Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia 9780824894108

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Mimetic Desires

Series Editor: Frederick Lau

Mimetic Desires IMPERSONATION AND GUISING ACROSS SOUTH ASIA

Edited by

HARSHITA MRUTHINTI KAMATH AND PAMELA LOTHSPEICH

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have provided financial assistance for the ­u ndertaking of this publication project. © 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing, 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kamath, Harshita Mruthinti, 1982- editor. | Lothspeich, Pamela, editor. Title: Mimetic desires : impersonation and guising across South Asia / [edited by] Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Pamela Lothspeich. Other titles: Music and performing arts of Asia and the Pacific. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022. | Series: Music and performing arts of Asia and the Pacific | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022026304 (print) | LCCN 2022026305 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824892777 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824894108 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824894757 (epub) | ISBN 9780824894764 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Impersonation. | Performing arts—South Asia. Classification: LCC PN2071.I47 M56 2022 (print) | LCC PN2071.I47 (ebook) | DDC 792.02/80954—dc23/eng/20220914 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026304 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026305

Cover art: Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi standing between paintings of Jesus and a Hindu goddess, Kadur, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva. 2011. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­f ree paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

CONTEN TS

A Note on Transliteration List of Figures ix Introduction

vii

1

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Pamela Lothspeich CHAPTER 1

Public Impersonators: Gender, Caste, and Social Ontology in the Marathi Vernacular Moment 24 Christian Lee Novetzke

CHAPTER 2

Racial Impressions, Capital Characters: Dave Carson Brownfaces the Empire 42 Kellen Hoxworth

CHAPTER 3

Remembering the Hunterwali’s Whip: The Ghosts of Fearless Nadia and Her Many Guises 65 Rosie Thomas

CHAPTER 4

In Gandhi’s Guise

85

Chaya Chandrasekhar, Janice Glowski, and Sumathi Ramaswamy CHAPTER 5

Playing the Yogi: The Making of Swami Baba Ramdev 109 Shehzad Nadeem

CHAPTER 6

The Freedom to Dance: Performance and Impersonation in Lagan 127 Aniruddha Dutta

CHAPTER 7 Mediatizing “Fake” Khwaja Siras:

The Limits of Impersonation 148 Claire Pamment CHAPTER 8 “We Are Better than the ­Women”: Understanding

the Popularity of Female Artists in Kerala 169 Shilpa Parthan CHAPTER 9

Cosplay, Fandom, and the Fashioning of Identities at Comic Con India 191 Sailaja Krishnamurti

CHAPTER 10

Possessed Impersonation: Divine Mimesis in Malabar 212 Rich Freeman

CHAPTER 11

Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila Pamela Lothspeich

CHAPTER 12

Resisting Brahminical Patriarchy in Kuchipudi Dance: The Story of Haleem Khan 257 Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

Contributors Index 281

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Contents

277

236

A N O T E O N T R A N S L I T E R AT I O N

C

hapters in this volume reference words in various South Asian languages, including Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, Ma laya lam, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Telugu. Depending on the conventions in the particu lar subfield and the preferences of the author, some chapters include transliterations of words not common in North American English and of titles of non-English works, while other chapters do not include transliterations. Where transliterations have been provided, they follow the standard guidelines provided by the American Library Association– Library of Congress Romanization Tables: https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso ­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​ /roman.html. ­ ​­ For words that occur in both Sansk rit and a vernacular language, we follow the transliteration conventions based on the context of the term. Variations in transliteration are provided in the notes for individual chapters, where relevant.

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1. Carte-de-visite of Dave Carson as “The Bengalee Baboo.” 46 Figure 2.2. Advertisement, “Dave Carson at Home.” 50 Figure 2.3. Carte-de-visite of Huntley Wright as “Chambhuddy Ram.” 59 Figure 3.1. Fearless Nadia: Booklet Cover of Lootaru Lalna (1938). 78 Figure 4.1. Bygadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi “standing sculpture.” 88 Figure 4.2. Bygadehalli Basavaraju preparing for his Gandhi guise. 92 Figure 4.3. Byagadehalli Basavarju as Gandhi standing between paintings Jesus and a Hindu goddess. 93 Figure 4.4. Byagadehalli Basavarju as Gandhi at a spinning wheel. 94 Figure 4.5. Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi plowing. 95 Figure 4.6. Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi with a Digambara Jain monk. 102 Figure 4.7. Balaji Ponna, Gopal & Gulam. 104 Figure 6.1. Kanchana strikes a dance pose in lagan attire. 141 Figure 6.2. Priyanka decked out in typical lagan attire and makeup. 143 Figure 9.1. The Penguin and the Nazi officer pose for photos. 192 Figure 9.2. A volunteer talks to cosplaying Legends of Vyas cosplayers. 199 Figure 9.3. A Gundam cosplayer heads to the stage as volunteers hold back the crowd. 203 Figure 10.1. A typical teyyam’s kōlam, featuring a varied assemblage of expertly crafted natural and manufactured materials. 215 Figure 10.2. The complexly involuted facial makeup typical of teyyams. 216 Figure 10.3. Children watching the construction of a kōlam outside a makeup room. 218 Figure 10.4. The mirror-gazing rite. 222 Figure 10.5. A teyyam addressing a deity in the unseen distance. 225

ix

Figure 10.6. ​A teyyam blessing the specially honored descendant of a former lordly house. ­   226 Figure 10.7. ​A veḷiccappāṭŭ under possession by a teyyam. 232 Figure 11.1. ​An ārtī tableau of Ram, Sita, and Lakshman. 239 Figure 11.2. ​An ārtī tableau of Lakshman and Ram. 240 Figure 11.3. Ram, Sage Vishwamitra, and Lakshman travel by horse ­carriage.  241 Figure 11.4. An audience member touches the feet of a professional actor portraying the divine sage Narad. 253 ­ Figure 12.1. Haleem Khan in strī-vēṣam. 265 ­ Figure 12.2. Haleem Khan in strī-vēṣam. 267 ­ Figure 12.3. Haleem Khan performing in strī-vēṣam. 269

x

List of Figures

Mimetic Desires

Introduction Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Pamela Lothspeich

In Mimetic Desires, we define the term impersonation as the temporary as-

sumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic per­for­mance that is perceived as not one’s own. Our reading of impersonation interrogates the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the “real/original” and “fake/dupe.” That is, we refute the ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. Relatedly, for us guising is a broader category that captures sartorial and kinetic play more generally. We and the contributors to this volume maintain this stance as we explore a series of socially and po­liti­cally representative examples of impersonation and guising in per­for­mance in South Asia. Although locally situated, ­these examples are highly relevant to broader discourses of per­for­mance in transnational contexts; they disclose sites and pro­cesses of sociopo­liti­cal power facilitated by normative markers of social status—of race, gender, caste, class, religion—­and how ­those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance the power of individuals and groups. In employing the En­glish term impersonation, we do not mean to suggest that South Asian languages lack a lexicon for this critical concept. In fact, we readily find parallels in South Asian terms, for example, vēṣam in Telugu and vesh/bhes in Hindi-Urdu.1 We also register the deliberateness and artifice implicit in ­these vernacular terms for guising, obvious in Hindi-­Urdu expressions like “vesh dharnā” (to take on or don a guise). Thus, we use the term impersonation to translate to a broader En­glish readership, and, more significantly, ­because we hope that our work w ­ ill engage with wider scholarly discourses on global per­for­mance traditions beyond ­those of South Asia. The phenomenon of impersonation is certainly not unique to South Asia. Across the globe and throughout history, we can find countless examples of spectacular, affective forms of impersonation where individuals perform “­others” 1

(­human, divine, or suprahuman) in ways that invoke, play with, or destabilize social and cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and social station. It should not surprise us, then, that the term impersonation has already been used productively by many scholars in a range of disciplines to analyze vari­ ous forms of per­for­mance, for example, Japa­nese kabuki theatre (Mezur 2005), Javanese dance per­for­mance (Sunardi 2015), Shakespearean theatre (Orgel 1996), Asian-­A merican lit­er­a­ture (Chen 2005), Black minstrelsy (Gaines 2017), and American drag balls (Newton 1979). In sum, we consider impersonation an elastic term that spans global contexts. Scholars working in South Asia too have discussed or alluded to the practice of gender impersonation or gender guising, albeit often in dif­fer­ent terms, and in some cases in what is now outdated language.2 For instance, scholars have discussed the phenomenon of gender guising in a range of literary sources including premodern Sans­k rit epic texts (Goldman 1993; Doniger 2000, 2004; Vanita and Kidwai 2001), bhak­ti or Hindu devotional lit­er­a­ture (Ramanujan 1989; Hawley 2000; Pechilis 2012), and Sufi and Urdu poetry (Petievich 2008; Kugle 2013). Scholars have also used it with reference to con­temporary performative contexts such as vernacular theatre, dance, public pro­cessions, and religious ritual, just as we also do in this volume. The phenomenon of cisgender men3 performing as ­women has been a long-­standing practice in many of India’s per­for­mance traditions, including forms of theatre (Kapur 1990; Hansen 1999, 2011; Seizer 2005; Mukherjee and Chatterjee 2016) and dance (Zarrilli 2000; Madhavan 2017; Kamath 2019; Putcha 2019; Khubchandani 2020), while the phenomena of deity possession in religious ritual also have a long history (Smith 2006; Erndl 2006; Flueckiger 2013; Holdrege and Pechilis 2016; Malik 2016; Jassal 2016, 2017). Below we briefly expand on some of this history of professional, urban stages in India to illustrate both the generative possibilities and confining margins of gender impersonation. Racial impersonation in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, by way of contrast, has received relatively less treatment (Roy 1998; Davé 2013). Our usage of the term impersonation is not simply about the per­for­mance of a par­tic­u­lar identity onstage, in ritual, or in quotidian contexts. Rather, we use the term strategically as a performative category that often challenges fixed or a priori categories of identity. In other words, impersonation does not entail the imitation of an original by a copy; rather, impersonation implies an interrogation of the very dichotomy between “real” versus “copy.”4 Similarly, we use the term guising to capture sartorial and kinetic play that exceeds the discursive bound­aries of impersonation in vernacular discourse. In employing both impersonation and guising, our goal in this volume is to uncover intellectually generative sites of social and aesthetic per­for­mance in South Asia that in vari­ous ways trou­ble the illusion of a stable, essentialized referent, ­whether that referent is 2

Introduction

an ­actual person, like Mahatma Gandhi (Chapter 4); an ideal type, like the “yogi” (Chapter 5); a fictional character, like ­t hose in comic cons (Chapter 9); a racialized figure, like ­those in brownface per­for­mance (Chapter 2) and film (Chapter 3); a mythological figure, like ­t hose in vernacular dance (Chapter 12); and even gods themselves (Chapters  1, 10, and 11).5 The referent may also invoke normative social constructs like gender, in defense of which hegemonic society gatekeeps, legislates, and polices, even as trans and gender nonconforming people challenge this through activism, per­for­mance, and their lived experiences (Chapters  6 and 7). Elsewhere, the variously gendered actors who perform as “ female artists” in comedy real­ity shows (Chapter 8) prompt us to think about the power of the gender binary to shape public discourse. The longing to impersonate or, as the title of this volume indicates, the desire for mimesis, animates the everyday lives of the figures explored in this book, just as it does for ­people the world over. However, ­these examples also suggest that the power to impersonate in the public sphere often requires a certain degree of social capital, which hegemonic groups may seek to deny to oppressed groups, whose own impersonations may therefore be socially transgressive acts (Chapter 10–12). In using impersonation in this par­tic­u ­lar way and guising as an umbrella term, we are cognizant of their inherent capaciousness and incommensurability in certain performative contexts. Indeed, the limits of the terms are borne out in this volume itself, where some of the contributors question the suitability of the term “impersonation” to their specific subjects and propose alternate language—­ “impression” in the case of brownface per­for­mance (Chapter 2), “divine personhood” in the case of Teyyattam (teyyāṭṭam) (Chapter 10), and “divine embodiment” in the case of Ramlila (rāmlīlā) (Chapter 11). The concepts of per­for­mance and performativity are also integral to our definitions of impersonation and guising. Scholars (chiefly in the fields of per­ for­mance studies and gender studies, but also in sociology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics) often use the terms performance and performativity freely and in tension with one another. Yet we can distill many ideas about per­for­ mance and performativity into three broad and sometimes intersecting schools of thought. One starts from the premise that per­for­mance should be parsed as  fundamentally rhetorical (the speech-­act theory deriving principally from J.  L.  Austin), while another asserts that per­for­mance is basically everywhere (the “broad-­spectrum” theory deriving principally from Richard Schechner). A third school begins with performativity and claims that it is essentially citational (the “repetitive-­acts” theory deriving principally from Judith Butler).6 In this volume, we the editors also wish to distinguish between per­for­mance and performativity, particularly as they pertain to categories of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, caste, and other social identities. However, in our work we propose a capacious and globally inclusive conception of per­for­mance, one

Kamath and Lothspeich

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defined as social and aesthetic acts that involve mimesis and, by default, work to reinforce and/or challenge social and cultural norms.7 We are not so much interested in the power of words—an insular rhetorical exercise situated in specific languages and cultures, which is then sometimes projected as having “universal” applicability—­but the power of performers and per­for­mance itself to effect change in society across time and space. We also advocate for an understanding of per­for­mance that “sees” non-­hegemonic contexts just as clearly as hegemonic ones. Fi­nally, our understanding of per­for­mance acknowledges temporal and physical limitations, as when a play, ritual, or pro­cession has a fixed beginning and end and transpires within a bounded space. In contrast to per­for­mance, our conception of performativity does not carry the same intentionality, and temporal and physical constraints, but it is likewise social and inclusive. We begin from the “repetitive-­acts” theory, accepting that in socie­t ies, “identities are constructed iteratively through complex citational practices” (Parker and Sedgwick 2016, 226). We thus define performativity as a fluid, ongoing pro­cess of being or acting in the world, one propelled by learned be­hav­iors and cultural signposts that follow iterative imperatives and manifest in repetition. We view performativity as per­for­mance’s ability to have an effect through repetition, such as the ability of a sari or a dress to conjure femininity in the eyes of the viewer or wearer. However, our understanding of performativity takes seriously the specificity and diversity of cultural inputs, noting that markers of identity such as a sari are culturally specific and not fixed and absolute. This creates space for us to look for “repetitive acts” of social identity in non­dominant spaces, w ­ hether “at home” or abroad. In Mimetic Desires, we interrogate all hegemonic proj­ects of fixed identities, concurring with Purnima Mankekar that “all personation is impersonation” (2015, 189). In saying this, however, we disavow any notion of the “inauthenticity” of trans and gender nonconforming identities and expressions, regardless of how individuals choose to name (or not name) their gender and sexuality. We also reject any assumption of “authenticity” placed on cis bodies and heteronormative sexualities. Further, we are allied with transfeminist theorists and activists like Julia Serano, who recognizes that gender and sexuality are t­ hings that we actively “do” or “perform,” but critiques what she calls the “gender artifactualism” model, namely, that gender is primarily or entirely socially and culturally constructed (2013, 165–188).

Re­orienting the Genealogy of Per­for­mance Studies Our definitions of per­for­mance and performativity are indebted to and diverge from the broader field of per­for­mance studies scholarship, which we ­will outline 4

Introduction

in brief h ­ ere. In the context of white Euro-­American scholarship, the genealogy of per­for­mance studies is often traced to the work of scholars such as linguist J. L. Austin ([1962] 1975) and sociologist Erving Goffman (1956, [1967] 2005). ­Later scholars, many of them cultural anthropologists like Victor Turner (1969) and Dwight Conquergood (2013),8 theatre prac­ti­tion­ers like Richard Schechner (1976, 1985, 1993, 2002) and Marvin Carlson ([1996] 2018), and religious studies scholars like Catherine Bell (1992), further developed the discipline and gave it a name and institutional standing. Schechner, a chief exponent of the discipline and, not coincidentally, a scholar of the theatre of Ramlila, developed one of the founding princi­ples of per­for­mance studies: that all social acts, and not just intentional dramatic forms, are manifestations of per­for­mance, blurring the distinction between per­for­mance and performativity. In a similar vein, Carlson posited that per­for­mance is a “display of skills” or “recognized and culturally coded pattern of be­hav­ior” ([1996] 2018, 4–5).9 With the maturing of the field of per­for­mance studies, scholars have set about producing reflexive autocritiques and genealogical histories of the field, emphasizing its self-­professed interdisciplinarity and eventual institutionalization (Phelan and Lane 1998; Jackson 2004, 2006). Collectively, this work helps us to see that although we are often not aware of it, per­for­mance is intrinsic to everyday social interactions and is not just a defining feature of aesthetic forms like theatre, dance, ­music, and so forth. This scholarship also demonstrates that the field affords space to initiate and amplify social and po­liti­cal critique and further social justice campaigns. Conquergood, for example, analyzed and critiqued structures of power in his ethnographic work, and integrated activism and advocacy with engaged scholarship.10 While this brief tracing of per­for­mance studies in Euro-­American scholarship provides one narrative, it is critical for us to consider what this genealogy omits. For instance, due to the Euro-­American-­centeredness of field of per­for­mance studies, the predominantly white field has only belatedly recognized the work of two Black anthropologists, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1995)11 and dancer Katherine Dunham ([1964] 1994). ­These artist-­scholars carried out critical documentation and theorizing of per­for­mance forms in the African diaspora, the American South, and the Ca­r ib­bean, which developed ­under and in response to conditions of racial apartheid and slavery.12 In South Asia, scholars and performers have also been observing and writing about per­for­ mance in complex ways and “­doing” per­for­mance theory before the discipline was in­ven­ted and institutionalized in the late twentieth ­century (Dharwadker 2019).13 The long-overlooked work of scholars of color in the fields of per­for­mance studies and South Asian studies prompts us to engage with the recent interventions by the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS) Collective. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) call to disorient academic citational practices, the FCHS

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Collective poses questions that critique genealogies of knowledge in academia, particularly in South Asian studies and Hindu studies; they ask: “Who built this room? Whose ­labor was rendered invisible? Who benefits? And who is continually left outside? What can we gain from disrupting linear narratives that adhere to neat chronologies?” (2021, 10). In raising such questions, the FCHS Collective calls on us to reconsider the impulse to lay out fixed chronological genealogies of knowledge production and, instead, reorient how we know what we know within a par­tic­u­lar field of academic inquiry. In recent years, scholars of color have been instrumental in moving the field of per­for­mance studies in new ways that are disruptive of “linear narratives that adhere to neat chronologies,” bringing to bear critical race theory, intersectional and transnational feminisms, and queer and trans theory in dynamic ways, while also building on the work of theoretical pre­de­ces­sors in the field of postcolonial studies. Attuned to the FCHS Collective’s call to disrupt scholarly knowledge production, we briefly trace an alternative genealogy of per­for­mance studies, emphasizing recent scholarship on wellness tourism, accents, and drag. Below we give only several examples of what is an emerging and impactful body of work. As a brahmin cis ­woman and a white cis ­woman, we also acknowledge our own complicity in working within and benefiting from institutional spaces, structures, and hierarchies within academia in the United States. First, we can turn to Rumya S. Putcha (2020a, 2020b) for a reformulation of Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism ([1978] 2014). Said was not a scholar of per­ for­mance studies, yet he laid critical conceptual groundwork by demonstrating the nexus of knowledge and power in a world s­ haped by the legacies of white colonialism and ongoing forms of imperialism. This, of course, includes the disproportionate amplification of knowledge production in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, and grossly distorted repre­sen­ta­tions of the “Orient.” In her work, Putcha productively extends Said’s thesis to encompass what she calls “somatic orientalism” to critique forms of wellness tourism (primarily by white yoga enthusiasts) and volunteerism and missionary work (chiefly by white Christians) to India (2020a). She also shows how yoga is operationalized in the white institutional spaces of museums (2020b). ­These practices by white savants and white saviors, Putcha suggests, invoke the logics of imperialism and anti-­ Asian racism in new forms, and position India within old Orientalist frames. The predominantly upper-­class white ­women who affectively perform yoga and travel to India for spiritual self-­care (2020b, 456, 461) may be said to be taking on the guise of a yogi, but it is a guise determined by escapist fantasies of an unreal India, and impelled by white supremacy and Orientalism.14 Another cogent example is Shilpa Davé’s (2013) work moving out from Homi Bhabha’s analytic of “colonial mimicry,” a subversive strategy deployed by col6

