Politicizing Creative Economy by Dia Da Costa

Author:Dia Da Costa [Costa, Dia Da]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252040603
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Three Plays by Janam

WEAPONS

The play Weapons was written in the immediate aftermath of 1978 riots in the northern Indian city of Aligarh, home to a historic artisanal lock industry where Hindus and Muslims worked together. The proximate cause of the riot was a match between Hindu and Muslim wrestling schools where a Hindu wrestler was stabbed by some Muslims. Intervening in culturalist narratives about Hindu-Muslim riots as spontaneous resurgences of age-old differences, Janam’s play argues that industrialists, Congress politicians, and their hired criminals instigated the riots. As noted by Arjun Ghosh (2012), in Aligarh in 1976, “two large-lock-making factories were [opened] … [but] they found it difficult to establish themselves” due to the tightly cooperative lock-making process shared between Muslims and Hindus (Ghosh 2012, 43). In the play, these big industrialists want to disrupt this communal division of labor. They are described as “wolves hungry for human blood [who] want to ruin the workshops and appropriate and enslave the local skill for their own profit” (Jana Natya Manch 2002d, 55). Congress politicians support the industrialists’ plan for the greater good of the national economy and hire criminals humorously depicted as skilled at destruction, only too happy to tear Aligarh apart. The criminals in the play are unmarked in ethnic terms. In scene after scene, actors playing politicians switch roles to play industrialists and criminals become police, emphasizing interchangeable and interdependent interests. The satire rests on caricaturing these relationships among the agents of violence.

By contrast, there is pious regard for the forces of good. Despite numerous efforts to incite workers into violence, Sadiq and Ramkishan and Harkishan and Rafiq (two generations of Hindu-Muslim friends) refuse to give in to ethnic divisions, having lived, worked, and played together for generations. Even when Sadiq and Ramkishan die, and the opposing religious community is blamed for stabbings actually done by hired criminals, the fathers of the slain sons are not stirred to draw their swords against the communal other. The message is stark. Hindu nationalists and Congress politicians who rhetorically invoke Gandhian principles of communal peace while hiring criminals to perpetrate violence for electoral and monetary profit are tearing asunder quintessential Hindu-Muslim brotherhood and working-class solidarity.

Janam’s attention to the relationship between the lock industry and communal violence was a seminal intervention. But, Janam’s play betrays some key silences. First, it assumes an a priori working-class and communal solidarity in Aligarh, viewing it as an outcome of working lives and neighborhood histories tied to the lock-manufacturing industry. This unity is exaggerated. In the Aligarh lock industry, Hindus have long been traders and suppliers (Varshney 2002), while Muslims have mostly been locksmiths until recently (Laskar 2000, 510). Thus, a seemingly amicable communal division of labor (which, incidentally, is not unique to lock-making or Aligarh) hides the fact that Muslim labor has historically relied on Hindu control over capital, credit, and trade (Varshney 2002, 128)—a system that manifests both interdependence and inequality between Hindus and Muslims.

Second, Janam’s play neglects the symbolic roles, aspirations, and political meanings of the middle class (Li 2009) in these riots.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.