ABSTRACT

Performed as hereditary labour by women artists of lower castes largely for male entertainment, the erotic dance of lavani seems to occupy two different bifurcated worlds. There is a licit world of festivals, television dance shows, and urban revivalist cultural shows where lavani is performed in its vernacularized codified form, and valorized as the folk art of Maharashtra. The nostalgia of the urban cosmopolitan middle class for the indigenous and rural, and the concern of the regional state and elites for cultural identity undergirds this folk world. The other world is of a range of subaltern cultural spaces from local performance houses (kala kendra), to stage shows and orchestras, where the erotic dance of lavani is performed for livelihood, and is castigated as vulgar, ‘just sex, no art’. While the cultural labour of this ‘vulgar’ lavani is performed only by the hereditary women artists, they have only a nominal presence in the folk world of lavani. This paper seeks to unpack the politics of folklorization that rests upon the exclusion of vulgarized but an organically thriving performance of lavani. It further interrogates how the hereditary cultural labour is central to this process of folklorization.

摘要

作为低种姓女性艺术家的世袭劳动，主要是为了男性娱乐，lavani的色情舞蹈似乎占据了两个不同的分叉世界。有一个充满节日、电视舞蹈节目和城市复兴主义文化表演的合法世界，其中lavani以其本土化的编纂形式进行表演，并被视为马哈拉施特拉邦的民间艺术。城市中产阶级对土著和农村的怀旧，以及地区国家和精英对文化认同的关注，巩固了这个民间世界。另一个世界是一系列底层文化空间，从当地表演场所 ( kala kendra ) 到舞台表演和管弦乐队， lavani的情色舞蹈表演是为了谋生，并被斥为庸俗、“只有性，没有艺术”。虽然这种“庸俗”的拉瓦尼文化劳动仅由世袭的女艺术家进行，但她们在拉瓦尼的民间世界中只是名义上的存在。本文试图揭示民俗化的政治，这种民俗化依赖于排斥庸俗化但有机繁荣的lavani表演。它进一步质疑世袭的文化劳动如何成为这一民俗化过程的核心。