Introduction

onized p ­ eoples to performatively and discursively resist and combat colonial regimes and their forms of knowledge (2004, 121–131). Extending Bhabha’s analytic of colonial mimicry with the lens of critical race theory, Davé explores the concept of the “brown voice” (the per­for­mance of Indian vocal accents) in the context of the well-­k nown character Apu in The Simpsons. According to Davé, Brown voice is mimicry in reverse but not its opposite. The two concepts are connected ­because brown voice, like mimicry, depends upon the notion of an au­t hen­tic native figure by which to gauge one’s identity. However, while mimicry exposes the cracks in the imperial effort to reform natives into proper subjects of the British Empire, brown voice operates in a slightly dif­fer­ent manner ­because brown voice is also related to the comedic genre of parody . . . ​[unlike mimicry,] the intent of parody is to highlight the performative aspect of imitation. (2013, 57) Brown voice fixes a ste­reo­t yped accent to a racial figure but divorces it from the racialized body, thus enabling a white performer (Hank Azaria) to voice a brown character (Apu) (Davé 2013, 58). The intersection of mimicry and parody is further complicated by Kellen Hoxworth’s exploration of the nineteenth-­ century blackface minstrel Dave Carson (1837–1896) in Chapter  2 of this volume.15 Spanning from Bhabha’s seminal claim of “almost the same, but not quite” [emphasis in original] (2004, 122) to Davé’s examination of mimicry as parody, ­these examinations of mimicry are helpful in understanding other hierarchical social and cultural contexts where impersonation is at play. As evident in the chapters in this volume, social capital often facilitates someone’s ability to impersonate, but sometimes the “lower” can impersonate the “higher,” with socially disruptive ends. Also relevant to our understanding of impersonation are Black feminist and queer of color theorists who bring attention to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class to consider the broader structural systems of power that impact racialized communities (Crenshaw 1989; hooks 1992; Johnson 2001, 2003). For example, E. Patrick Johnson (2001), a pioneering scholar of Black sexuality studies, critiques the per­sis­tent whiteness that informs the work of queer theorists beginning with Judith Butler’s Gender Trou­ble ([1990] 2008). Rejecting Butler’s eschewal of subjectivity, Johnson calls upon Black “quare” theory to suture the gap between performativity and per­for­mance in order to reinstate subjectivity and agency through the per­for­mance of identity (2001, 11). Also relevant to the context of this volume, Kareem Khubchandani (2020) provides an accented style of approaching dance and drag in cosmopolitan nightlife that moves us beyond the confines of seminal works like Esther Newton (1979) and Butler ([1990] 2008). Khubchandani writes:

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Drag artists assem­ble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools—­ d ress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gestures, pose—we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din. (2020, xiii–­xiv) Khubchandani’s intersectional analy­sis of drag, per­for­mance, and performativity, and readings of queer, racialized identities provides an insightful starting point to examine the acts of impersonation in this volume, including the enactments of female artists in Kerala real­ity tele­v i­sion (Chapter  8), the ­legal discourses of khvājā sirā (commonly spelled “khwaja sira”) identity in con­temporary Pakistan (Chapter 7), and disruptions of brahmin masculinity in Kuchipudi (kūcipūḍi) dance (Chapter 12). Indebted to feminist, queer, and trans theorists, we approach the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality without reference to any rigid prescriptions or universalizing epistemological frameworks. In addition to this, we take seriously Mrinalini Sinha’s call for approaching gender, as well as sex and sexuality, as radically contextualized: “A truly global perspective on gender—­rather than merely the extension of an a priori conception of gender to dif­fer­ent parts of the globe—­must give theoretical weight to the par­t ic­u ­lar contexts in which it is articulated” (2012, 357). It is in this spirit that, through our work in this volume, we strive to further dismantle structures of oppressive normativities and turn to deeply localized understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and caste in our exploration of impersonation in South Asia. We start from the premise that material conditions always already color acts of impersonation, w ­ hether they are enacted in social contexts or in aesthetic ones, despite being temporarily covered over. We therefore take seriously the very real markers of social station—­ caste, class, race, ethnicity, and gender—­inscribed on the impersonating body, as well as the ­imagined but also very real social markers of the same on the impersonated body. Many examples in this volume also demonstrate that power-­ driven affects often come into play. That is, acts of impersonation are implicated in pro­cesses of power, regardless of the impersonator and impersonated.

Gender Impersonation in South Asian Per­for­mance ­ ecause of the relatively greater amount of academic writing on gender imperB sonation in comparison to other forms of impersonation in South Asian contexts,

8

Introduction

we pause h ­ ere to reflect on that productive work. While the historical rec­ord of who performed which gender roles in Indian theatre and dance traditions prior to the modern period is murky, it is clear that ­until around the second half of the twentieth ­century, cisgender men fairly consistently performed as ­women in many vernacular per­for­mance forms of South Asia.16 While ­there is a ­great deal of variation across regions and styles of such impersonation, we can turn to scholarship on Indian theatre, particularly Parsi, Marathi, and Gujarati theatres in western India, for some pertinent insights. The practice of cisgender men playing female roles onstage was prevalent in western Indian theatre from the late nineteenth ­century ­until the 1930s, particularly on account of the social prescription against middle-­ class w ­ omen performing in public (Singh 2009, 273).17 Following the advent of professional Indian theatre companies such as the Victoria Theatrical Com­pany, established in Bombay in 1868, a “premium was placed on young men of pleasing figures and superlative voices, who would ensure com­pany profits through their virtuosity in ­women’s roles” (Hansen 1999, 132). ­These impersonators, as scholars of Indian theatre underscore, eventually coexisted with and competed with cis ­women onstage, but ­were sought ­after as men who ­were thought to embody and represent an ideal notion of Indian womanhood (Hansen 1999; Singh 2009).18 Two actors who performed in female guises—­Jayshankar Sundari (1888– 1967) and Bal Gandharva (1889–1975)—­epitomize the trend of sartorial gender impersonation in Indian theatre in this period. Kathryn Hansen’s extensive research on both artists testifies to their skills in impersonation and, perhaps most importantly, the impersonators’ ability to shape ideals of Indian womanhood.19 As Hansen argues: [T]hrough the institution of female impersonation, a publicly vis­i­ble, respectable image of “­woman” was constructed, one that was of use to both men and w ­ omen. . . . ​Female impersonators, by bringing into the public sphere mannerisms, speech, and distinctive appearance of middle-­class ­women, defined the external equivalents of the new gendered code of conduct for w ­ omen. That such tastes ­were crafted by men (albeit men allegedly imitating w ­ omen) gave them the imprimatur of acceptability. (1999, 140) In short, the image of respectable Indian womanhood in late colonial and postcolonial India became vis­i­ble through the male body of the stage actor/ impersonator. Hansen’s work on Sundari and Gandharva clarifies the limits imposed on impersonation—­namely, which bodies could impersonate and which bodies could not—­a theme explored in the case of Fearless Nadia in Hindi film (Chapter 3) and con­temporary Kuchipudi dance (Chapter 12).20



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On the productive and disruptive possibilities of South Asian per­for­ mance, we take note of Sreenath Nair’s (2017) work on Kutiyattam (kūṭiyāṭṭam), one of India’s theatrical forms. Citing Butler’s (1988) and Julia Kristeva’s (1980) work, and linking gender and text as “constructed by the dominant ideologies pervasive in a society in its cultural, linguistic and historical contexts,” Nair argues that “gender identities can be challenged and textual meanings reversed” though deliberate acts of what he calls “gestural reconstruction.” Elaborating, he writes, “gestural reconstruction subverts the masculine dominance in the text through improvisation, the unscripted and unwarranted in per­for­mance that uses kinetic and temporal properties of the body to reiterate the po­liti­cal discourse” (Nair 2017, 159–160). Nair then goes on to show how writer-­d irector-­ dancer Margi Sathi (1965–2015), through her feminist interventions in the field of Kutiyattam dance, has done just this—­t hat is, “significantly reversed the masculine discourse in acting on the classical Indian stage” (Nair 2017, 165–170). Beginning with Hansen, previous scholars have underscored how impersonation on the Indian stage is both reflective of cis male power and privilege and is a site where the male body has propagated ideals of Indian womanhood. In a similar vein, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger (2013) has examined (and contested) the male-­dominated landscape of (goddess) impersonation in the con­ temporary ritual context of the jātara festival of Tirupati on the southeast coast of India. In her study of this weeklong festival to the goddess Gangamma, Flueckiger shows that it is not only men who ritually take on the guise of the goddess Gangamma, w ­ hether by design or by choice. Significantly, she argues that ­women too impersonate by applying turmeric paste to their ­faces as though manifestations of Gangamma themselves. Flueckiger reads such practices by ­women as a form of impersonation, one that challenges the exclusive male prerogative to enact the divine (2013, 71). Building on the work of ­t hese and the other culturally situated critics and theorists of per­for­mance cited above, we argue that impersonation is not simply a descriptive term of a dramatic per­for­mance but also a performative category that can help us rethink how we envision social identities and power structures in South Asia. The range of sites where impersonation appears in South Asia—­l iterary texts, vernacular theatre, dance, public pro­cessions, religious rituals—­makes it an everyday occurrence. Yet the transnational scope of impersonation as a per­for­mance and performative practice makes it legible across global contexts and to a transnational readership. Moreover, the dual capacity of impersonation to reify normative practices and interrogate hegemonic ideals makes it a unique starting point to examine broader themes of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and social station, on the stage and in the world. The essays in this volume reflect on the capaciousness of impersonation to capture some of the 10

Introduction

many complexities of gender and racial per­for­mance, and guising in religious expression across South Asia and beyond. * * * Subjects explored in the twelve chapters of this volume include the impersonation and guising of real p ­ eople (both charismatic cultural icons and cultural types), fantasy beings such as comic book characters and one swashbuckling film star, as well as Hindu deities and possessing spirits. Below we discuss the vari­ ous approaches and aims of each of the essays, cognizant that many of the essays address multiple interconnected themes. In Chapter 1, “Public Impersonators: Gender, Caste, and Social Ontology in the Marathi Vernacular Moment,” Christian Lee Novetzke prompts us to consider the critical question of who has the power to impersonate, a central question of the volume. Novetzke writes of impersonation as discursively enlivened through the sacred biographical Marathi text, Līḷācaritra, which tells of a thirteenth-­century godman named Chakradhar. As an aristocratic brahmin man, Chakradhar had the social capital to impersonate and, in the pro­cess, resist the social conventions of brahmin orthodoxy of his day and his own domestic duties. As Novetzke writes, Chakradhar is a man “who pretends to be other kinds of men,” but more tellingly, if his biography is to be believed, he is also God pretending to be a man—­a bold statement. Clearly, the example of Chakradhar shows that social capital can smooth the pro­cess of impersonation. Novetzke’s reading of the Līḷācaritra also shows how impersonation can be both generative and destructive. That is, it may alternately or even si­mul­ta­neously reaffirm social hegemonies. To what extent Chakradhar was able to overturn the structures of gender and caste of his time through his pedagogical acts of impersonation is a vexed question Novetzke unravels for us. In Chapter  2, “Racial Impressions, Capital Characters: Dave Carson Brownfaces the Empire,” Kellen Hoxworth gives nuanced insight into the disturbing history of racist per­for­mance practices that flourished ­u nder white imperialism in colonial India. Hoxworth does this by focusing on a single performing body—­t hat of blackface minstrel Dave Carson—to trace the circulation of racial impressions of South Asians and the concomitant formation of what one British journalist termed “capital characters” with racist derision. From 1861 ­until his death in 1896, Carson established himself as a leading theatrical impresario in the Indian subcontinent. In ­doing so, Carson traveled widely, performing his most infamous brownface character, “The Bengalee Baboo,” throughout the Indian Ocean world. During his extended tours, he developed and profited handsomely by performing racial impressions of South Asians, braiding together minstrelsy’s figurations of racial abjection with local colonial discourses of race, class, and gender. Carson’s per­for­mances served as many white colonists’ first impression of South Asian subjects, forging popu­lar imperial feelings and beliefs

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about South Asians. Embodying colonial discourses of race, Carson, Hoxworth shows, deployed brownface enactments that worked to materialize the affective economies of whiteness and white supremacy in colonial South Asia and beyond. Chapter 3, “Remembering the Hunterwali’s Whip: The Ghosts of Fearless Nadia and Her Many Guises,” examines the case of “Fearless Nadia” (Mary Evans), the 1930s and 1940s white stunt-­fi lm star who donned a mask, cape, hot pants, and whip to play a voluptuous, blonde princess with an alter ego, beating up burly villains, righting wrongs, and saving “her” country. In this chapter, Rosie Thomas draws on original interviews, fan memorabilia, newspaper archives, and films that include Hunterwali, Diamond Queen, and Lootaru Lalna (The Robber Girl), to argue that Nadia—­and similarly white or “passing-­as-­white” female figures in Indian cinema and theatre—­offered direct visual experience of a muscular brand of “modern” femininity dif­fer­ent from that of the Bhāratīya nārī or (traditional) Indian w ­ oman, celebrated in film and theatre. Nadia offered viewers a new model of feminine power and assertiveness based on female characters and tropes in early Hollywood films. Nadia began her performing ­career as a working-­class ­woman in colonial India, but with her white privilege ultimately r­ ose above her working-class background and became a film star. She married movie executive Homi Wadia and for de­cades performed in films that brought in big profits for their com­pany, Wadia Movietone. Thomas’s discussion of Nadia as a scantily clad, whip-­bearing avenger—­who at times even donned Bhagat Singh’s trilby, a power­f ul symbol of anticolonial nationalism—­prompts us to consider what it means that Nadia appeared in the guise of a passing-­as-­ Indian white dominatrix. In Chapter 4, “In Gandhi’s Guise,” Chaya Chandrasekhar, Janice Glowski, and Sumathi Ramaswamy examine the case of Byagadehalli Basavaraju, a con­ temporary schoolteacher from rural Karnataka who periodically adopts the guise of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). As the authors show, Basavaraju does not endeavor to don the persona of Gandhi per se, but rather to mimetically represent a statue or sculpture of the Mahatma. Covering his body with silver paint and transforming himself into a flesh-­and-­blood mūrti (sculptural form) of Gandhi, he walks about the Karnataka countryside seeking to bring (back) Gandhi’s story and ideals into a neoliberal India that has, in many ways, turned its back on the putative f­ ather of the nation. Viewing Basavaraju’s impersonation through the arresting black-­a nd-­white photo­graphs of Bengaluru-based artist Cop Shiva, Chandrasekhar, Glowski, and Ramaswamy unpack what it means for a photo­g raph to serve as proxy for a man impersonating the statue of a charismatic icon. Drawing attention to other Gandhi impersonators and other forms of visual imagery across South Asia, the authors resist attempts to see Basavaraju’s Gandhi guise as somehow a less “au­t hen­tic” form of the Mahatma.

12

Introduction

Instead, they underscore Gandhi’s own attempts to mimic the starving Indian peasant, itself a paradigmatic act of impersonation. The vari­ous layers of impersonation in this chapter, including the photo­graph, the impersonator, the statue, the icon, and the real-­life Gandhi, provide a compelling account of the complexities of mimicry and guising in con­temporary South Asia. Chapter  5, “Playing the Yogi: The Making of Swami Baba Ramdev,” by Shehzad Nadeem, moves to Baba Ramdev, a living cultural icon and astute businessman who has positioned himself as an expert on essential Hindu knowledge and a yoga guru extraordinaire. Nadeem investigates how Baba Ramdev, a purportedly penniless, long-­haired yogi or yoga master who co-­ presides over Patanjali Ayurved ­Limited, a multibillion-­dollar consumer goods com­pany, was able to parlay his impersonation of an essentialized Hindu ascetic into cap­i­tal­ist gold in con­temporary India. In the chapter, Nadeem examines how Ramdev markets himself as a living symbol of yoga’s promise for enlightenment and health, often through a ­great number of mass-­produced Ayurvedic products. According to Nadeem, through Ramdev and his com­pany Patanjali, we are given proof of “the fruitful symbiosis between the selling of religion and the religion of selling.” Nadeem’s insightful critique illustrates how Ramdev impersonates the renunciant yogi and how he leverages this identity for po­liti­cal fame and economic gain in the con­temporary Indian neoliberal economy. In Chapter 6, “The Freedom to Dance: Per­for­mance and Impersonation in Lagan,” A­ni­rud­dha Dutta examines the practice of Lagan (lagan), a performative practice where variously identified launḍās or “feminine boys” dance at weddings and other socioreligious festivals in northern India. As Dutta explains, launḍās typically work ­under the aegis of a master (pārṭīvālā) who leads a troupe of dancers and musicians and arranges for contracts with ­house­holds or neighborhoods where the per­for­mances take place. Dutta’s chapter examines the forms of performative work undertaken by laganvālīs and asks how dancers from transfeminine koti-­hijṛā communities negotiate the forms of per­for­mance and impersonation demanded of them by audiences and organizers in the business of Lagan. Given that many launḍā dancers take on relatively masculinized personas outside Lagan due to occupational and familial demands, how do they negotiate the shift in their public personas during Lagan? Dutta shows how laganvālīs cultivate varied personas informed by gender, class, and caste to exert agency within the exploitative structures of Lagan in ways that challenge elite, metrocentric discourses on their victimhood. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with koti-­hijṛā performers, Dutta analyzes per­for­mance and impersonation in Lagan to arrive at a nuanced understanding of transfeminine agency and its limitations within intensely competitive and patriarchal settings.



