this MacArthur genius, should be their role model.
Dalit artists’ virtuous selves entangled with their community continue to puncture the neat, educated, and smart Dalit modernity of their caste fellows to exercise their few modes of agency surviving the structural violence of ashlil caste and untouchability.
This would also be true of artists of any community who perform in disreputable venues. Even rent-boys who take it up the arse only in Mayfair alleyways find themselves subject to adverse comment when they attend Cabinet Meetings. At least that was the case when Rishi Sunak was PM. Sir Keir Starmer may be more broadminded.
Their politics, different voices and dialogues deserve attention
nobody deserves the attention of this imbecile
as it continues with recent insurgencies,
The Taliban were successful insurgents. Transgender dudes prancing around- not so much.
transplanted to an even more diverse global theatre.
Tamasha is regional. Still, so long as Maharashtra's economic rise continues, it is likely to grow in sophistication and there will be greater 'cross-over' into Bollywood and from there into 'global' theatre. But no thanks will go to this 'genius' for her paranoid and deeply patronizing book. Still, I suppose she ticks all sorts of 'woke' boxes. The Americans are welcome to her.
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