Traders and Tinkers by Maitrayee Deka;

Author:Maitrayee Deka;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

There is also an innovative use of bodies. We see this among street performers whose innovative use of their physical bodies guarantees them a livable income. Throughout history, street performers, tradespeople, and people doing informal labor have used their physical bodies to create traditions of knowledge and livelihood outside of formal structures of knowledge production (Serafini 2017). Of course, these modes of marginal knowledge came from the specific social-cultural universe. Their challenges and struggles depended on the type of people they came in contact with and the nature of their jobs. But what undoubtedly connects marginalized knowledge is the effective use of limited resources to survive in a competitive environment. When nothing else is available, performers and technicians used their bodies in novel ways to survive an otherwise inhospitable climate. In Jadoowallah Jugglers and Jinns: A Magical History of India, Zubrzycki (2018) gives a detailed account of street magicians in Delhi, like Tantric performers, for whom community knowledge gets mapped on the human body by painstaking training. In the British colonial era, street performers and magicians performed risky tricks to generate a livelihood out of sheer courage. The famous Indian rope trick, featuring a young man climbing a rope and disappearing in the sky or, alternatively, emerging out of a basket on the ground, exemplifies how ordinary people can use the resource that is fundamentally common to all, the human body (Deka 2021). The extent to which the physical body is a common resource for ordinary people is also visible in the tricks of the snake charmers who hang snakes on their necks. That there is not much that prevents people from making use of their physical body to produce exceptional results is what many communities on the fringes depend on to survive. A recurring image of electronic repair is that of a person working adroitly on a machine. The bent back and the eyes concentrated on the job produce a similarly effective image of the use of the physical body. Tinkers, street magicians, performers, and manual laborers make use of the human body when faced with new and old challenges. No doubt, we hear less and less of the laboring classes, but the sheer number of people who depend on innovative uses of bodily knowledge is evidence of their sustained power to produce an alternative to formal and institutional knowledge.

Analyzing the Local Context, Tinkering, and Lokavidya

The bazaar actors’ lack of confidence about their skill and knowledge relates to contemporary urban class distinctions, and also to traditional knowledge hierarchies that unduly disadvantage popular knowledge systems. In India, the classical tradition builds on brahminical knowledge passed through primary Sanskritic texts such as the Vedas and the Upanishads. In many ways such knowledge is exclusive; the most obvious discrimination has come from the ritualistic division of the caste system into pure and impure castes. The higher the caste the purer they are; those on the lower rungs do not have duties that connect them with sacred knowledge. At the top of the ritualistic caste hierarchy, Brahmins have been the custodian of scriptural knowledge.

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