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Next, in Chapter 7, Claire Pamment revisits a theme raised throughout the volume by asking the s­ imple question: What does it mean to be a “real” versus a “fake” khvājā sirā (the Pakistani government’s official term for a “third-­gender” or hijṛā person) in her chapter, “Mediatizing ‘Fake’ Khwaja Siras: The Limits of Impersonation.” Despite landmark Pakistan Supreme Court rulings in 2009 and 2018 meant to further the rights and protections of this vulnerable community, public figures such as comedians and reporters have since become the self-­designated arbiters of “real” khvājā sirās, often by humiliating references to genitalia and discourses of gender binarism. Pamment’s chapter explores the construction of the “fake” khvājā sirā and regulatory modes of their public visibility across vari­ous media, including crime shows, comic tele­vi­sion, and straight journalism, which exploded around the time of the 2009 and 2018 rulings. It also details some of the forceful rebuttals by members of the internally diverse khvājā sirā-­trans communities as they persist in publicly defining their own realness. Ultimately, Pamment argues that lurid media portrayals of khvājā sirās work to render them abject subjects of regulatory fictions, entailing significant vio­lence by ­those who would determine which bodies do not ­matter and which do. In Chapter 8, “ ‘We Are Better than the ­Women’: Understanding the Popularity of Female Artists in Kerala,” Shilpa Parthan invites us to interrogate the category of “female impersonators” in the context of comedy real­ity shows from the southern Indian state of Kerala. This chapter focuses on a cast of actors perceived as cis men, referred to as female artists, who impersonate cis ­women on comedy real­ity shows, a type of televised show that gained popularity in the early 2000s. Rather than the practice of caricatural repre­sen­ta­tion common in such shows, female artists take ­great pride in instead representing desirable and idealized female figures, indistinguishable from “real” ­women. By drawing on female artists’ diverse narratives of self, Parthan makes a case for understanding the controversy around the female artists’ popularity as an instance of queer visibility emerging at the precarious and historically s­ haped intersections of caste, class, and per­for­mance styles. This approach ­counters the characterization of such gender-­guising per­for­mances as simply premodern traditions of “men performing as w ­ omen,” a discourse that tries to fit performers such as the female artists into the binary logic of colonial and postcolonial gender politics. Queer-­ of-­color and (subnational) regional perspectives, Parthan argues, go hand in hand in making sense of the seemingly anachronistic popularity of “female impersonators” in the time of satellite tele­vi­sion, revealing specific genealogies of gender, sexuality, and re­sis­tance. Shifting to the con­temporary period, Chapter 9, “Cosplay, Fandom, and the Fashioning of Identities at Comic Con India,” examines racial impersonation in the context of comic cons in India, which have been growing in popularity since the first one was held in Delhi in 2011. Sailaja Krishnamurti draws on her 14

Introduction

interviews with cosplayers in India and field observations of fan culture at ­t hese events, particularly at Comic Con Bengaluru in December 2017. Krishnamurti first observes that Indian cosplayers desire to situate themselves as “au­t hen­tic” fans within global cultural discourse, and suggests that Indian cosplayers are not particularly engaged with Indian comics, films, and games, despite the richness and availability of such works. Rather, they seem more drawn to repre­ sen­ta­tions from Japa­nese manga and anime, as well as American comics, video games, and films. Second, she notes that an impor­tant aspect of cosplay in India is the embodied experience of gendered and ethno-­racial impersonation. She notes that some cosplayers play roles separate from their own gender or sexual identity, and many play roles of another ethnicity. In the final analy­sis, Krishnamurti explores how Indian cosplayers’ portrayals of characters of Japa­nese and American origin often involve a complex mimetic per­for­mance of race, ethnicity, gender, and religious and/or cultural identities. Chapter 10 shifts our attention from spectatorial forms of theatre and dance to the highly developed complex of Teyyattam, or spirit-­possessed worship of teyyam deities, in Malabar. Specifically, Rich Freeman shows that t­ hese deities “possess” a range of forms and loci, including: (1) elaborately costumed and made-up dancers who are, in fact, professional serial impersonators of vari­ous deities; (2) more minimally and generically costumed dancing priests committed through their office to episodic possession by a single deity for life; (3) vari­ous cult objects performatively enlivened as conduits or receptacles of divine power; and (4) the pro­cessionally mobile or permanently enshrined iconic images of the deities themselves as the enduring repositories of this conscious energy (caitanyam). In the chapter, Freeman provides a useful delineation of the dif­fer­ ent vectors of agency and power implied in the use of the respective terms possession and impersonation. While the gods in Teyyattam have very distinctive features that emerge in their impersonation by and through dancers and possession-­priests, their virtually divine personhood seems more densely contextualized in its purchase on the lives of its prac­ti­tion­ers and worshippers than is normally associated with nonpossessed impersonation. In Chapter  11, “Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila,” Pamela Lothspeich discusses a per­for­mance form that enacts the Ramayan in an annual festival in connection with Dussehra. Drawing on her research in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Lothspeich discusses a range of casting practices and rituals associated with svarūps (literally, “self-­forms” [of deities], or “divine embodiment”), particularly in amateur Ramlilas performed by community members themselves. She contrasts the situation at several older, nineteenth-­century Ramlilas, like the one at Ramnagar near Varanasi, with a number of newer ones established in the twentieth ­century, performed on outdoor proscenium stages. ­Here, Lothspeich argues that while some “preservationist” Ramlilas tend to place

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brahmins in the roles of the svarūps, the majority of neighborhood Ramlilas are, to vari­ous degrees, more flexible and inclusive in their casting practices. However, t­here is still significantly more repre­sen­ta­tion of cis men and boys from privileged caste groups in divine roles overall, which implies a correlation between one’s social capital and ability to impersonate, and especially to “impersonate up.” Lothspeich also argues that t­ hose who perform in Ramlila not only play roles, but also enact social norms and tropes, indicating that Ramlila is si­ mul­ta­neously a site of both dramatic per­for­mance and social performativities. In the final chapter of the volume, “Resisting Brahminical Patriarchy in Kuchipudi Dance: The Story of Haleem Khan,” Harshita Mruthinti Kamath critiques the exclusive power given to brahmin men to impersonate female characters in the South Indian dance form of Kuchipudi. A dance form from an eponymous village in Telugu-­speaking South India, Kuchipudi has become globally recognized due to the originary practice of impersonation in which brahmin men don the strī-­vēṣam (­woman’s guise) to impersonate female characters. Kamath shifts away from the brahmin male body in strī-­vēṣam by examining the case of Muslim male dancer and impersonator Haleem Khan. Rather than reading Khan’s practices of donning the strī-­vēṣam as acts of mimesis that mirror the village’s brahmin dance community, Kamath argues that Khan challenges and even divests from the brahminical patriarchy undergirding both Kuchipudi village and Kuchipudi as dance. Kamath’s critique of brahmin masculinity through the figure of Haleem Khan rounds out the volume and connects back to Novetzke’s first chapter focusing on the mimetic acts of the aristocratic thirteenth-­century brahmin, Chakradhar. Together, the contributors to this volume illustrate the flexibility and usefulness of the terms impersonation and guising. They illuminate a wide array of acts of impersonation and guising, from ­silent to cacophonous per­for­mance events and from solo to collaborative interventions in a number of social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. The charismatic icons examined in Chapters 1, 4, and 5—­Chakradhar, Basavaraju, and Baba Ramdev—­remind us that sociopo­liti­ cal power flows not only unilaterally through the channels of brick-­and-­mortar edifices and public institutions, but also more diffusely and covertly, through what Foucault has called “centres of observation disseminated throughout society” ([1977] 1995, 212), and that impersonation itself operates through “polymorphous techniques of power” (Foucault [1978] 1990, 11). Chapters 2, 3, and 9 critique forms of racial and ethnic per­for­mance in brownface caricature, in colonial-­era adventure films, and in cosplay and fandom in con­temporary times, respectively. US citizen Dave Carson was a racist cap­i­tal­ist who exalted in whiteness in plain sight by lampooning its supposed converse, Blackness, in his parodies of “native types.” Fearless Nadia too capitalized on whiteness; she was cast in and capitalized on Indian roles that traded in tropes in support of white su16

Introduction

premacy and imperialism. Chapter 9 on cosplay and fandom in India reminds us that a racialized logic still pervades the way many cosplayers in India and globally perceive and navigate this spectatorial form of play, even as some characters are tellingly subversive with re­spect to race and gender. Contributions relating to forms of gender per­for­mance in Chapters 6–8 interrogate the ostensible interstice between “real” and “fake” identities and, thereby, work to thwart the specter of (in)authenticity with regard to the concept. ­These chapters also underscore the precarity of the subaltern, and often multiply marginalized performers who work in ­t hese media and are often considered risqué, vulgar, criminal, and/or inauthentic by normative/hegemonic society. Fi­nally, Chapters  10–12 are ensconced in intentional forms of aesthetic and ritual per­for­mance geared t­oward religious edification, worship, sociality, and entertainment. Although the referents of ­these chapters are all South Asian, in vari­ous ways they illustrate that the practice of impersonation is fundamental to our shared ­human experience. Just as we cannot escape our own performativities of gender, race, class, and so on, so too we seem compelled to want to impersonate that which we are not, even as ­t hose with the most social capital often have disproportionate access and ability to impersonate, and to be rewarded for their acts of impersonation. Yet, as t­ hese chapters show, impersonation can also be deployed to interrogate sites of hegemonic control and ameliorate social injustices in South Asia and the world. In this way, impersonation and guising in South Asia offer up theoretical frameworks that allow us to rethink and reimagine social performativities in the world, and intentional per­for­mances “on the stage,” in new and sometimes even liberatory ways.

Acknowl­edgments The editors would like to thank the contributors of this volume, the two anonymous reviewers, and Masako Ikeda from University of Hawai‘i Press. Thanks in par­tic­u ­lar to Kellen Hoxworth, Kareem Khubchandani, Sailaja Krishnamurti, and Claire Pamment for their intellectual l­abor in helping us develop the theoretical framework for this volume.

Notes 1. In the introduction, we use diacritics and italics for technical terms following the convention of the South Asian language in which the term is used, for example, vēṣam in Telugu and vesh/bhes in Hindi-­Urdu. We use the names of per­for­mance genres as proper nouns but



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gloss them with diacritics on first mention in the body, for example, Kuchipudi (kūcipūḍi). All cited material in quotes is given with the spelling and style with which it appears in the original, including language from chapters in this volume. 2. ­Here, we use the terms gender impersonation and gender guising rather than female impersonation to resist gender binarism and signal the situatedness and constructedness of gender. We also do not use the terms “cross-­d ressing” or “cross-­gender guising,” b ­ ecause they presuppose a gender binary, one that can be “crossed” through sartorial transformations. See Shilpa Parthan’s chapter in this volume for a critique of the term female impersonator. 3. It is pos­si­ble that some of the perceived-­as-­male ­people in ­these studies did/do not identify as cisgender men. 4. Although this dichotomy may hold up in certain material contexts, for example, it is common in South Asia and in many parts of the world to speak of “duplicates” or “counterfeits” with re­spect to inexpensive products that look like more expensive “branded” or designer ones, this dichotomy in no way holds up in our understanding of impersonation. 5. By discussing t­ hese religious practices alongside the concept of impersonation, we do not mean to emphasize the artifice of the acts or question the integrity of participants’ religious sentiments. Rather, we note that the structural and iterative manifestations of their performances—­regardless of the intents and beliefs of the participants—­l ink them to impersonation as we have defined it. 6. We discuss the work of t­ hese theorists and ­others in the next section. 7. Making a similar point, Diana Taylor writes, “[Per­for­mance] is not l­imited to mimetic repetition. It also includes the possibility of change, critique, and creativity within frameworks of repetition” (2015, 15). 8. This is a collection of essays that ­were originally published between 1985 and 2002. 9. On Carlson’s work, also see Shepherd (2016, 174–176). 10. Animated by structural anthropology, much twentieth-­century scholarship in per­ for­mance studies does not critically interrogate the fraught history of Euro-­American scholarly entanglements with colonial and postcolonial per­for­mance, particularly the fetishization of the exotic and the racialization of subject performers and ritual specialists. For several critiques of Euro-­American scholars’ misrepre­sen­ta­tions and appropriations of Indian per­ for­mance, see Bharucha (1984, 1991, 1993), Lal (2004, ix–­x), and Dharwadker (2005, 127–162). 11. This is a collection of works that ­were originally published between 1926 and 1955. 12. Thanks to Kareem Khubchandani for drawing our attention to the per­for­mance theory work of Hurston and Dunham. 13. As just one example, in the 1970s Induja Awasthi documented and theorized two broad styles of Ramlila, which she designated “abhinay-­parak” (acting-­or pantomime-­ based) and “samvād-­parak” (dialogue-­based) productions, to capture the performative gap between per­for­mances on an open field or space and ­those on an outdoor proscenium (1979a, 58–60; 1979b, 34–35). 14. See also Shehzad Nadeem’s chapter in this volume for a dif­fer­ent take on impersonating the archetypal yogi in the context of neoliberal capitalism in India. 15. Engaging theoretically with both Bhabha and Davé, Hoxworth argues that Carson’s enactment of the character of the “Bengalee Baboo” should not be seen as a straightforward example of mimicry; rather, he was “a mock ‘mimic man’ performed by a white man in a blackface minstrel show.” 16. Transfeminine ­people who may or may not identify as ­women have of course also performed and continue to perform in female roles.

18

Introduction

17. See also Hansen (2002, 168, 179n16) for a discussion of Bombay versus Calcutta theatre and the decline of such impersonation. 18. This contrasts with Calcutta theatre, where cis women replaced impersonators onstage (Hansen 2002, 168). 19. See Hansen’s studies on impersonators published in 1998, 1999, 2002, and 2015. In addition, her book Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (2011) also includes excerpts from Jayshankar Sundari’s autobiography. 20. On gender per­for­mance in theatre, ritual, and dance forms including Jatra, Ojha Naach, the Aravan festival, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, and Andhranatyam, see Mukherjee and Chatterjee (2016). On Marathi theatre, Kathakali, and Kutiyattam (and other Asian forms of  theatre and dance), see Madhavan (2017). ­These works undermine established Euro-­ American feminist biases and universalizing pronouncements about performing w ­ omen, including their presumed near absence in theatre prior to the modern period.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, O ­ thers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Austin, J. L. [1962] 1975. How to Do ­Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Awasthi, Induja. 1979a. Rāmlīlā, paramparā aur śailiyām. Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan. —­—­—. 1979b. “Ramlila: Tradition and Styles.” Quarterly Journal for the National Centre for the Performing Arts 8, no. 3:23–36. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Bharucha, Rustom. 1984. “A Collision of Cultures: Some Western Interpretations of the Indian Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 1, no. 1:1–20. —­—­—. 1991. “A View from India.” In Peter Brook and the “Mahabharata”: Critical Perspectives, edited by David Williams, 228–252. New York: Routledge. —­—­—. 1993. Theatre and the World: Per­for­mance and the Politics of Culture. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4:519–531. —­—­—. [1990] 2008. Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge Classics. —­—­—. [1993] 2011. Bodies That ­Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge Classics. Carlson, Marvin. [1996] 2018. Per­for­mance: A Critical Introduction, 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Chen, Tina. 2005. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 2013. Cultural Strug­gles: Per­for­mance, Ethnography, Praxis, edited by E. Patrick Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cowaloosur, Vedita. 2016. “Not Quite Black: Black Skin in Popu­lar Indian Cinema.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 51, no. 52:76–84.



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Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago ­Legal Forum 1:139–167. Davé, Shilpa S. 2013. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Per­for­mance in American Tele­vi­sion and Film. Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Dharwadker, Aparna Bharghava. 2005. Theatres of In­de­pen­dence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Per­for­mance in India since 1947. Iowa City: Iowa University Press. —­—­—­, ed. 2019. A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Pre­sent. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy. 2000. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —­—­—. 2004. “Self-­I mpersonation in World Lit­er­a­t ure.” Kenyon Review 26, no.  2:​ 101–125. Dunham, Katherine. [1964] 1994. Island Possessed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erndl, Kathleen. 2006. “Possession by Durga: The ­Mother Who Possesses.” In The Life of Hinduism, edited by John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan, 158–170. Berkeley: University of California Press. FCHS Collective. 2021. “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in Formation.” Religion Compass 15, no. 5:e12392. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. 2013. When the World Becomes Female: Possibilities of a South Indian Goddess. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel. [1978] 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books. —­—­—. [1977] 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Gaines, Alisha. 2017. Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre. —­—­—. [1967] 2005. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-­to-­Face Be­hav­ior. New Brunswick, NJ: Adline Transaction. Goldman, Robert. 1993. “Transsexualism, Gender, and Anxiety in Traditional India.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 3:374–401. Hansen, Kathryn. 1998. “Stri Bhumika: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 33, no. 35:2291–2300. —­—­—. 1999. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. —­—­—. 2002. “A Difference Desire, a Dif­fer­ent Femininity: Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” In Queering India: Same-­Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita, 163–180. New York: Routledge. —­—­—. 2011. Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies. London: Anthem Press. —­—­—. 2015. “Performing Gender and Faith in Indian Theater Autobiographies.” In Speaking of the Self: Gender, Per­for­mance, and Autobiography in South Asia, edited by Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-­Hurley, 255–280. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Hawley, John Stratton. 2000. “Krishna and the Gender of Longing.” In Love, Sex, and Gender in the World Religions, edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin, 239–256. Oxford: Oneworld. Holdrege, Barbara, and Karen Pechilis, eds. 2016. Refiguring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Repre­sen­ta­tion. Boston: South End Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of Amer­i­ca. Jackson, Shannon. 2004. Professing Per­for­mance: Theatre in the Acad­emy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —­—­—. 2006. “Genealogies of Per­for­mance Studies.” In The Sage Handbook of Per­for­ mance Studies, edited by Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, 73–86. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Jassal, Aftab. 2016. “Divine Politicking: A Rhetorical Approach to Deity Possession in the Hi­ma­la­yas.” Religions 7, no. 9. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3390​/­rel7090117. —­—­—. 2017. “Making God Pre­sent: Place-­Making and Ritual Healing in North India.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 21, no. 2:141–164. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2001. “ ‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Every­t hing I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grand­mother.” Text and Per­for­mance Quarterly 21, no. 1:1–25. —­—­—. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Per­for­mance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kamath, Harshita Mruthinti. 2019. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance. Oakland: University of California Press. Kapur, Anuradha. 1990. Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Khubchandani, Kareem. 2020. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Lit­er­a­ture and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Kugle, Scott. 2013. “Dancing with Khusro: Gender Ambiguities and Poetic Per­for­mance in a Delhi Dargah.” In Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, 245–265. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Lal, Ananda, ed. 2004. The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madhavan, Arya, ed. 2017. ­Women in Asian Per­for­mance: Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Routledge. Malik, Aditya. 2016. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Hi­ma­la­yas. New York: Oxford University Press. Mankekar, Purnima. 2015. Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mezur, Katherine. 2005. Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-­Likeness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mukherjee, Tutun, and Niladri R. Chatterjee. 2016. Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India: Nari Bhav. New Delhi: Niyogi Books.



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Nair, Sreenath. 2017. “Rasatrialogue: The Politics of the Female Body in Asian Per­for­ mance.” In ­Women in Asian Per­for­mance: Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Arya Madhavan. New York: Routledge. Newton, Esther. 1979. ­Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in Amer­i­ca. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orgel, Stephen. 1996. Impersonations: The Per­for­mance of Gender in Shakespeare’s ­England. New York: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 2016. “Introduction to Performativity and Per­for­mance.” In The Per­for­mance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial and Sara Brady, 226–232. London: Routledge. Pechilis, Karen. 2012. “Gender.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, edited by Knut Jacobsen, vol. 4. Leiden: Brill. Petievich, Carla. 2008. When Men Speak as ­Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-­Muslim Poetry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Phelan, Peggy, and Jill Lane, eds. 1998. The Ends of Per­for­mance. New York: New York University Press. Putcha, Rumya S. 2019. “Gender, Caste, and Feminist Praxis in Transnational South India.” South Asian Popu­lar Culture 17, no. 1:61–79. —­—­—. 2020a. “­A fter Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and Cartographies of Salvation.” Tourist Studies 20, no. 4:450–466. —­—­—. 2020b. “Yoga and White Public Space.” Religions 11, no. 12:1–14. Ramanujan, A. K. 1989. “Talking to God in the M ­ other Tongue.” Manushi 50–51–52:9–14. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping ­Mother India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roy, Parama. 1998. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Said, Edward. [1978] 2014. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Schechner, Richard. 1976. Essays on Per­for­mance Theory, 1970–1976. New York: Drama Book Specialists. —­—­—­, ed. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —­—­—. 1993. The ­Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Per­for­mance. London: Routledge. —­—­—. 2002. Per­for­mance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Seizer, Susan. 2005. Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Serano, Julia. 2013. Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Shepherd, Simon. 2016. The Cambridge Introduction to Per­for­mance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, Lata. 2009. “Fore-­Grounding the Actresses’ Question: Bengal and Maharastra.” In Theatre in Colonial India: Play-­House of Power, edited by Lata Singh, 270–294. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sinha, Mrinalini. 2012. “A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?” In South Asian Feminism, edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose, 356–373. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

22

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Smith, Frederick. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Lit­ er­a­ture and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. Sunardi, Christine. 2015. Stunning Males and Power­ful Females: Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, Diana. 2015. Per­for­mance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Pro­cess: Structure and Anti-­Structure. London: Routledge. Vanita, Ruth, and Saleem Kidwai, eds. 2001. Same-­Sex Love in India: Readings from Lit­ er­a­ture and History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zarrilli, Phillip B. 2000. Kathakali Dance-­Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London: Routledge.



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CHAPTER 1

Public Impersonators GENDER, CASTE, AND SOCIAL ONTOLOGY IN THE MARATHI VERNACULAR MOMENT Christian Lee Novetzke

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his is an essay about God who pretends to be a man who pretends to be other kinds of men. As Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Pamela Lothspeich lay out in the introduction to this volume, impersonation involves a dialectic of power that both plays on binaries and often opposes them as well. This dialectic is often formed as a juxtaposition of the normative—­t he personation—­a nd the nonnormative—­the impersonation. Like all dialectics, impersonation registers friction and power differentials. In this chapter, I take public impersonation to be premised on a differential of social power and si­mul­ta­neously a demonstration of that differential. This per­for­mance of impersonation can have many impulses: the reassertion of dominance perhaps, but also an expression of protest or cultural critique. Impersonation can find motivation in anx­i­eties about social mobility, but it can also convey empathy and confessions of social in­equality. For ­these reasons, I ­will view public impersonation as a social didactic and public practice that often exposes the nature of social in­equality, even if unintentionally. My focus ­here w ­ ill be on practices I would position within the “social liberal” context of demonstrating social in­equality around caste as a means of critiquing that in­ equality rather than reinforcing it. However, such critiques are incomplete as they do not always hew to the “social liberal” model of progressive change. The pro­cess of vernacularization that the examples below w ­ ill draw from all pre­sent a complicated matrix that may compel an engagement with everyday life and non-­elite worlds, but this engagement may also reinforce the prejudices of the quotidian world, even against the desires of the person d ­ oing the impersonating. I am less concerned with arguing that any one teleology of ethics is envisioned ­here. Instead, I want to explore how public impersonation created ambivalent ethical messages, particularly around caste and gender, providing flashpoints of critique but not necessarily resolution.

