Dalit Movement Media (India)

Emergence of the Dalit Movement

Historically, the relationship between the Dalits and popular cultural form emerged mainly as a result of two factors: (1) the “cultural labor” imposed on the Dalits within the hierarchy of caste occupations, and (2) the fact they were required to work with animals' skins, which the upper castes found sacrilegious to touch, to make musical instruments. Thus, there existed many forms of music, dance, and theater chiefly designed for the upper castes' entertainment but played and performed by the Dalits. Many of these cultural forms persisted as oral traditions, as the caste system denied the Dalits access to literacy.

The emergence of a concerted movement against caste oppression in the 19th century reinvented these popular cultural forms as movement media, as sites of resistance and contestation. Two such popular forms are noteworthy: powada (a praise song exclusively performed by lower caste males in Maharashtra State) and tamasha (a popular form of folk theater).

Conventionally, the lower castes used to compose powadas in praise of the dominant ruling castes. It is in this art form the Dalit movement found a militant cultural expression. For example, one well-known powada presents King Shivaji—a popular icon in Maharashtra and India at large for his brave feats in the 1600s against the Mughal emperors—as the leader of the lower castes and attributes his achievements to the strengths and skills of his lower caste armies rather than his court.

Cultural hegemony has enabled a degree of consent among Dalits to the exploitative caste practices. Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar, pivotal late 19th-and early 20th-century Dalit leaders respectively, identified education as the most important means for reconstructing consciousness to liberate the Dalits from this “mental slavery.” During those centuries, even though print media became powerful within the Dalit movement, the majority of the lower caste masses were illiterate. Consequently, the Dalit movement invented a new genre of tamasha—the jalsa—as a form of movement media to communicate with the masses.

The content was sharply altered: instead of religion, reform and revolt. A typical tamasha begins with a gan (devotional offering to the God), but in the jalsa, with a gavlan (a comic act by an “effeminate” male performer), followed by the performance of lavani (a spiritual and erotic ballad performed by lower caste women). The key element of the new jalsas was the vag (extempore satirical performance), which often praised modern science and education, ideas of rights and [Page 155]equality, and was built around mockery of the oppressive brahminical religious practices. One of Phule's famous compositions, titled “The World Leans,” critiqued the rich men who bid for the sexual services of the tamasha dancers.

In Ambedkari Jalsa, the plots and themes were organized around Ambedkar's principles of equality, fraternity and liberty. Instead of the conventional respectful Johar Maibap! greeting to a landlord, the plot would begin with the slogan Jai Bhim! in praise of Bhimrao Ambedkar (and also a traditional friendly greeting among Indian Buddhists). However, jalsas highlighted their difference from the tamashas by omitting the erotic lavanis, which most social reform movements considered vulgar—but thereby excluded women performers. The Dalit movement in rural India during Ambedkar's leadership also used the kala-pathak tradition, a folk musical theater that involves a director/lyricist and in which actors are also the chorus and write their own roles.

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