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In this essay, I w ­ ill apply t­ hese ideas to an analy­sis of modes of impersonation in the Līḷācaritra (c. 1273), the first extant work of Marathi lit­er­a­ture and a key  resource for understanding Marathi literary vernacularization and the social forces that ­shaped it.1 In this text, t­ here are many examples of public impersonation. The text tells the life story of a godman named Chakradhar (c. thirteenth c­ entury) who regularly uses impersonation to teach his disciples his social ethics around gender and caste prejudice. Other characters also use impersonation in the form of per­for­mance, disguise, and didactic discourse. Even the text itself, a story of līḷā, of the play of humanity undertaken by a god on earth, is a story bounded by a form of impersonation, God playing or “impersonating” a h ­ uman. The examples I w ­ ill use are drawn from the everyday life of Chakradhar and his followers, called Mahanubhavs, as recorded in the Līḷācaritra, yet they are also performative moments. ­These are not examples of formal per­for­mance, but rather moments when Chakradhar or his followers performed a public impersonation for some didactic reason. This distinction is impor­tant since it contrasts with other ideas of public per­for­mance, many of which make up the content of the other chapters in this volume. In other words, my theoretical frame of reference is less per­for­mance studies and more the per­for­mance of social hierarchy in contexts of everyday life. I am not engaging an established per­for­mance tradition as such, but rather how ­people perform their social humanity, and also at times take on the role of another’s social ontology. Th ­ ese are all moments situated within the context of “religion” insofar as they circulate within and around the life of Chakradhar and his ascetic devout followers and are recorded in his highly realistic prose sacred biography, the Līḷācaritra. However, the social conditions engaged through public impersonation—or not engaged, as we w ­ ill see—­a re all central to the shared social order of the thirteenth ­century, unrestricted by religious affiliation. The issues addressed ­here are the social ethics of everyday life analyzed through episodes of public impersonation. I suggest that Chakradhar’s divine impersonation of humanity is a critique of social in­equality that is wrapped up in the pro­cess of vernacularization, of which the Līḷācaritra is the first example in Marathi that we have. For this reason, Iw ­ ill engage impersonation in this chapter as a social act that relies on a shared understanding of social order joined to a proliferation of disagreements about that social order. I theorize impersonation as a palimpsest of two superimposed images: one image is of the actor or impersonator as a social being—­t hat is, as a person with gender, caste, class, language, affect, and so on—­that can be located and categorized by a given public within normative frames of being a person. The second image is that of the impersonated subject—­likewise composed of the same social indicators—­but when superimposed over the social ontology of the

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impersonator creates a dialectic that generates a social critique. Impersonation is the juxtaposition in one moment of ­t hose two social ontologies, a doubling of a fixed identity in a liminal moment of public display. The differences between them create the social critique of impersonation. Even if an impersonator does not intend social critique, it is the inevitable and logical outcome of the juxtaposition of publicly performed social ontologies by a single person. In this chapter, I ­will take par­tic­u­lar account of caste and gender in this dynamic, which I have argued is a salient feature of Marathi vernacularization and maybe all vernacularization. When the literary capital of elite spheres, formerly restricted to Sans­k rit, meets the language of everyday life, in this case Marathi, the new literary idiom of the vernacular ­will always reflect upon this meeting of elite and non-­elite. This is the area of the quotidian world, and it is where Chakradhar and his followers used impersonation most effectively.

Chakradhar’s Critique of Social Difference through Impersonation Sometime in the m ­ iddle of the thirteenth ­century, somewhere in the heart of the Deccan, a brahmin and godman did something odd. ­Here is a remembrance of that moment from the Līḷācaritra: ­ fter the morning worship was over, Chakradhar wandered off to a ­temple. A Baisa was understood to be the leader among the devotees who accompanied Chakradhar. In the t­emple’s assembly hall, he removed his shirt and hung it up; he wrapped his turban around his waist. He applied ash to his forehead like the Shudras do. Then he went by the drainage line [outside the ­temple] and stood t­ here. He joined his hands together. Then he said, “Sorathi Somnath! Aundha Naganath! Paraliya Vaijanath!2 One hundred liṅ­gas! One thousand liṅ­gas! One hundred thousand liṅ­gas! [I do] prostration [to them]! [I do] one prostration [to them]! Bless Saya! Bless Ma­ya! Bless Kaya! Bless Saubai! Bless Maubai! Bless Kaubai!”3 And then Chakradhar folded his hands and came ­toward the devotees [and said], “O Elders, this is pure. O Elders, this is pure.” Then Baisa said, “What’s this, sir?” Chakradhar said, “­Woman, this is how the Shudras encounter God.” (LC-U, 497)4 In the Līḷācaritra, Chakradhar is a man, born with the name Haripal, to a brahmin minister who serves a king of Gujarat. At some point this boy Hari-

26

Chapter 1

pal dies, and his body is reanimated by the spirit or soul of God. That spirit is shared by two other h ­ uman bodies—­Changadev and Raul Gundam—­a nd two godly bodies—­t he deities Krishna and Dattatreya. So Chakradhar is all ­t hese ­t hings, but he is also the single one God, that is Parameshwar, the Prime Lord. In other words, Chakradhar is God manifest in five forms. The first līḷā of Chakradhar is to manifest as this multiple divine person—he is all ­these ­t hings, and t­ hese ­t hings are all just one ultimate being. But the manifestation that is the subject of the Līḷācaritra for the most part is Chakradhar, the Gujarati son of a brahmin minister of state who wanders into Maharashtra one day and stays ­there for about eighty years, u ­ ntil he again wanders off, this time to live immortally in the Hi­ma­la­yas. The Līḷācaritra emphasizes the point that all of Chakradhar’s actions are impersonations in the sense that he is h ­ uman but always also God assuming a social skin. So I would argue that the first līḷā of the Līḷācaritra is his impersonation of a ­human in the first place. However, this is not a generic ­human—­for how could such a ­thing exist? Instead, Chakradhar is a par­tic­u­lar kind of ­human, a brahmin and a male. Chakradhar is God playing at being a man to teach the world a lesson about humanity itself, but he does so from the very top of the social hierarchy. This ­will be an impor­tant point as it becomes clear that in the logic of the palimpsest, the base image must have a social superiority to the superimposed secondary image, or ­else a high-­minded critique of social justice might turn into a tale of personal peril. To understand the critical doubling that is enacted through impersonation, let us return to the story above. Chakradhar impersonates a Shudra man at a Shaiva ­temple to show his brahmin followers how a Shudra man worships t­ here. A Shudra man must not wear a shirt when worshipping, and should stand by the drainage ditch, where perhaps he can catch a vision (darśan) of the image inside the ­temple. Chakradhar invokes famous Shaiva t­ emples of the region that are said to hold one of the twelve jyotirliṅgas5 of Shiva. He also calls out the names of his six c­ hildren—­three boys and three girls—­ostensibly the subjects of his entreaties to Shiva in the ­temple. And he concludes by showing deference to gathered brahmins, who are also his followers, by calling them “elders” and reassuring them that his worship remains pure. In this way, he might be said to impose an “impersonation” on his followers, for as he plays at being a “Shudra,” so he makes his followers aware of their brahmin status even if they disavow it as Mahanubhavs, as ascetics. It is not u ­ ntil his female follower Baisa, who is clearly confused, asks what is g­ oing on that Chakradhar breaks this character and returns to his other impersonation so to speak, that is, God appearing as Chakradhar, in order to deliver his message: “This is how Shudras worship.” The line is both a description and a reprimand—­for why did Baisa and the other brahmin Mahanubhavs not know

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this already? The implied explanation is, of course, their elitism and privilege as b ­ rahmins. Some may find this story insults Shudras, as the scene may carry an excess of affect bordering on ridicule—­certainly a risk in the arena of impersonation. Most Mahanubhavs would likely understand Chakradhar to be instructing his brahmin followers about a caste world that is alien to his followers, a performative moment to show them how “the other half lives.”6 Despite the socially egalitarian commitments of the Mahanubhavs, we hear very few stories in the Līḷācaritra about followers of Chakradhar who are from Shudra or Dalit castes. We can look to another story that involves an “untouchable” man, a Dalit, but does not involve impersonation, but rather calls out the façade of elite-­caste identity to which his followers still cling. Chakradhar once took a gift of a laḍu, a sweet, from a Dalit man outside a ­temple. He asked the man to first take a bite of it, then Chakradhar himself took a bite. He then passed it around to all of his brahmin followers and asked them to take a bite. His brahmin followers became perplexed ­because they ­couldn’t tell if the laḍu was a sacred offering to and from God (prasād) or a polluted substance they should avoid (uṣṭā). Chakradhar made it clear: this was prasād and they should overcome their casteism, their brāhmaṇatva. His point may be to suggest to his brahmin followers that they are still holding on to their attachment to brahminness—­t hey are g­ oing on impersonating brahmins even as Chakradhar has demonstrated that the h ­ uman condition is beyond caste, or rather that caste is just a form of social impersonation, a social ontology at play. But this story of how Shudras worship at a ­temple is a l­ittle dif­fer­ent from the one I have just relayed. No Shudras are pre­sent in the first story, much less Dalits; t­ here are only his brahmin followers. And Chakradhar takes on the role of a Shudra man without explanation, impersonating his mode of worship. Elsewhere when he takes on other personas—­when he pretends to be an excellent farmer or h ­ orse trader, for example—he actually impresses all the farmers and ­horse traders with his skill, such that they simply believe he is one of them. He blurs the lines between being a so-­called real ­horse trader and pretending to be one. He calls into question the very social ontology of being a person with ascribed qualities, and while t­here may be a mild social critique when this brahmin godman is impersonating a non-­brahmin h ­ orse trader, t­here is a special social emphasis when he is impersonating a Shudra. If we follow the logic of Chakradhar’s many other acts of impersonation, then we can see that in the story at the Shaiva ­temple he is not only pretending to be a Shudra, he is pretending to be the best kind of Shudra—­obedient to social norms, devoted to ­family and God. Chakradhar’s Shudra is not a rebel, not a social critic—he is abject and he conforms to society’s norms. The palimpsest reveals the brahmin social ontology underwriting Chakradhar’s Shudra impersonation. 28

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The story of Chakradhar impersonating a Shudra is embedded in what seems to be a collection of līḷās that deal with caste self-­delusions. A few verses before the impersonation story, we have a līḷā in which Chakradhar tells this story: One day Chakradhar said, “­There was once a Shudra. He washed his hands and feet at the river. He viewed Shiva’s liṅ­ga and then went home. He would sit near [his] bed and bend down, taking out a wooden stool [from under­ neath the bed]. Then [his wife] would cook warm millet. He’d take the warm millet on his plate. She would make seasoning in oil in a ladle and put it on his millet. He’d have lentils on his plate. Then he’d mix them and press many holes in them. Then have a ladle full of eggplant in a sauce. And he’d eat. Afterward he’d drink buttermilk from an earthen pot. He’d wash his mouth, then wash his hands and on a well-­shaped mattress he’d lie down. He’d chew a dried, blackened betel leaf as small as a tiny berry. This was his after-­dinner digestive. His two runny-­nosed ­daughters would roll around on his stomach and he’d say, ‘I’m very happy.’ ” Chakradhar said, “Thus is one person’s happiness; he knew nothing ­else.” (LC U, 494). If one is inclined to feel Chakradhar is ridiculing Shudras in his impersonation of them at the Shaiva ­temple, then one ­will also be inclined to see this story as an example of such ridicule. And this līḷā never gives away its moral, lending itself to interpretation. Chakradhar’s comment at the end is enigmatic. Is the Shudra man happy ­because his life is so ­simple? Or is he deluded by its simplicity, and so does not understand the deeper knowledge that is the goal of the renunciant Mahanubhavs? Food h ­ ere, as above in the story of the sweet given by a Dalit man, is in the medium and an expression of the vernacular—­just as a laḍu is a typical Maharashtrian sweet, so too is the meal a very typical one in Maharashtra, even t­oday. Chakradhar does not dwell on the reference to the Shiva ­liṅ ­ga—­a foreshadowing of the līḷā to come perhaps. This is ­because, as renunciants, the Mahanubhavs have given up the plea­sure of food. And as brahmins for the most part, the Līḷācaritra tells us that this is the most difficult sacrifice they could make. This story operates as a warning to his brahmin followers, a warning delivered by using food as pedagogy (as he does with the laḍu and the Dalit man above), but the valences of social ontology are complex. Chakradhar is reminding them that ­t here is a kind of happiness that one can have in the pleasures of life (food being the most pleasing to his brahmin followers). But this kind of happiness comes without knowledge; it is the bliss of ignorance, or to put it another way, ignorance is the pretense that you are, in essence, the social Novetzke

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per­for­mance you enact. This is also a way to show his followers that if they remain attached to the expectation that as socially coded brahmins they should receive delicious food as they beg door to door, then they are just like the Shudra man whose life revolves around his food and a postprandial wrestle with the kids without any sense of who he is at a deeper, one might say “spiritual” level. Chakradhar seems to be telling his followers that the world of phenomenal plea­sure ­will trap you in a fabricated social ontology where we are all impersonating some socially distinct sort of being. Just as a Shudra is trapped in this mode of impersonation, so too is a brahmin. While I would not agree that his story is an insult to Shudras, it does seem to be a pedagogical chastisement of his brahmin followers that uses their low opinion of Shudras as a narrative ­strategy—as with the Dalit man above. He is browbeating them into realizing that they can no longer impersonate brahmins just ­because they ­were born as brahmins. They must start to live with the knowledge that he teaches, but it is also apparently knowledge that the Shudra man lacks. And, of course, the idea that we are all universally trapped in constructed social ontologies may be right, but some social ontologies have more benefits than ­others. We might note in addition that this līḷā seems to be in a sequence of līḷās that all involve caste-­based ste­reo­t ypes of everyday life. The līḷā that follows the one regarding the Shudra man’s midday meal tells us of a Molikar or Malakar, a woodworker, one of several traditional artisanal jātis. In this story, we hear of the daily life of an impoverished woodworker who earns a meager income, lives in a ramshackle hut, but returns to a happy home. Though he has a broken cot, a torn blanket, and only one shoe, he still insists that his wife eat with him so they are both equally fed. Chakradhar concludes this story by saying that even ­t hese pleasures some p ­ eople cannot surrender. Immediately following this līḷā, we have a story of a ste­reo­t ypical Patil, likely a dominant non-­brahmin jāti, who celebrates the birth of a son as opposed to a d ­ aughter, with no recognition of the inherent suffering of life shared by all beings regardless of sex. It is ­after this līḷā that Chakradhar impersonates a Shudra. Taken as a sequence, Chakradhar’s impersonation of a Shudra man is the apex of an arc of impersonation vignettes. The first three stories are about the social façade of being a par­tic­u­lar kind of person in a social matrix and how this keeps someone from transcending this social matrix to understand the core ­human condition. When Chakradhar impersonates a Shudra he is trying to drive home this lesson: being in society is a mode of impersonation, a prevarication. Chakradhar pretends to be a brahmin man pretending to be a Shudra man in order to show his followers that their status as brahmins is itself a ­pretense. The entire set of līḷās is a lesson about the illusion of social real­ity and its consequences for the seeker of truth. And in par­t ic­u ­lar it is addressed to an 30

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audience of brahmins, targeting their brahmin caste essence or brāhmaṇatva—­ those social trappings and expectations that make them social brahmins. As such, this moment of impersonation cannot help but also be a critique of society as a fabrication produced by impersonators—­gender and caste are the delusions of a world of desire and power. It is for this reason that Chakradhar ultimately impersonates a Shudra to get his point across. The idea of a brahmin man staging a per­for­mance, even an informal one, that is a critique of brahminness in the vernacular has a long tradition in Maharashtra. I doubt that Chakradhar was the first, but his is the first rec­ord we have of this phenomenon in Marathi. Shortly a­ fter him, we ­w ill have the equivocal critiques of brahmin excess, as well as patriarchal sexism, that ­w ill come from Jnandev, also a brahmin. This w ­ ill continue with Eknath in the sixteenth ­century and track a long line through brahmin male public performers, especially through lāvaṇī and tamāśā and ultimately into con­temporary theatre and film. Elsewhere, I have described this phenomenon as “the Brah­man Double,” a mode of social critique where a brahmin (usually a man) performs in public before an audience of brahmins and non-­brahmins and challenges the prejudices of brahminical society, usually by impersonating a “bad” brahmin in the mode of the classical vidūṣaka or brahmin fool (Novetzke 2011). The entirety of Chakradhar’s life in the Līḷācaritra is an example of the brahmin double if we understand his most basic līḷā to be the impersonation of a brahmin man and godman on Earth. Chakradhar is the per­for­mance of the good brahmin, a critic of brahminical casteism and sexism spoken by a brahmin to an audience that ­will, as the centuries unfold, come to be dominated by non-­ brahmins. This is indeed one way to read this text and the life of Chakradhar— as a ­grand impersonation of a brahmin who spends his life trying to dismantle brahminism and sexism, albeit for a small group of brahmin followers at first, but with an aim ­toward a change is some aspects of society. As this is the first extant work of Marathi lit­er­a­ture, we should understand that social critique is bound up in the pro­cess of vernacularization such that vernacularization is itself a criticism of elite society from the point of view of the non-­elite, or rather the quotidian where the elite and non-­elite intersect. The moment when Chakradhar impersonates a Shudra, which comes t­ oward the end of his life and teaching in Maharashtra, exemplifies the way vernacularization is a public expression of social critique constructed through the tropes of the non-­elite world. But this is an incomplete critique for many reasons. One reason is that ­these early challenges to social in­equality around caste and gender tend to confine themselves to the realm of spirit and religious ideas of escaping rebirth, rather than as emendations of all general social order. But perhaps most importantly h ­ ere, the critical moments I have outlined so far still remain nestled within the confines of a male brahmin persona. What happens when this mode of public performative critique Novetzke

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switches caste registers and emerges from a non-­brahmin context? And why do we lack examples of Chakradhar impersonating w ­ omen?

The Limits of the Critique of Social Difference through Impersonation Let us return to the fact that though Chakradhar is God, his bodily form is that of a male brahmin who is impressively handsome, and Chakradhar seems skilled well beyond what his caste designation would suggest. The audience for which he performs his rejections of caste privilege, such as the ones I described above, are mostly brahmin men and ­women devoted to him. What happens when someone e­ lse, someone who is not a brahmin man, tries to do what Chakradhar does—­tries in essence to impersonate the divine impersonator himself? Very early in the Līḷācaritra, when Chakradhar is just starting out and before his followers assem­ble, we get a story of Chakradhar’s encounter with a man from a Chambhar/Chamar caste,7 a Dalit jāti that, in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, is associated with shoemaking and leatherwork.8 In this līḷā, the Chambhar man and his wife—­both of whom remain nameless in the līḷā—­ happen upon Chakradhar, who is preaching in the town square. The Chambhar man is hypnotized by Chakradhar’s radiance, praising him as “without equal.” The Chambhar’s wife, however, is less impressed and demands that he leave Chakradhar’s presence so that they can continue on their way. However, the man refuses to abandon Chakradhar’s presence. The w ­ oman then threatens that she ­will divorce him if he does not move along, and he flatly responds, “Divorce me.” She apparently does so and, as promised, goes her own way. The man is then given instruction and initiation into renunciation by Chakradhar, where the man begins to learn Chakradhar’s philosophy and yogic practices. A ­ fter some period of tutelage with him, Chakradhar leaves the region, and the Chambhar man stays b ­ ehind in his village. The man begins a practice of sitting in the town square and preaching in the style of Chakradhar. The villa­ gers object that he is only “playing at” being a holy man—­t here’s an inappropriate mixing of social ontologies, and the Dalit man is seen merely as an impersonator, or rather an imposter. They call a brahmin l­egal expert in Dhar­maśās­tra, who declares that the Chambhar man is polluting the village with his presence.9 When the Chambhar refuses to leave, the brahmin declares his judgment: the man should be buried in a water-­limestone pit, a particularly horrible form of capital punishment in which the limestone corrodes the person’s flesh very slowly. While the sentence is being carried out, a bystander declares that he has just seen that same man in the market, garlanded and strolling carefree. When

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the ­people rush to the market and find the Chambhar man ­there just as described, they repent, falling at his feet, with the brahmins in par­t ic­u ­lar declaring, “We are all like sinful Chandals [untouchables] [­because] we have harassed you.”10 ­Here we can juxtapose the story at the start of this essay—of a god impersonating a brahmin man impersonating a Shudra—­w ith this story of a Dalit man (allegedly) impersonating a brahmin man. It is clear in this story that impersonation is not also disguise. Impersonation works only when we know the “original” or normative identity of the person who takes on a temporary new identity in the act of impersonation. In this way, I have argued that impersonation is a palimpsest—­a superimposition of one identity on another, leaving both legible. The layers of social being do not blend but rather double, each containing its own gravity and exerting a force on the observer. We cannot see the impersonation except through the impersonator. But as I also mentioned, impersonation as social critique plays off of a hierarchy between t­ hese two superimposed “personas.” The palimpsest that allows a brahmin man to impersonate a Shudra cannot be reversed: the social ontology of a Dalit cannot be overwritten by the impersonation of a brahmin man. If we return to my formulation of the brahmin double, we can see that impersonation is personal—­who you are and who you impersonate may reinforce the very hierarchy that is the target of critique. When Chakradhar impersonates a Shudra he is not inverting caste hierarchy but rather reinforcing it implicitly and perhaps unintentionally by establishing his power to imitate a social subordinate. His intention may be to educate his brahmin followers and chip away at their casteism, but his very ability to serve in this capacity—to be a double, an impersonator—is premised on his superior social status. As we ­will see, it is not his godman standing that empowers him, for this is a social recognition upheld only by a small group of followers and not necessarily society at large. What allows Chakradhar to critique caste society is his ordinary everyday privilege in caste society as a brahmin man. The inversion of caste hierarchy is a crime only the Chambhar man can commit—he cannot play “up” without peril. The “uppity” Chambhar—to borrow a derogatory term from the lexicon of American racism—­violates social norms. Though I could not find any reference in any Dhar­maśās­tra text referring to the supposed crime he commits, it is that very preeminent text of social order that is cited for his punishment.11 It is the phantom of this text, encoded within a sphere of brahminical legal-­social superiority, that buttresses Chakradhar’s freedom to play down without peril. The reference to Dhar­maśās­tra ­here is a metonym for the culture that surveils and enacts vio­lence on the Chambhar man. We see h ­ ere one impor­tant limit to the critique of social justice, which is the person of the impersonator. This limit point punishes a Chambhar man who (allegedly) impersonates a brahmin.

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Yet this same ­factor of power gives ­free rein to a brahmin who impersonates a Shudra. But as we ­w ill see, this does not mean that Chakradhar—as God impersonating a brahmin male—is ­free from peril himself. It may be that gender-­power transgressions set a limit point in the public culture of Chakradhar’s time.

The Limits of Gender in Patriarchal Social Critique I mentioned at the outset of this essay that Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs ­were interested in a social critique that involved both caste and gender. But in this essay so far, I have only talked about caste and not gender. I would like to conclude this essay by addressing this lacuna in a speculative way, hoping that in lieu of conclusions t­ here might simply be more possibilities. Throughout the Līḷācaritra we see Chakradhar as God impersonating a man who then impersonates a host of other social identities: Shudra, ­horse trader, swordsman, wrestler, gambler, medical doctor, farmer, Sans­krit scholar, Gujarati trader, and so on. But the one kind of person Chakradhar never impersonates is a ­woman. I find this puzzling for many reasons. It does seem that both men and ­women in Chakradhar’s time could perform public theatrical roles in the same or different genders—­though ­there may have been caste-­based taboos of which I am unaware. In other words, w ­ omen might have played men and men might have played w ­ omen on stage. So t­ here may have been exemplars and per­for­ mance normativities already in place that allowed ­people to play gender-­switching roles, and that would have made space, in some sense, for Chakradhar to take on a ­woman’s persona in a pedagogical format. And it is not the case that gender is somehow subordinated to caste in the social ethics of the Mahanubhavs. Gender is very much the center of their critique—­the inaccessibility of Sans­krit to ­women is the reason given for why the Mahanubhavs compose in Marathi rather than Sans­k rit, as Anne Feldhaus has pointed out (see Feldhaus and Tulpule 1992, 29, 40, 73, 153). Caste is not mentioned, even though the same restrictions on who can access Sans­k rit apply to ­women and to non-­elite-­caste men—­a group commonly referred to as strīśūdrādika or “­women, Shudras, and o ­ thers [Dalits]” in early Marathi vernacular texts like the Jñāneśvarī (c. 1290 CE). Fi­nally, most of Chakradhar’s followers are female (mostly brahmin, and several brahmin ­widows in par­tic­u­lar); his oldest and closest follower is a w ­ oman (Baisa); and his entire retinue of Mahanubhav devotees comes together only ­after he gathers female followers, who essentially stabilize and make functional their roving group of renunciants. Furthermore, from what I can gather, the peregrinations and daily life of Chakradhar and his Mahanubhavs is supplemented by the inheritance of at least one ­widow who maintains a prosperous farm ­under her own control. In some fundamental way, this is a movement of w ­ omen, though 34

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led by a man, who is in any case God only impersonating a man. Yet for all ­these inducements and indicators, Chakradhar never impersonates a w ­ oman in order to teach his followers about gender in­equality. Why is this the case? I do not have one answer to this question, but I can offer several speculations. However, before I do so, I feel that one last līḷā may be relevant, though it does not involve impersonation, but rather something more personal. Many versions of the Līḷācaritra conclude with a story that tells about Chakradhar being put on trial for crimes against dhar­ma.12 ­Here is my translation of the līḷā: Then Chakradhar, having crossed the Godavari River, went to Paithan, where a tribunal [sa­bhā] gathered at the A­di­ti ­temple of Mudha. Hemadri, Sarang Pandit, Mayata Ha­ri, Prajnasagar;13 the major leaders of the village, the brahmin elites [mahājan], scholars, historians, holy men, celibates, Jain ascetics, members of the Natha sect—­they all assembled. Chakradhar was brought into the Mudha A­di­ti ­temple. Chakradhar took a seat in the ­middle of the assembly hall. They said to him, “Who are you?” Chakradhar said, “I am an ascetic, a Mahatma.” [They said,] “­There is nothing more you’d like to say?” [Chakradhar] said, “All of you gathered ­here are eminent ­people. Scholars, students, renunciants, milk fasters, l­egal scholars, historians.” And then his gaze fell upon Sarang Pandit, and Sarang Pandit looked aside. [Chakradhar continued,] “You who have assembled are the leaders of all eigh­teen families [of Paithan], Jain ascetics, Natha yogis. You would not drink unknown ­water.14 Then you ask yourself what it is that I am.” [They said,] “The w ­ omen are attracted to you, no? ­Isn’t this the way it is? And you are similarly attracted to the ­women, ­isn’t that the case?” ­Those gathered said, “Yes!” Someone among the tribunal clapped, and they all began to quietly conspire [i.e., “whisper”] with one another. Then two p ­ eople, Mayata Ha­ri and Prajnasagar, stood up [and addressed the tribunal]: “That you conspire [against Chakradhar] is wrong.” The conspiring talk ended. Mayata Ha­ri and Prajnasagar said, “You [tribunal members] are bringing ruin upon this country [rāṣṭra] and you are acting like Chandals.” Then Mayata Ha­ri and Prajnasagar left. Chakradhar said [to the tribunal], “You each are religious experts [agāmika]. Each of you holds a position of po­liti­cal importance [pradhān]. Please consider what it is you’d like to do.” “No need, w ­ e’ve de­cided already,” they said. Novetzke

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“Is it so? Then what­ever it is y­ ou’ve de­cided, just do it,” [Chakradhar said.] Then they took [Chakradhar] to the ­temple courtyard. ­There he voluntarily offered his nose.15 (LC U, 536) Notice the first question asked of Chakradhar: Who are you? Chakradhar is asked this question throughout the Līḷācaritra, and given that social life itself is an impersonation, as I have argued, this is not a bad question to ask of Chakradhar. He answers in many ways throughout the text depending on who asks him. If a brahmin asks him who he is, he ­w ill often speak in Sans­k rit and say: I am not a man, nor a god or Yaksha. Nor a Brahmana, a Ksha­tri­ya, a Vaishya or a Shudra. I am not a celibate; I am not a h ­ ouse­holder or a forest hermit. Neither am I a mendicant, I who am innate knowledge.16 And when Chakradhar is asked his identity by a ­horse trader ­eager to marry his d ­ aughter to Chakradhar, he first says he is beyond all social distinctions, but then relents and admits that his caste is “Lād Sāmaka,”17 a jāti title that appears to indicate a brahmin caste group who recite the Sāma Veda and are from the Lād or Lāt region of Gujarat, the region in which Baruch is located, the region from which Chakradhar emigrated (see Joshi 1974, 346). Yet ­here he has a dif­ fer­ent answer, one not seen elsewhere in the Līḷācaritra. He says he is a ­simple celibate ascetic, a bhīkṣu, and also a mahātma, which ­here is a rather basic term for spiritual seeker. Th ­ ese are two very ordinary terms, in other words, and they are the same terms he uses to describe all of his Mahanubhav devotees. He is saying that he is an ordinary renunciant. Nothing special. He does not call himself Parameshwar or God, which he does elsewhere, nor does he display his very impressive Sans­k rit before this august body for whom Sans­k rit was a way of life, revenue, and po­liti­cal power. As if always challenging social expectations, Chakradhar plays down all the ­t hings that make him so special in the text. Chakradhar’s existence in the mundane realm is entirely impersonation—­his identity is a fabrication of each moment, a social skin donned like clothing geared to catalyze the enlightenment of the world. Notice also that Chakradhar is surrounded by men who are his social peers, other brahmins, and a host of brahminical and elite-­caste figures. Th ­ ese are the jury in a sense; the judges are four brahmin male ministers—­Hemadri, Sarang Pandit, Mayata Ha­ri, and Prajnasagar. Two of ­these—­Hemadri and Sarang Pandit—­ have conspired to fix this trial. Hemadri, or Hemadpant, was a famous minister of the Yadava court and a Sans­krit specialist in Dhar­maśās­tra. He sees Chakradhar as a direct threat ­because, as we learn in another līḷā, Chakradhar had 36

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given his wife, Demati, an aphrodisiac to help her win the affection of her enervated husband. Sarang Pandit was an old devotee and friend of Chakradhar who has apparently sold the loyalty he once had to Chakradhar for advancement at the Yadava court, a deal we assume is made with Hemadri. Mayata Ha­ri and Sarang Pandit are two noble brahmins who are offended that this brahmin sa­ bhā has transgressed its dharmic duty to offer their fellow brahmin, Chakradhar, a fair and impartial trial.18 This is why they storm off at the end—­t hey are, in the brahmin double equation, “good” brahmins who criticize their own kind. The crime of which Chakradhar is accused is “attracting” ­women to him, and himself being attracted to them. The verb h ­ ere is vedhaṇe, which does not imply sexual attraction but something more like pious, spiritual, or devotional attraction, particularly beyond reason. Chakradhar’s crime is the unreasonable education of w ­ omen, and therefore making w ­ omen do unreasonable t­hings, we are to believe. This charge seems to rest in some obscure Dhar­maśās­tra injunctions against provoking a w ­ oman to undertake vows or religious actions without the consent of her father/husband/son (see Olivelle and Olivelle 2005, 146, Chapter 5, verse 155). But what is truly beyond the pale of the social mores of Chakradhar’s time, it seems, is that he takes on female followers in a religious order that rejects caste and gender hierarchies to a g­ reat degree. As I suggested above, the tribunal is arguing that Chakradhar is literally leading a “­women’s movement” of some kind, and this goes against proper social order (dhar­ma). The ­women who follow Chakradhar are seen as impersonating ascetics who have taken a vow of renunciation—­they are not actually female ascetics who have taken such a vow b ­ ecause that would be “illegal.” But worse than that is Chakradhar’s crime of taking the rightful place of all ­t hose fathers/husbands/ sons and accepting the ascetic vows of ­t hese ­women as his followers. The culmination of the trial suggests that gender in­equality—­far more than caste ­in­equality—is the core subject of the social critique within the Līḷācaritra. Chakradhar is not on trial for transgressing caste norms, which he does everywhere in the Līḷācaritra and which he demands his followers to do, for the most part.19 But the fact that Chakradhar never impersonates a w ­ oman suggests that the brahminical ecumene in which he existed—­and which tried him in a court with a rigged jury—­may have been able to countenance his teaching of non-­brahmin p ­ eople, but not his teaching of ­women. ­There is undoubtedly a preponderance of patriarchy all around, and within, the Mahanubhavs. But in a more general sense, the question of gender is the one that remains most intimately problematic within the public fields in which Chakradhar moved. This is all the more in­ter­est­ing when we remember that though Chakradhar had some non-­brahmin followers, and caste sometimes became a very intimate and immediate issue, a majority of his followers ­were ­women. Of the two social cleavages of caste and gender in Chakradhar’s world, the one of gender is much Novetzke

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more immediate and pre­sent in terms of the cohesion of his small community, and indeed, posed a danger to Chakradhar himself in a way that caste transgression did not. Perhaps the reason Chakradhar never impersonates ­women is b ­ ecause they are with him far more intimately than Chambhars or Shudras, or ­horse traders or farmers. And it is likely that his female followers did not need even this godman whom they worship to explain to them through sympathetic impersonation the difficulty of their situation. It may be that Chakradhar does not impersonate w ­ omen ­because ­women are always with him and they all exist, male and female Mahanubhavs, in the matrix of patriarchy quite explic­itly and clearly. It is also true that given five divine personalities for Parameshwar, none are female or coded as feminine. It seems that gender and sex are not just features of the one incarnation of Chakradhar, but of all incarnations of Parameshwar in the Mahanubhav divine imagination. And so this matrix of patriarchy is hardly restricted to the h ­ uman realm. And yet it is on this issue of gender equality, and this issue alone, that Chakradhar takes his stand before the violent power of the Yadava polity. As with the question of impersonating a Shudra and w ­ hether or not this implied re­spect, so too we might ask if Chakradhar is unwilling to impersonate w ­ omen out of some sense of re­spect, wishing to avoid the double bind of the palimpsest that provides critique, but often plays on a hierarchy of social ontologies. It may be that for this man, who was also God, one social ontology remained outside his reach.

Conclusion I have argued that the pro­cess of vernacularization is a kind of ventriloquism whereby the idioms and tropes of everyday life enter a formerly elite stylized symbol system, w ­ hether it is lit­er­a­ture, art, architecture, fashion, or what­ever it might be. The key issue is the repre­sen­ta­tion and valorization of everyday life in such a way that publics may form around that new repre­sen­ta­t ion. Our most common example is lit­er­a­ture, but ­t here are many ­others. When the everyday enters ­these new idioms, at least in South Asia, critiques around caste and gender in­equality almost always follow. I have suggested that t­hese are incomplete critical engagements, a movement t­ oward a greater freedom in one realm—­t he spiritual or religious, for example—­but not in another—in general, the broader social world. If vernacularization is an investment in the idioms of everyday life, then it may also replicate and reinforce the social inequalities of everyday life. Still, I have identified in the pro­cess of vernacularization in Maharashtra an impulse ­toward a social critique that works ­toward some sense of social equality in the context of gender and caste.

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As an extension of that argument, I have attempted in this essay to show how impersonation operates as a palimpsest of social in­equality that places two social ontologies drawn from everyday life over one another. The juxtaposition of ­those two social ontologies, read through the trace of the other, diagnoses inherent social inequalities. I have drawn my examples from the first extant work of Marathi literary vernacularization, that is, in the Līḷācaritra, and through the figure of Chakradhar as a way to expand the debate we carry out regarding impersonation and social ontology into premodern terrain. I have theorized impersonation as a mode of public ethics that is premised on differentials of social power apparent to any public observer, which is what gives impersonation its ability to exist as social critique. An analy­sis of impersonation, like all analyses of per­for­mance, must account for the identity of the impersonator as much as the identity being impersonated. This dialectic is always within the perceptive ken of an audience, or a public, that is the catalyst for shaping the critical effect of impersonation. I analyzed the way Chakradhar used impersonation as told in the Līḷācaritra as God impersonating a brahmin man who impersonates other male figures from public culture in thirteenth-­century Maharashtra. Through this mode, I drew out what I understand to be his critiques, often ambivalent though they may be, of caste difference. I also observed a limit point around gender, noting that Chakradhar never impersonates a female character from society. I speculated that the fact that a majority of his retinue, the Mahanubhavs, ­were w ­ omen (whereas few of his followers ­were non-­brahmin) might suggest a rationale for this fact. Or it may simply be that his mode of addressing gender in­equality was through the very fact that a majority of his followers, and indeed what appear to be his most dear followers, ­were w ­ omen. He had no need to impersonate a social ontology that was always with him and that formed the core of his following. What­ever the case might be, I have offered some suppositions about how impersonation as social critique may have functioned in the earliest layer of Marathi literary vernacularization, a pro­cess that is the precursor to the emergence and widening of a public sphere that engages in debate about creating a better and more equitable society.

Notes 1. The diacritics used in this chapter are according to the ALA-­LC Romanization t­ ables for Marathi and Sans­k rit, and so vary according to which language is implied. In instances of the sibilant, ṣ, the Sans­k rit transliteration is followed in all cases (e.g., rāṣṭra). 2. ­These are the names of three famous Shaiva t­ emples in the region. Sorathi Somnath is in Veraval, Gujarat; Aundh Naganath is in the Hingoli district of Maharashtra; Paraliya

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Vaijyanath is in the Beed district of Maharashtra. Each is said to have one of the twelve jyotirliṅgas of Shiva. 3. ­These are apparently understood by Chakradhar to be typical Shudra or Gopal names of three boys and three girls, but may reflect names he has heard. See Novetzke (2016, 53) for the first instance of ­t hese boys’ names. 4. All translations are mine and are drawn from Novetzke (2016) ­unless other­w ise noted. LC indicates the Līḷācaritra and U indicates the latter section or uttarārdha; P indicates the former section or pūrvārdha. Numbers refer to the par­t ic­u ­lar līḷā itself. As this is not verse but prose, ­t here are no verse numbers to cite. 5. A jyotirliṅga is an emblem of Shiva, a “pillar of light,” and refers to a par­tic­u­lar place claimed to be sacred to Shiva, usually marking a ­temple that holds this emblem. ­There are dif­fer­ent numbers of t­ hese emblems attached to ­temples throughout India. In the reckoning of twelve of them, ­t here are four in Maharashtra (Ellora, Aundh, Nasik, and Pune). 6. Or the other 77  ­percent depending on your statistical assumptions for the thirteenth ­century. See the Government of India’s Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission (1981), otherwise known as the Mandal Commission. 7. The text uses the term camākara as well as camār. See Rawat (2011) for a challenge to the historical association between Chamars and leatherwork in North India. 8. This paragraph and the next are an adaptation from Novetzke (2016, 136ff) and based on LC P, 27. 9. The term used h ­ ere is nibandha, a kind of “digest” of Dhar­maśās­tra ­legal codes. 10. The term cāṇḍāḷ is not the name of a caste or group, but appears, at least in Marathi, as a Sanskritized insult naming a “wild outcaste,” that is, an invective delivered between brahmins. It does not actually seem to be a term of insult or condescension ­toward Dalits. 11. My thanks to Patrick Olivelle for assistance with this point. 12. ­There are many Mahanubhavs who do not believe the events described in this līḷā actually happened, and I reproduce it h ­ ere as a textual artifact, not an ­actual historical fact, out of re­spect for their beliefs. I read it in the logic of the text as a literary work but do not claim that it is true. 13. ­These are names of key brahmin officials and scholars of the brahminical ecumene and Yadava court; Sarang Pandit, in par­tic­u ­lar, is an erstwhile follower of Chakradhar. 14. This figure of speech indicates to “stomach” something, to bear something offensive in silence, or simply to keep s­ ilent. Chakradhar is saying that they are not the kind of ­people to keep quiet b ­ ecause they have already made up their minds. 15. The term ­here is pūjā svīkarīlī nākācī, which means “he voluntarily offered his nose,” implying they cut or other­w ise disfigured his nose as punishment. 16. LC-­U, 516 and Sūtrapāṭha 11:a61 in Feldhaus (1983, 199). This passage echoes several similar statements in a variety of texts. For example, it sounds quite similar to a passage of the “Ādi” attributed to Namdev (see the Namdev Gatha abhaṅg 809, verse 2). ­There is also a parallel in Chapter 4, verse 13 of the Bhagavad-­gītā, where Krishna states that though he has created the four var­ṇas (archetypical social types), he is not defined by them. Another statement, very similar to the one made h ­ ere by Chakradhar, is attributed to the Bud­d ha in the Sutta Nipāta. See Chal­mers (1932, 455, 456). I’m sure ­t here are many more examples. 17. Feldhaus and Tulpule define this term as such in the Old Marathi Dictionary, citing this passage of the Līḷācaritra (1999, 607). 18. Chapter 8 of the Laws of Ma­nu begins with a set of general ideals related to the fairness and due pro­cess of a trial. Verse 14 in par­tic­u ­lar warns that an unfair trial is an example, as Patrick and Suman Olivelle translate it, of “Justice struck by Injustice, and Truth by

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Untruth, while the court officials remain idle onlookers, then they are themselves struck down.” Verse 16 declares that anyone who impedes justice this way is a “low born” (vṛṣala), a word related to “Shudra,” a word that conveys the same effect as Chandal. See Olivelle and Olivelle (2005, 168). 19. In contrast, see Novetzke (2016, 153–155) for an example of when Chakradhar upbraids his followers for not following casteist social conventions when dining as a guest at someone’s home.

Works Cited Chal­mers, Robert. 1932. Bud­dha’s Teachings: Being the Sutta-­Nipāta or Discourse Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deshpande, Vamana Narayana, ed. 1969. Smṛtisthaḷa. Pune: Venus Publishers. Feldhaus, Anne. 1983. The Religious System of the Mahānubhāva Sect: The Mahānubhāva Sūtrapātha. New Delhi: Manohar. Feldhaus, Anne, and S. G. Tulpule. 1992. In the Absence of God: The Early Years of an Indian Sect: A Translation of Smṛtisthaḷ, with an Introduction. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Government of India Backward Classes Commission. 1981. Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 1980, parts 1 and 2. New Delhi: Controller of Publications, Government of India. Joshi, M. 1974. Bhāratīya saṃskṛti koś. Pune: Bharatiya Sanskriti Kosh Mandal. Kolte, Vishnu Bhikaji, ed. 1978. Līḷācaritra. Mumbai: Maharashtra Government Lit­er­a­ ture and Culture Commission. Novetzke, Christian Lee. 2011. “The Brah­man Double: The Brahmanical Construction of Anti-­Brahmanism and Anti-­Caste Sentiment in the Religious Culture of Pre-­ Colonial Maharashtra.” South Asia History and Culture 2, no. 2:232–252. —­—­—. 2016. The Quotidian Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press. Olivelle, Patrick, and Suman Olivelle, eds. and trans. 2005. The Law Code of Ma­nu. London: Oxford University Press. Rawat, Ramnarayan. 2011. Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalits in North India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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CHAPTER 2

Racial Impressions, Capital Characters DAVE CARSON BROWNFACES THE EMPIRE Kellen Hoxworth

In the 2017 documentary The Prob­lem with Apu, Ha­ri Kondabolu interrogates

the history of South Asian repre­sen­ta­tion in film and tele­vi­sion. Focusing on the character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon of the long-­running animated tele­v i­sion series The Simpsons (1989–­pre­sent), Kondabolu charts a genealogy of what Shilpa Davé calls “Indian accents” (2013, esp. 40–59). The Prob­lem with Apu outlines fifty years of South Asian caricature, tracing Apu’s lineage to Peter Sellers’s per­for­ mance as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968): Hank Azaria, the white actor who voiced the animated character on The Simpsons, cites Sellers’s per­for­mance in The Party as his inspiration for Apu.1 Amid this succession of South Asian racial impressions, Kondabolu also includes a discussion with Whoopi Goldberg on blackface minstrelsy that culminates in the provocative question: “Does Apu count as a minstrel?” (Kondabolu and Cargill 2017, 22:55). Kondabolu and Goldberg agree that Apu resembles the travestied Black caricatures of the nineteenth-­century US stage insofar as he is made up of brown paint, a white performer, singing, and dancing. The prob­lem with Apu materializes: he is what Nicholas Sammond terms a “vestigial minstrel”—­a cartoon figure who “perform[s] m ­ instrelsy in a dif­fer­ent modality” by reanimating the racial impressions of nineteenth-­century popu­lar theatre on twenty-­first-­century tele­vi­sion (2015, 3, 267). This recognition, however, raises several critical questions. When, where, and how did blackface minstrelsy mix and mingle with South Asian repre­sen­ta­tion to forge the complex of racial impressions known as brownface? If Apu is an animated minstrel in a lineage extending back to Peter Sellers, was Sellers’s Hrundi V. Bakshi also a minstrel character? If so, then from what cultural materials did the famous British comedian derive his brownface act? ­These questions compel consideration of the forgotten transoceanic histories of blackface minstrelsy. During the nineteenth c­ entury, blackface circulated as one of the most prevalent per­for­mance forms in both the United States and the 42

global British Empire, wherein it animated popu­lar impressions of blackness as a comically abjected mode of being. Through blackface minstrelsy, predominantly white transnational audiences engaged with and promoted per­ for­ mance economies that figured Black and brown imperial subjects as racially inferior, uncivilized, and unfit for freedom (Hoxworth 2020). In the Indian subcontinent, minstrel per­for­mance and its transnational traffics centered on the imperial networks of theatrical impresario and blackface performer Dave Carson (1837– 1896). From his arrival in Kolkata (previously Calcutta) in 1861 ­until his death in 1896, Carson took center stage in South Asia’s popu­lar colonial theatres, where he developed a panoply of brownface characters derived from blackface minstrelsy.2 Dave Carson was a white performer who was born in New York City during the formation of blackface minstrelsy as the most popu­lar per­for­mance form in the United States (New York Clipper, May 25, 1867, 50). In 1853, at the age of sixteen, he sailed to Melbourne, Australia, following thousands of Americans who sought to make their fortunes in the gold rush. However, Carson did not strike it rich as a gold miner; instead, finding himself surrounded by blackface minstrel per­for­mances in Australian mining camps, he de­cided to follow in the footsteps of British comedian Charles Mathews by becoming “rich in black fun” (Mathews 1839, 239). Beginning in 1856, he performed throughout the major cities and mining towns of Australia, ultimately joining the San Francisco Minstrels.3 In 1861, Carson and his blackface troupe sailed to South Asia, arriving in Kolkata and subsequently touring the subcontinent. ­There, Carson “attained Hindostanese” [sic] and developed brownface impressions “in which he mimicked and caricatured a certain class of the native ­people” (New York Clipper, May 25, 1867, 50). Carson performed his signature impressions of South Asians—­ especially his “Bengalee Baboo”—­throughout India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan, and ­England.4 Carson’s frequent tours throughout the subcontinent and the transoceanic British Empire established him as the principal minstrel impresario in South Asia, where he became “an established institution”—­“a nodal link in the global chain” of Anglophone imperial per­for­ mance (Mehta 1960, 169; Bhattacharya 2014, 68). Performing racial impressions such as “The Bengalee Baboo,” Carson made a fortune by circulating South Asian minstrel characters. In the wake of the 1857 Rebellion, Carson’s caricatures mediated imperial anx­i­eties and affirmed the superiority and stability of whiteness. As many white subjects’ first impressions of South Asian ­people, his racial impressions forged popu­lar feelings and beliefs about the empire’s brown male subjects as abjectly “effeminate” and brown female subjects as alluring yet unfit objects of desire.5 Carson’s minstrel per­for­ mances facilitated the coherence of public feelings and popu­lar beliefs about race and the adherence of such affect to racialized, colonial bodies. Through the broad Hoxworth

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circulation and the insistent reanimation of minstrelsy’s racial repertoires, Carson brownfaced the empire, furnishing the Anglophone world with enduring impressions of South Asian subjects.

Performing Racial Impressions Though Carson has long been a footnote in South Asian per­for­mance history (Guha-­Thakurta 1930, 105; Banerjee 1943, 49; Das Gupta 1946, 202–203; Mehta 1960, 168–172; Mukherjee 1982, 36), recently, his popu­lar “Bengalee Baboo” impression has received increased scholarly attention following Richard Water­ house’s trailblazing research on blackface minstrelsy in the Global South (Water­ house 1990, 105, 108). As Carson’s enactments combined racial mimicry with colonial discourses on South Asian subjects, several scholars have drawn on Homi K. Bhabha’s theorizations of colonial mimicry to apprehend the complex ideological work effected through such enactments.6 Specifically, Bhabha’s analy­ sis of “ambivalence” has impelled consideration of the shifting significances of Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo” (Bhabha [1994] 2004, 95). For instance, Sudipto Chatterjee discusses Carson’s “racist parody” of the “Bengalee Baboo” in his minstrel show, which, beginning in 1871, he often titled “Dave Carson Sahib Ka Pucka Tumasha” (Times of India, December 4, 1871, 1). Chatterjee contrasts Carson’s brownface act with Ardhendu Sekhar Mustafi’s riposte in his subversive enactment of the “absurdity of colonial mimicry” in Mustafī sāhib kā pakkā tamāśā (Mr. Mustafi’s ­Great Skit) (1873) (Chatterjee 2007, 137–138).7 Yet Poonam Trivedi analyzes Carson’s brownface act as itself an example of “colonial mimicry,” claiming that in his racial impressions, “Carson taught [South Asians] to laugh at [them]selves” (2007, 261–262).8 ­These contradictory interpretations of Carson’s racial impression suggest that analyzing racial impressions for “ambivalence” perpetuates rather than subverts colonial binaries, signaling, as per Mrinalini Sinha’s apt observation, “the need to go beyond Homi Bhabha’s other­w ise perceptive analy­sis of colonial ste­reo­ types” and his emphasis on deconstructing binaries (1995, 18). Moreover, as Benita Parry notes, overemphasis on colonial discourse often blinkers considerations of the imbrications between colonialism and racial capitalism (1987, 33). Therefore, I follow Ania Loomba’s invitation to “scrutinize colonial institutions (as opposed to just discourse),” positing that Carson’s theatrical per­for­ mances of racial impressions in colonial theatres offer a critical site for analyzing entangled structures of colonialism, race, and capitalism ­because theatre functions both as a discourse and an institution (1991, 172). Theatrical per­for­mance necessitates that repre­sen­ta­tions and discourses are mediated through the materiality of performing bodies. Theatrical enactments 44

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exceed analytical frames of textual play and the interpretation of signs, for per­ for­mance is a promiscuous site of affective intensities wherein audiences may come into embodied contact with “impressions” about the world. Importantly, the term racial impression—­rather than racial impersonation—­does not presume that ­there is any ­actual “person” who is the object of imitation; nor does “impression” imply that theatrical characters are understood to be “persons.” Rather, racial impressions performatively fashion what they purport to represent: abject figurations of racialized subjects. As Sara Ahmed explicates, “impression” is a keyword in apprehending how affect materializes performative effects as it circulates between bodies: “An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be u ­ nder an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on the surface (‘to leave an impression’)” (Ahmed 2004b, 6). At this juncture between feeling, belief, and imitation, performed impressions animate public affect that circulates as a form of capital, which “sticks” to repre­sen­ta­tions long ­after an enactment is done (Ahmed 2004a, 119–120). The institutional structures of imperial per­for­mance economies—­particularly their privileging of white performers on colonial stages—­reinforced the affectivity and endurance of racial impressions (Hansen 1999). White performing bodies served as a discursive mechanism for shaping colonial subjectivities and for disseminating beliefs and feelings about the empire’s ­others. Colonial theatres ensured that derogatory racial impressions “stuck,” cohering around imperial racial formations through repeated per­for­mances of comic caricatures.

Performing the Bengalee Baboo No caricature in Carson’s repertoire of popu­lar racial impressions was more famous or enduring than “The Bengalee Baboo” (Figure 2.1). This role was so closely associated with Carson that he was referred to not as a “Negro-­minstrel” but rather as a “Bengali-­minstrel” (Dangle 1881, 91). Carson’s racial impression of aspirational Bengalis offered audiences the opportunity, in the terms of one of his advertisements, to laugh at “the buffooneries of the Bengalee Baboo” (Australasian, May 25, 1872, 19). Beginning with his earliest known per­for­mance of the caricature in December 1864 and continuing throughout his thirty-­year ­career in South Asia, Carson adapted and revised his “Bengalee Baboo” act with topical references to mock Anglicized Bengali subjects as well as prominent Bengalis such as Keshab Chandra Sen, a leader in the Brahmo Samaj religious organ­ization (Bengal Hurkaru, December 21, 1864, 1; Indian Mirror, February 6, 1871 [reprinted in The Era, April 30, 1871, 11]). Attesting to the broad circulation of Carson’s caricature and to its extensive influence on beliefs about South Asian Hoxworth

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Figure 2.1. ​Carte-­de-­v isite of Dave Carson as “The Bengalee Baboo,” undated. Courtesy of Françoise Mazza.

subjects, a British educational reformer observed in 1875, “the ordinary Bombay man knows but ­little more what a Bengalee Baboo is ­really like than he may have gleaned from Dave Carson’s famous caricature” (Wode­house 1875, 59). As many imperial subjects’ first impression of a “Bengalee Baboo,” Carson’s caricature stuck in the popu­lar imagination, where it mediated commonsense impressions of racialized colonial subjects throughout the subcontinent. What racial feelings and beliefs cohered around the “Bengalee Baboo”? Centrally, Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo” circulated popu­lar impressions of South Asian subjects as bound to mimetic failure. Carson’s “Baboo” troped on the colonized “mimic man” figured by Thomas  B. Macaulay in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”: “Indian in blood and colour, but En­glish in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay [1835] 1952, 729; see also Bhabha [1994] 2004, 124–125). In this mold, Carson fashioned his Baboo caricature, “Ramjam Thunda Ghose, B.A. (failed),” as an aspirational Bengali student whose inability to learn “proper” En­glish manifested in broken, dialect speech that was marred by mispronunciations, grammatical errors, and nonsensical neologisms (Hobbs 1944, 284).9 Carson’s brownface per­for­mances ironized the efficacy of the British imperial education system by assuring white audiences that, despite taking his “matric exam,” Ramjam Thunda Ghose could never quite articulate the En­glish language nor attain other properties of whiteness. Such failure was a central feature of imperial racial hierarchies, for to be a colonial racial subject was to be woven into the structures of colonial institutions and discourses as an ineffectual performer who ­offered white subjects security in their feelings of racial superiority. To wit, Carson’s caricature introduced himself as a “very En­glish Baboo,” a claim to Anglicization that his broken En­glish comically subverted (Indian Daily News, August 24, 1868, 3). Crucially, though the “Bengalee Baboo” might seem to be a paradigmatic example of Bhabha’s colonial subject—­“almost the same, but not quite” or “almost the same but not white”—it is necessary to remember that Carson himself was not a “mimic man,” but rather a white performer who enacted a satire of abortive per­for­mances of Anglicization (Bhabha [1994] 2004, 125). Carson’s mockery of the Baboo as a mimic man hinged on Carson’s masterful per­for­mance of the Baboo’s unambiguously failed articulation of En­glish. Thus, Carson staged a vertiginous enactment of racial masking—­the “Bengalee Baboo” was a mock “mimic man” performed by a white man in a blackface minstrel show. Through his per­for­mances of racial mockery, Carson incorporated South Asian subjects into the minstrel fold. Within minstrelsy’s affective economy of racial abjection, Carson circulated racial impressions of South Asians as insistently inarticulate and therefore as failed forms of full personhood akin to the minstrel stage’s popu­lar impressions of enslaved Africans:

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I very good Bengalee Baboo In Calcutta I long time stop; Ramchand Tunda Ghosh my name, Radha Bazar I keep my shop. Very good Hindu, smoke my hooka, Eat my dal bhat ­every day; Night come I make plenty Pooja ­Here is the nautchwalla tom tom play. Kooch Parwa nahi good time coming Babu never make islave. (Wacha 1920, 352)10

In addition to Carson’s parody of the mimic man, the “Bengalee Baboo” combined several other Orientalist tropes of Bengali culture: he is a shop­keeper in Radha Bazar; he devoutly practices Hinduism with nightly pūjā (devotions) and eats only rice and dahl; and he enjoys a “good time” in his sensual pleasures of smoking hookah and attending a nautch. As a contemporaneous review of Carson’s per­for­mance noted, the “Bengalee Baboo” was a fantastical amalgam of the “Baboo shop­keeper,” the devout “classical Baboo,” and the Anglicized “Baboo” of Young Bengal—­t ypes that “have no identity in common” (Indian Daily News, August 24, 1868, 3; see also Times of India, June 3, 1865, 3). For Carson, the “classical Baboo” was essentially no dif­fer­ent from the “Baboo shop­ keeper” nor the aspirational student of Young Bengal. Collapsing together vari­ ous classes of Bengali society, Hindi and Bengali speakers, and orthodox and reformist Hindus, Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo” was a totalizing racial impression—­ less a mimetic repre­sen­ta­tion of a­ ctual Bengalis than an embodied figuration of colonial racial fantasies. The contradictions of Carson’s Baboo ­were a feature of his racial impression, which made a mockery of Bengali attempts t­oward Anglicization and class refinement. As a white critic for Mumbai’s Times of India asserted of Carson’s per­for­mance, “[t]he thin varnish of Western civilization which coats over the semi-­barbarism of the Baboo caste ­w ill both inform and be received with ­great relish” (June 6, 1865, 3). This critic perceptively noted that the Baboo was a South Asian scion of the blackface urban dandy—or “swell”—­character “Zip Coon,” who was defined by his failed aspirations t­ oward high class status and whiteness.11 Carson’s Baboo was a paradigmatic minstrel character insofar as he was a carefree, music-­loving racial subject who made a fool of himself simply by speaking. The Baboo’s broken En­glish, malapropisms, and obsequiousness reveal the blackface minstrel bones beneath the Baboo’s brownface mask. As Tavia Nyong’o observes, minstrelsy constituted its theatrical impressions of the Black subject as a “­human commodity” and of Black speech as “a broken down and ragtag version of ordinary speech” (2009, 107). Carson’s minstrel impression of the Baboo reproduced ­these techniques and forms of blackface abjection, placing 48

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the South Asian caricature in intimate proximity with minstrelsy’s Black figures. The “Bengalee Baboo” therefore exceeded binary frames of colonizer and colonized, for it situated South Asian colonial subjects amid intertwined tropes of blackface abjection and Orientalism. Carson’s racial impression in­ ven­ted a representative South Asian subject who occupied a motile position between civilization and savagery, freedom and slavery, h ­ uman person and commoditized ­t hing (Figure 2.2). The lyr­ics to “The Bengalee Baboo” directly invoke ­these entanglements of colonial un/freedom and the imperial legacies of enslavement. The chorus’s closing line drew the Baboo into the minstrel fold through an ambiguous negation of his enslavement—or rather, islavement.12 On one hand, the lyric asserted the Baboo’s fundamental difference from the Black “slave.” On the other hand, the Baboo’s mispronounced assertion that he was not a slave contained a cruel joke on the theme of colonial un/freedom. As the Baboo declared never to be “islave” rather than a “slave,” his enunciation of freedom attached him to the possibility that he might in fact be h ­ uman chattel. This complex joke was clarified in a variation of the chorus provided by an Australian who saw Carson perform in Lucknow: Kush per warney, good time coming, Sing Britannia rules the waves; Jolly good fellow, go home in the morning— Bengalee baboo ne’er be slaves! (Adelaide Observer, November 5, 1881, 42)

In this version, the Baboo character articulated “slave” in accordance with standard En­g lish orthography and pronunciation, and inserted two modified lines from “Rule, Britannia!” between the chorus’s concluding lines. Nevertheless, ­t hese alterations ­were not emancipatory for the Baboo. In the Lucknow version, the Baboo positioned himself as a good British subject who sang the imperial anthem, “Rule, Britannia!,” wherein the chorus proclaims, “Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves: Britons will never be slaves!” Linking his freedom to a claim to British exceptionalism, the Baboo again voiced an aspiration t­ oward En­glishness and the privileged properties of whiteness—­a performative utterance that necessarily misfired, for to be a colonized subject of the British Empire was to not be a ­free, En­glish subject. Beyond making a mockery of the Baboo through his broken speech, Carson articulated an impression that situated South Asians in asymptotic relation to whiteness while also placing them in enduring proximity to the abject figuration of the docile plantation slave whose spectral presence subtended white freedom and supremacy in the British imperial imagination. Carson’s “Baboo” could not quite escape the discursive formations of slavery, servitude, and racial subjection that animated the Anglophone imperial imaginary. The “Bengalee Baboo” occupied an ambiguous position within the empire’s Hoxworth

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Figure 2.2. ​Advertisement, “Dave Carson at Home,” undated. An ensemble of South Asian caricatures flank Carson (center), as two blackface figures frame the scene, constituting a minstrel chain of being from black to brown to white. Courtesy of Françoise Mazza.

zones of un/freedom, as he was positioned between popu­lar impressions of enslaved Africans and the white imperialists that he aspired to imitate. Like the thousands of indentured South Asians transported to replace enslaved Black laborers on imperial sugar plantations, the Baboo was i­magined to be not quite white yet not quite Black, not quite civilized yet not quite savage, not quite a slave yet not quite not a slave. Amid t­ hese proliferating negations, Carson’s racial impression, far from enacting racial transgression or subversion, reified colonial color lines by positioning racialized groups in relation to the specter of chattel slavery and the modes of racial subjection that proliferated u ­ nder colonial cap­i­tal­ist rule. In his impression of the Baboo, Carson did not merely imitate, mimic, or represent ­actual South Asians; rather, his minstrel caricature functioned as a central theatrical technology that performatively reified race as imperial common sense. The Baboo was not a fixed ste­reo­type but rather a fungible impression whose capacity for racial travesty was his greatest selling point. Over de­cades of per­ for­mances, Carson regularly revised his signature song to attract audiences with fresh material. In a rare surviving full version of Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo,” the racialized caricature sings eleven verses, beginning with an inventory of his extensive shop before recounting a series of misadventures.13 The song touched on anx­i­eties about South Asian class ascendancy by emphasizing the Baboo’s role as an unscrupulous and avaricious moneymaker: Sub Sahab logue, come my shop look now (stop sir) Very good ­t hing got, you ­shall see. Not money want-it, give long credit, Then Sahab pay me plenty rupee, Come inside . . . ​I very poor man, Sahab; Something buy from me, I pray— (sit down) Bito—­tell you what t­ hing got now, I sell “you” very cheap to-­day. Chorus. (never mind) [Kautch-­per-­wanee, good time coming; Sing Britannia rules the waves, Jolly good-­e-­fellow, go home in the morning– Baboo how he can make slaves.] (Angel 1923, 129)14

In this banal marketplace scenario, Carson interpolated a curious joke—­t he Baboo promised (or threatened) to “sell ‘you’ very cheap.” Another revision of “Rule, Britannia!” drove this joke home: no longer proclaiming that he would not become a slave (or islave), the revised final line boasted, “Baboo how he can make slaves!” This address to predominantly white audiences suggested that Ramjam Thunda Ghose had slipped from a potential slave to a slave trader. ­Here, Carson touched on anx­i­eties over cap­i­tal­ist exchange, particularly across racial Hoxworth

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lines. The Baboo’s capacity for “selling”—­for accumulating capital through the market—­threatened to subvert the white British freedom upon which the empire rested. The acquisitive Baboo re-­enlivened the specter of “white slavery” and tropes of inverted racial hierarchies that animated the anxious popularity of blackface minstrelsy in the United States and Britain (Meer 2005; Roediger [1991] 2007). The Baboo threatened to ascend the class ladder and thereby exposed the tenuousness of the imperial racial order. Yet, as in the manifold inversions staged throughout transatlantic blackface cir­cuits, Carson invoked the threat of racial and class realignment only to defuse it through comic abjection. Through his several misadventures, the Baboo’s accumulation of capital was accompanied by an accrual of embarrassment. Each verse offered a non sequitur scenario in which the Baboo’s aspirations positioned him as farcically out of place. He subsequently sang of his travel to an unidentified imperial territory where he became a mockery of a civil servant who “eat[s] beef-­ steak, and simpkin [champagne] drink[s]”; a self-­serving patron of Indian famine relief; a misfit at a “first-­class ball” who “hire[s] nautch-­wallahs” as his dancing partners; then concludes by getting drunk and ruining a lady’s dress at dinner (Angel 1923, 129–132).15 The comic moral was clear: the higher the Baboo climbed the social ladder, the more his aspirations to class refinement revealed him to be essentially out of place. Throughout, Carson’s minstrel humor relied on bathetic inversions of racial hierarchies, which offered reassurance to the white subjects of the empire: ­were the Baboo to ascend to colonial high society, he would only make himself an effeminized, ineffectual fool as he lacked the white masculine subjectivity necessary for imperial rule (Sinha 1995; Banerjee 2005).

Trafficking in South Asian Impressions Carson’s abject Baboo provided a model for a panoply of mocking South Asian racial impressions. His enactments of durable yet capacious dramaturgical structures entangled racial humiliation and class abjection into a set of reproducible comedic tropes, which Carson reprised frequently throughout his tours. As Sir D. E. Wacha noted in his memoir, Carson “knew how to catch his audience, specially with local topics of interest and many a topical song” (1920, 351). Adapting the tropes and techniques of blackface minstrelsy and applying them to South Asian subjects, Carson fashioned an extensive repertoire that involved impersonations of South Asian men and ­women, which he performed through brownface masking, costuming, dialect, and cultural references from Mumbai to Kolkata. Many of Carson’s South Asian songs and skits w ­ ere standard blackface minstrel pieces that ­were designed to be modified by local, topical humor. ­These 52

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included “The Delhi ­Mummy” (originally, “The ­Virginia ­Mummy”), “That’s So (with New Local Verses),” “Hold Your Ghoras” (“Hold Your Horses”), “The Calcutta Swell” (“The Dandy Broadway Swell”), and “The Belles of Calcutta” (“The Belles of Broadway”) (Bengal Hurkaru, March 10, 1864, 1; December 27, 1864, 1; January 17, 1865, 1; February 1, 1866, 1). In this variety of brownface impressions, Carson differentiated the Baboo from other South Asian caricatures, yet he reiterated many of the same tropes articulated in his signature song. For instance, “The Calcutta Swell” burlesqued the nouveau riche Bengali as an absurdly affluent, tea-plantation owning, dandified “swell” who Lives in Chowringhee [an upper-­class area of Kolkata] Keeps a bolio [large sailing boat] and dinghy Has large estates in Chittagong And grows no end of tea. (Supplement to the Bengal Hurkaru, February 12, 1866, 2)

Similarly, “The Belles of Calcutta” offered audiences a “scathing satire” of Bengali ­women (Indian Mirror, February 6, 1871 [reprinted in The Era, April 30, 1871, 11]). He also produced several mocking impressions of South Asians beyond Bengal: “The Dak Gharry,” a satire of overland transportation through the northwestern provinces; “The Bombay Palkee-­Wallah,” another song parodying local transportation (palanquins); “Tight L ­ ittle Island, or Bombay as It Is,” a lampoon of land reclamation schemes in Mumbai; “The Hindoostanee Nautch” (or, “Zuleika, the Pearl of the Punjaub” or “of Chinchpoogly”), a burlesque of a South Asian dance form (that the British associated with sex work); and “Ra­ti Madam,” a travesty of Parsi courtship in the mode of blackface drag “wench” routines (see, respectively: Bengal Hurkaru, March 18, 1864, 1; Times of India, April 16, 1874, 1; May 19, 1865, 3; April 10, 1865, 1; April 30, 1874, 1; Wacha 1920, 351).16 Encompassing disparate geographies and categories of class and gender, Carson’s prolific production of South Asian characters traced the extent to which racial capitalism animated popu­lar impressions of racialized subjects u ­ nder British imperial rule. Carson’s racial impressions fixated upon the entanglement of race and class at the intersection of global capitalism and imperial rule, particularly in his caricatures of Mumbai Parsis. During the US Civil War (1861–1865), the transnational textile trade was disrupted by the suddenly reduced availability of cotton harvested by Black captives on southern plantations. Britain, seeking an alternative source for Manchester’s mills, turned to India and Persia. The booming South Asian cotton trade initiated a sudden influx of capital into Mumbai’s Parsi merchant class, drawing the colonial public’s attention to its prominent, wealthy figures. Early in his ­career, Carson adapted the popu­lar minstrel song “The Whole Hog or None” to incorporate laudatory references to Hoxworth

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such Parsis, including Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Sir Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney, and David Sassoon (cited in Albuquerque 1985, 93). Though such allusions celebrated the benevolence of prominent South Asians, they bore with them a tacit criticism of upper-­class South Asians by bringing them into the “low” frame of blackface minstrelsy. To wit, Carson ­later incorporated references to Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy in his songs “Jamsetjee the Hobbledehoy” and “I’m Jamsetjee, Parsi Guard on the G.I.P.,” which displaced him from his high social status and associated him with abjected, awkward, and working-­class South Asian minstrel figures. ­These ­later “Jamsetjee” songs remained in popu­lar colonial memory fifty years ­after Carson’s death, signaling that his popu­lar brownface per­for­mances left more lasting impressions than did his evanescent articulations of transracial praise (Times of India, June 19, 1944, 4). As his protean impressions of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy demonstrate, Carson’s relationship with local communities was not fixed; rather, he navigated shifting social and po­liti­cal exigencies through his per­for­mances. Most notably, following the end of the US Civil War and the restoration of the transatlantic cotton trade in April 1865, Mumbai’s speculative economy in cotton shares collapsed, and Carson’s quicksilver praise for wealthy Parsis evaporated. The ensuing economic crisis stirred racial anx­i­eties in the region, particularly in the city’s theatres, wherein audiences wrestled with each other over the “race question” (“The Race Question,” Times of India Overland Summary, April 18–­May 13, 1865, 3). In April and May 1865, a series of per­for­mances by Carson’s San Francisco Minstrels ­were disrupted by seating disputes between British and Parsi audience members. During a per­for­mance on April 17, 1865, a prominent Parsi gentleman named Framjee Bomanjee confronted a white patron, a Mr. Berkley, who had taken his seat in the audience during intermission (Times of India, April 19, 1865, 3). Several similar arguments ensued in theatres and in the editorial pages of the Times of India, culminating in another fracas on May 12, 1865, in which the seats of two unidentified Parsi gentlemen ­were double-­booked with ­those of Mumbai’s white chief magistrate (Times of India, May 3, 1865, 2; May 4, 1865, 3; May 8, 1865, 3; May 15, 1865, 2). Carson himself requested the Parsis give up their seats to the colonial judge; they refused (Times of India, May  17, 1865, 2; May  18, 1865, 2). During the seating dispute involving the chief magistrate, Carson included in his “Bengalee Baboo” routine a “scathing side hit” aimed at the two Parsi gentlemen. Carson’s joke was unambiguous—it functioned as a “rebuke,” a white audience member recalled, “­under which [the Parsi gentlemen] must have felt exceedingly small” (Times of India, May 15, 1865, 2). In response, one of the Parsi gentlemen wrote an anonymous letter to the editor criticizing Carson, alleging that he was “tainted with the idea that black skin should bow to the white one” (Times of India, May 15, 1865, 2). Yet, as the white spectator recounted, the majority of the audience took plea­sure in Carson’s comic riposte 54

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to the Parsis in the crowd, particularly insofar as it was understood to make the Parsis feel inferior as retribution for their assertions of racial equality. Capitalizing on the colonial audience’s enthusiastic response to his improvised enactment of Parsi abjection, Carson soon premiered his signature Parsi caricature, “Davejee Carsonbhoy,” an acerbic parody that referenced Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy in a broader mockery of Parsis.17 Despite the blatant racial travesty, Mumbai’s white audiences found Carson’s Parsi caricature “so faithfully represented” that they responded with “a hearty cheer” (Times of India, May 19, 1865, 3). In the following weeks, Carson frequently touched on popu­lar concerns over the collapse of the Mumbai cotton commodity market by attaching anx­i­eties over economic volatility to his new racial impression of Parsis. For example, in “The Unveiled Prophet of Bombay,” Carson mocked wealthy, upper-­class Parsis: “The best-­abused man [Premchund] in Bombay” [sic] Mr. Hannay, Chairman Bank of Bombay. Priest at the shrine of holy Speculation Reverent and low before thy feet we bend; Extend to us thy smile of approbation, May we the plea­sure share to call thee friend. Cannings, or Freres, or Back Bay Reclamations, How ­shall we spend the money (not our own); “Union” and “­Grand Finance” Associations, Now beg us to accept on a short-­loan, Deign to advise thy h ­ umble suppliants. Rogue and Deceiver! faithless, treacherous knave, Oh for a tongue thy villainy to expose! Your victims’ wrongs the direst vengeance crave, Converting former friends to bitterest foes. Humbug and cheat! accept our keenest hate, Undying as Zoroaster’s sacred fire; Nor long expect exemption from the fate Destined for all who rouse our furious ire. DAVEJEE CARSONBHOY, Jun.18 (Bengal Hurkaru, August 24, 1865, 3)

Through a meta­phorical alignment of financial speculation with fanatical fetishism, Carson mocked the Parsi character for his religiosity and his greed—­ most evident in the punning lines, “the shrine of holy [financial] Speculation” and the “unveiled prophet [profit] of Bombay.” As with his response to seating disputes in Mumbai theatres, Carson’s humor ridiculed colonial difference (imbricating religion with race) to rebuke the class status of wealthy Parsis. Thus, Carson scapegoated Parsis for the economic crisis both by channeling popu­lar white resentments of the growing Parsi presence in public spaces and by figuring Hoxworth

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Parsi speculation in the financial sector as taking capital that was “not [their] own” (Bengal Hurkaru, August 24, 1865, 3). Despite its topical origins, Carson’s Parsi impression of “Davejee Carsonbhoy” stuck, remaining in circulation and reanimating Parsi abjection throughout the next two de­cades.19 Far from teaching South Asians to laugh at themselves, Carson’s answer to “The Race Question” explic­itly ridiculed the Parsis in the crowd in order to keep them in their place.

Feeling Race, Forging Empire Though Carson’s derogatory intent was often explic­itly stated, some South Asian audiences nevertheless enjoyed his Parsi and Bengali impressions. The Times of India, for instance, praised Carson’s “wonderful power in the delineation of native Indian character, which amused the natives themselves, and never offended them” (January  11, 1872, 3). J.  C. Parkinson further noted in his memoir that Carson “acquired considerable reputation for his delineations of native character, making the Parsee laugh at his caricature of the Hindoo, while the Hindoo is convulsed at his clever skits on the Parsee” (1870, 58). Drawing from such responses, Poonam Trivedi celebrates Carson’s impressions for creating opportunities for psychic and social self-­identification among colonized South Asians (2007, 262). Such an emancipatory reading, however, fails to consider how per­for­mances can attach feelings of enjoyment to structures of oppression. Reading such commentary against the grain reveals a more nuanced set of interpretive possibilities. First, the “observations” of South Asian audience responses published by Parkinson and the Times of India voiced the colonial ambivalences of white audiences; that is, the white authors did not necessarily report on ­actual scenes of cross-­racial colonial approbation, but rather the white authors project desires for colonized subjects to validate imperial structures of feeling and racial beliefs. Second, even if t­ hese textual accounts ­were accurate, they outlined theatrical scenarios wherein vari­ous colonized persons did not experience self-­identification but rather enjoyed the racial abjection of other colonized ­peoples—­Parsis laughing at Bengalis, and vice versa. For instance, Carson triangulated this complex economy of enjoyment when he ventriloquized animosity ­toward Parsis through the mouth of the “Bengalee Baboo”: “Oh! Parsees very niche ­people—­Oh! Parsees too goods ­people—­Oh! But (tapping his cranium, and in a confidential and self-­sufficient tone) got no intellect; not like one first class Bengalee gentleman” (Times of India, June 3, 1865, 3). As the Times of India reported, this articulation of Parsi abjection in the “Baboolah accent” of the Bengalee Baboo “did not seem to please a class of Bombayites”—­likely the Parsis in attendance (June 3, 1865, 3). Through such racial triangulation, Carson invited white audiences to laugh at South Asians, South Asians to scorn one 56

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another, and every­one to laugh at Black abjection. Notably, no audience member—­British, Parsi, Bengali, or other­w ise—­took umbrage with Carson’s ubiquitous derogation of Black characters. Thus, Carson animated an affective economy of comedic divide-­a nd-­r ule that subjected all South Asians and colonized ­people to ridicule. Moreover, through his per­for­mances, Carson conscripted members of the colonial South Asian elite as affective collaborators in his per­for­mance empire and thereby enfolded them into imperial racial hierarchies (Sinha 1995, 22). First, Carson collaborated professionally with South Asian theatre makers, as when he hosted Cooverjee Sorabjee Nazir’s Parsee Operatic and Dramatic Com­pany at the Theatre Royal, Chowringhee, for a monthlong engagement in Kolkata in May 1875. Alongside Nazir’s Parsi, Sans­k rit, and Shakespearean theatricals, Carson’s troupe performed a blackface “Eccentric Ethiopian Delineation” and a yellowface “Characteristic Chinese Repre­sen­ta­tion,” among other stock pieces from the minstrel repertoire (Indian Daily News, May 6, 1875, 1; May 8, 1875, 1; May 11, 1875, 1; May 12, 1875, 1). Signaling the promiscuous transmission of minstrel per­for­mance, during the Kolkata per­for­mances, Nazir borrowed from the minstrel repertoire to arrange “a night of Fun” replete with “a loyal patriotic song” praising Queen Victoria (Indian Daily News, May 14, 1875, 1, 4). Such coproductions of minstrelsy’s “black fun,” British imperial patriotism, and emergent South Asian nationalism trace the entanglements of imperialism and ambivalent national proj­ects. Additionally, Carson’s ticket prices would have excluded all but upper-­class South Asians—­a dynamic borne out in the reportage of James Arthur, a performer in one of Carson’s troupes, who noted “the dusky ­faces of many attendant native swells” (i.e., wealthy Bengalis) in the Kolkata audience (New York Clipper, April 10, 1880, 3). Within t­ hese elite audiences, Carson’s per­for­ mances animated Bengali anx­i­eties about gender, class, and nation. For instance, the Bengali writer Shib Chunder Bose (who attended the colonial school of Scottish missionary Dr. Alexander Duff) wrote fondly of Carson’s “humorous per­for­mance” of the Bengalee Baboo, which presented “graphic repre­sen­ta­ tions of his anglicised taste, habits and bearing” (Bose 1881, 191; “Bose’s Hindoos as They Are” 1882, 553). Bose’s writing on Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo,” however, signaled that the colonially educated and English-­speaking Bose had no qualms with the abasement of other Bengalis, specifically ­t hose he viewed as servile, effeminate, imperfectly Anglicized, ineffectually civilized, inadequately nationalistic, or other­wise deficient in their per­for­mances of colonial subjectivity (Bose 1881, 191–208). Beyond Bose’s apparent enjoyment of Carson’s derogation of effeminate babus, Carson’s title for his brownface minstrel shows, Dave Carson Sahib Ka Pucka Tamasha, suggested a linkage between his brownface characters and the Hoxworth

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“effeminate males” who performed in regional Maharashtrian Tamasha (tamāśā) per­for­mances (Indian Daily News, December 18, 1872, 1).20 In turn, the Bengali National Theatre’s subversive ripostes to Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo”—­such as Ardhendu Sekhar Mustafi’s Mustafī sāhib kā pakkā tamāśā—­hinged on reclamations of muscular Bengali masculinity that retained the “effeminate Baboo” as a species of Indian national (rather than colonial) failure (Sinha 1995, 22; Banerjee 2005, 43–73). The motif of male effeminacy adhered to the Bengali Babu, who regularly reappeared onstage, even in plays written by South Asians— as in Amrita Lal Bose’s Babu: A Society Sketch (1894)—­and in Bengali politics (see Sinha 1995; Roy 1998; Banerjee 2005). The “Bengalee Baboo” stuck as an abject figure whose effeminacy made him into a cultural traitor and a disgrace to his national heritage.21 Meanwhile, in Mumbai, prominent South Asians frequented Carson’s shows, and many likely shared Sir D. E. Wacha’s appreciation for Carson’s “ready wit and humour”; yet their enjoyment relied on Carson’s mockery of the aspirations of foolish lower-­class figures such as the “Parsi masher [seducer] of the period,” with whom Parsi elites likely would have experienced ­little identification (Wacha 1920, 351). Therefore, beyond reifying divisions between regional “national” populations (i.e., Mumbai’s Parsis vs. Kolkata’s Babus), t­hese racial impressions animated class grievances, stirred proto-­ nationalist anx­i­eties, and solidified essentialist gender identities.

Capitalizing on South Asian Characters Through his racial impressions of South Asians, Carson attained worldwide fame and a significant amount of capital. To wit, Carson was the subject of gossip at an 1869 Dresden dinner party, prompting author Charles Leland Godfrey to exclaim, “­t here is in India an enterprising American named Dave Carson who has made $100,000 singing nigger minstrel songs in broken En­ glish in Oriental dress” [sic] (Pennell 1906, 387). Leland’s descriptive language resonates with the apt phrase of a white Times of India correspondent, who advised Carson to develop additional racial impressions or “capital character[s]” (Times of India, July 27, 1871, 2). Suggesting that Carson extend his repertoire beyond “Bengalee Baboos, Parsees, and Eurasians” and the “nigger business” [sic] of blackface minstrelsy, this reporter opined, “­there are vast mines of wealth yet unworked in our domestic servants . . . ​a real Madras Butler would offer a capital character on which to work” (Times of India, July 27, 1871, 2). ­These observations trace the tight entanglements between racial impressions, colonial formations of nation and class, and the commoditization of imperial subjects. Moreover, they trace how Carson “mined” a panoply of capital characters to become rich in brown fun. 58

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Figure 2.3. ​Carte-­de-­v isite of Huntley Wright as “Chambhuddy Ram” in The Cingalee, 1904. Wright strikes a pose similar to that of Carson in “The Bengalee Baboo” and brandishes an umbrella, which was a popu­lar theatrical prop symbolizing aspirations to class status and civility on the minstrel stage. Personal collection of the author.

Carson’s “Bengalee Baboo” in turn offered raw material for additional racial impressions of South Asians in theatre and fiction, including the eponymous “Baboo” in Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s novel Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, BA London (Anstey 1897); Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, M.A. Calcutta University, in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (Kipling 1901); and the “Baboo ­lawyer” Chambhuddy Ram in James  T. Tanner’s comic opera The Cingalee (Tanner et al. 1904) (Figure 2.3). In 1904, a South Asian reporter for Amrita Hoxworth

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Bazar Patrika noted the endurance of Carson’s legacy in The Cingalee’s “caricature of a Bengali Babu at which a thousand p ­ eople are laughing ­every night”: Since the time when Dave Carson, in Calcutta, launched his derisive song concerning the Bengal Babu—­now forty years ago—­nothing quite so discreditable as the caricature at Daly’s [Theater, London] has been seen. It w ­ ill not be easy to estimate the harm to Indian character and reputation which the caricature—­now making much money for a theatre proprietor—­ will do to make difficult the right appreciation of educated Indians by their British fellow-­subjects. (Amrita Bazar Patrika, March 31, 1904, 4) In this reporter’s per­for­mance genealogy, ­t here was no question that Carson’s “Baboo” served as material for Huntley Wright’s embodiment of Chambhuddy Ram.22 The Cingalee in turn offered a model for British brownface acts such as Peter Sellers’s per­for­mance as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, removing any ambiguity regarding Apu’s role as a latter-­day minstrel. Apu, the owner of the town con­ve­ nience store, appears as yet another avatar of Carson’s Baboo shop­keeper, ever ready to take economic advantage of his customers while offering comic relief in his “Indian accent.” The durability of such capital characters over 150 years demonstrates that the prob­lem with Apu—­and with South Asian racial impressions writ large—­extends well beyond con­temporary anx­i­eties over twenty-­first-­ century globalized mass media and its dissemination of animated caricatures. In the wake of minstrelsy’s extensive transoceanic traffics, Carson’s racial impressions continue to circulate, furnishing “mines of wealth” through the incessant reanimation of his capital characters.

Notes 1. Kondabolu and Cargill (2017, 29:44). On Sellers’s per­for­mance in The Party, see Davé (2013, 19–40). In January 2020, ­after sustained protests, Azaria announced he would no longer voice Apu (Itzkoff 2020). In April 2021, Azaria apologized for his “part in creating that and participating in that”; Kondabolu welcomed the apology (Butler 2021). 2. Carson was not the first blackface minstrel to perform in South Asia. From 1852 to 1853, the New York Serenaders toured throughout the subcontinent, including stops in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Sri Lanka (Bengal Hurkaru, January 30, 1852, 3; Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, July 22, 1852; Bengal Hurkaru, March 5, 1853). 3. Carson’s San Francisco Minstrels derived their name from a troupe that left California for a tour of the Antipodes in 1855, and which inspired the formation of several minstrel troupes that took the same name. 4. Carson’s itineraries may be traced through the following periodicals: The Pioneer, January 25, 1869, 6; Ceylon Observer, May 3, 1870, 12; Madras Mail, August 26, 1875, 3; The

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North-China ­ Herald, October 7, 1875, 355; Japan Weekly Mail, November 20, 1875, 1081; The Australasian, May 25, 1872, 19. 5. On effeminacy and South Asian colonialism, see Sinha (1995). In this chapter, I focus on Carson’s impressions of male South Asian subjects; elsewhere, I take up brownface performances of female South Asian characters. 6. See Bhabha ([1994] 2004), especially “The Other Question” and “Of Mimicry and Man.” 7. The translation of Mustafi’s title is taken from Guha-Thakurta (1930, 105). 8. See also Shope (2016, 1–4, 35–39). 9. The Times of India declared Carson to have attained proficiency in “Hindostanee” [sic] (March 12, 1863, 3), well prior to his earliest documented per for mance of “The Bengalee Baboo.” 10. Carson regularly revised this song; therefore, no textual remnant of his performances may be taken as authoritative. Similar versions of this verse may be found in Angel (1923, 129) and in Leslie (1941, 105). 11. An Australian who saw a per for mance of “The Bengalee Baboo” in Lucknow, India, asserted, “The Bengalee baboo . . . is a great swell in his way” (Adelaide Observer, November 5, 1881, 41). 12. The neologism islavement rearticulates the Baboo’s broken speech in a trope that Carson voiced in his brownface parodies of popu lar songs, such as “E’Sweet E’Spirit, Hear My Prayer” and “Good Bye, E’Sweetheart” (Indian Daily News, August  11, 1870, 3; Times of India, August 29, 1874, 1). 13. Captain  W.  H. Angel stayed in Kolkata for three months in 1877 while helming a vessel that transported South Asian indentured laborers to the Ca ribbean. In his ship’s logbook, he reproduced eleven complete verses and a chorus of “The Bengalee Baboo,” likely from a printed song sheet (Angel 1923, 129–132). Four similar verses may be found in Leslie (1941, 105). 14. The parenthetical translations in this block quotation are taken directly from the version printed in Angel’s logbook, which likely reproduced the translations provided in Carson’s published song sheet. 15. The version quoted in Angel’s logbook translates “nautch-wallahs” as “dancing girls,” whereas the quotation in Wacha’s text (quoted p.  8) indicates its more appropriate meaning in reference to male musicians. The slippage of the term to refer, incorrectly, to various performers within a nautch signals Carson’s poor command of South Asian languages (Angel 129, 131). 16. On minstrel “wench” acts, see Lott (1993, 159–168); Bean (1996, 24–26). 17. Carson’s naming of his mock Parsi caricature, “Davejee Carsonbhoy,” echoed that of an alternative naming of his “Bengalee Baboo” character, which Carson sometimes performed as “Baboo Dave Kar Sen” in a mocking reference to Keshab Chandra Sen (Indian Daily News, August 8, 1868, 2). Both names combined his own name with that of a prominent South Asian public figure. 18. Here, Carson continues to directly address prominent Parsis in his minstrelsy. “[Premchund],” which is in brackets in the original, references Parsi businessman Premchand Roychand. 19. For the extensive circulation of Carson’s “Davejee Carsonbhoy,” see Times of India, May 17, 1865, 1; May 22, 1865, 1; May 29, 1865, 1; June 7, 1865, 1; January 11, 1872, 1; Bengal Hurkaru, July 19, 1865, 1; August 3, 1865, 1; The Pioneer, March 17, 1869, 7; Madras Mail, June 26, 1874, 1. Indian Daily News, October 2, 1868, 2; April 2, 1875, 1; April 24, 1875, 1; May 1, 1875, 1; February 17, 1877, 1; October 26, 1877, 1.

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20. On Tamasha as discursively linked to the per­for­mance of “effeminate males,” see Hansen (2001, 62). 21. ­These instances may also be mapped in a per­for­mance genealogy extending to Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s play Ekeī ki bale sabhyatā? [Is This What You Call Civility?] (1859; staged 1865), perhaps the earliest comedic example of a Bengali Babu authored by a South Asian dramatist. As Dutt’s Bengali-­language text preceded Carson’s arrival in South Asia and Carson was not fluent in Bengali, it is pos­si­ble (though rather improbable) that Carson drew from it in his minstrel version. Regardless, Dutt’s farce influenced subsequent Bengali lit­er­a­ture and theatre, including Mustafi’s and Bose’s comedies—as did Carson’s racial impressions. 22. Another vector of transmission of “The Bengalee Baboo” may have derived from per­for­mances by J.  O. Pierce, Carson’s co-­performer in the San Francisco Minstrels. Pierce, who authored the songs “The Bengalee Baboo” and “The Dak Gharry,” also staged brownface impressions of Bengalis, for which he was praised for “speak[ing] such (apparent) good Bengalee, and so faithfully imitat[ing] the subservient native character amongst the lower ­orders in Bengal, as to tread close on the heels of Carson for a division of the merit of this very clever per­for­mance” (Madras Mail, June 11, 1875, 2; Times of India, April  17, 1865, 3). Pierce enacted the caricature in Britain in 1877, which may have influenced l­ater brownface per­for­mances such as The Cingalee (Programme of the Anglo-­ Indian entertainment c. 1870–1885; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, April 23, 1877, 8).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004a. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2:117–139. —­—­—. 2004b. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge. Albuquerque, Teresa. 1985. Urbs Prima in Indis: An Epoch in the History of Bombay, 1840– 1865. New Delhi: Promilla & Co. Angel, W. H. 1923. The Clipper Ship “Sheila,” Angel—­Master. Boston: Charles E. Lauriat Com­pany. Anstey, F. [Guthrie, Thomas Anstey]. 1897. Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. New York: D. Appleton and Com­pany. Banerjee, Brajendra Nath. 1943. Bengali Stage, 1795–1873. Calcutta: Ranjan Publishing House. Banerjee, Sikata. 2005. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bean, Annmarie. 1996. “Presenting the Prima Donna: Black Femininity and Per­for­ mance in Nineteenth-­Century American Blackface Minstrelsy.” Per­for­mance Research 1, no. 3:23–30. Bhabha, Homi K. [1994] 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhattacharya, Rimli. 2014. “Promiscuous Spaces and Economies of Entertainment: ­ entury Theatre Soldiers, Actresses and Hybrid Genres in Colonial India.” Nineteenth C and Film 41, no. 2:50–75. Bose, Shib Chunder. 1881. The Hindoos as They Are: A Description of the Manners, Customs and Inner Life of Hindoo Society in Bengal. London: Edward Stanford. “Bose’s Hindoos as They Are.” 1882. London Quarterly Review 57, no. 114:553–556.

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Butler, Bethonie. 2021. “Hank Azaria Apologizes for Playing Apu on ‘The Simpsons’ for Three De­c ades.” Washington Post. April 13. https://­w ww​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­a rts​ -­entertainment​/­2021​/­04​/­13​/­hank​-­azaria​-­apology​-­apu​-­simpsons. Chatterjee, Sudipto. 2007. The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta. London: Seagull Books. Dangle, Mr. 1881. “The Calcutta Stage.” In The Theatre: A Monthly Review of the Drama, ­Music, and the Fine Arts, vol. 4: July to December, 1881, edited by Clement Scott, 89–92. London: Charles Dickens & Evans. Das Gupta, Hemendranath. 1946. The Indian Stage, rev. ed., vol. 2. Calcutta: Metropolitan Print & Publishing House. Davé, Shilpa S. 2013. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Per­for­mance in American Tele­vi­sion and Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Guha-­Thakurta, Prabhucharan. 1930. The Bengali Drama: Its Origin and Development. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Hansen, Kathryn. 1999. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. —­—­—. 2001. “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 24, no. S1:59–73. Hobbs, Harry. 1944. John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old-­Time Taverns in India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, & Co. Hoxworth, Kellen. 2020. “The Jim Crow Global South.” Theatre Journal 72, no. 4:443–467. Itzkoff, Dave. 2020. “Why Hank Azaria ­Won’t Play Apu on ‘The Simpsons’ Anymore.” New York Times. February 25. https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­02​/­25​/­arts​/­hank​-­azaria​ -­simpsons​-­apu​.­html. Kipling, Rudyard. 1901. Kim. London: Macmillan and Co. Kondabolu, Ha­ri, and Michael J. Cargill. 2017. The Prob­lem with Apu. Directed by Michael Melamedoff. Atlanta, GA: truTV. Leslie, J. H. 1941. “Dave Carson.” Notes & Queries 181, no. 8:105. Loomba, Ania. 1991. “Overworlding the ‘Third World.’ ” Oxford Literary Review 13, nos. 1/2:164–191. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. [1835] 1952. “Indian Education: Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835.” In Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, edited by G. M. Young, 719–730. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mathews, Anne. 1839. A Continuation of the Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, vol. 1. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard. Meer, Sarah. 2005. ­Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mehta, Kumudini Arvind. 1960. “En­glish Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eigh­ teenth C ­ entury and in the Nineteenth C ­ entury.” PhD dissertation, University of Bombay. Mukherjee, Sushil Kumar. 1982. The Story of the Calcutta Theatres, 1753–1980. Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2009. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Per­for­mance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Parkinson, Joseph Charles. 1870. The Ocean Telegraph to India: A Narrative and a Diary. Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons. Parry, Benita. 1987. “Prob­lems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9:27–58. Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins, ed. 1906. Charles Godfrey Leland: A Biography, vol. 1. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Com­pany. Programme of the Anglo-­Indian Entertainment. With an Account of the Amazing Feats Performed by the Hindoo Conjurors and Native Snake Charmers Brought to This Country by Dr. Lynn. c. 1870–1885. Oxford: John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Magic and Mystery. http://­gateway​.­proquest​.­com​/­openurl​?­u rl​ _­ver​=Z ­ 39​.­88​-­2004&res ​_­dat​=x­ ri:jjohnsonus:&rft ​_­dat​=x­ ri:jjohnson:rec:20080319155 932mf. Roediger, David R. [1991] 2007. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. London: Verso. Roy, Parama. 1998. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sammond, Nicholas. 2015. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shope, Bradley G. 2016. American Popu­lar ­Music in Britain’s Raj. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly En­glishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth ­Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tanner, James T., Adrian Ross, Percy Greenbank, Lionel Monckton, and Paul A. Rubens. 1904. The Cingalee. A New and Original Musical Play. London: Chappell & Co. Trivedi, Poonam. 2007. “Performing the Nation: Dave Carson and the Bengali Babu.” In The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Repre­sen­ta­tions, edited by Harish Trivedi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, C. Vijayasree, and T. Vijay Kumar, 246–269. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wacha, D. E. 1920. Shells from the Sands of Bombay: Being My Recollections and Reminiscences: 1860–1875. Bombay: Bombay Chronicle Press. Water­house, Richard. 1990. From Minstrel Show to Vaudev­ille: The Australian Popu­lar Stage, 1788–1914. Ken­sington: New South Wales University Press. Wode­house, C. 1875. “The Keatinge Rajku’mar College, Kathia’ Wa’r.” Calcutta Review 60:59–68.

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CHAPTER 3

Remembering the Hunterwali’s Whip THE GHOSTS OF FEARLESS NADIA AND HER MANY GUISES Rosie Thomas ­

Reviewing Wadia Movietone’s Diamond Queen in August 1940, Baburao Patel, the notoriously acerbic editor of filmindia, wrote with faux humility:

I am unequal to the job of reviewing a Wadia thriller, as this is the first one I have seen in the Indian thriller variety. To be on the safe side I took four experts with me—my four ­children between 8 and 15—­and according to them Nadia was marvellous in “Hunterwalli” [sic]. . . . ​When you see a Wadia thriller, your habits have to be re-­organised. You must sit on the extreme edge of the chair and keep your fists clenched in the boxing on-­guard pose. In between you must jump up and shout “Come on Nadia, give them tight.” If you have a friend sitting close by you must e­ ither shake him vigorously or slap his thighs tight or better still punch him well. This must be done at least ten times during the two and half hours to enjoy the entertainment effectively. The friend d ­ oesn’t mind it. He is in the same mood and returns the compliment with equal sincerity and vigour. In t­hese thriller theatres, I think, the chairs are unnecessary seeing that so ­little of them is being used. Cross poles would be more suitable. (Patel 1940, 37) Fearless Nadia (aka Mary Evans) was queen of the Bombay box office in the 1930s and 1940s. Known as hantarvali, a term Anglicized as hunterwali, or “­woman with the whip,” ­after her 1935 debut film of the same name, she played a swashbuckling, ­horse riding, masked avenger who championed India’s in­de­ pen­dence and w ­ omen’s rights. A white-­skinned, blue-­eyed blonde sporting hot pants, leather boots, plunging necklines, and a voluptuous body, she tossed burly villains over her golden curls, beat hapless men to a pulp, swung across ravines, and rescued her heroes before taking the reins in a no-­nonsense romance. The 65

success of her films at the box office built the reputation and fortunes of her producer, Wadia Movietone, and sustained its successor Basant Pictures for de­ cades; Fearless Nadia remained on the C-­grade cir­cuit from 1935 with Hunterwali (­Woman with the Whip) ­until 1968 with her final film, Khilari (The Player), a James Bond spoof made when Mary Evans had just turned sixty, both directed by Homi Wadia, her long-­term romantic partner and eventual husband. She had legions of fans, and her name and legend still resonate in the Indian popu­lar imagination: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon (2017) is only the most recent of many homages to Nadia over the years.1 This chapter develops and extends my e­ arlier writing (Gandhy and Thomas 1991; Thomas 2005) that dealt, in dif­fer­ent ways, with the racial and gendered aspects of Nadia’s on-­screen impersonations. Building on Anne McClintock’s argument that race, class, and gender are “articulated categories” (1995, 5), I now suggest that Mary Evans’s class position as a poor, low-­status, working-­class, white ­woman must also be taken into account when unraveling the complex layers of Nadia’s impersonations. Moreover, the unusual viscerality of t­ hese on-­screen impersonations and their kinetic potency merits closer examination. As the filmindia review indicates, Nadia’s films ­were perceived to be dif­fer­ent from the ones “respectable” middle-­class adults watched: she was a special kind of star and her films ­were enjoyed in what Patel suggests was a uniquely muscular way, appealing not only to lower-­class, C-­grade audiences around the country but also to c­ hildren of all classes.2 I propose that this distinctive form of embodied audience engagement was integral to the power of Nadia’s impersonations. Aspects of my 2005 article provide some necessary context for the current chapter. I outlined t­ here the multiple impersonations negotiated around the figure of Nadia, whose persona effected a surprisingly daring unsettling of gender and racial identities. She was a white actress who impersonated a (fictional) Indian w ­ oman; she was a Bombay actress who was marketed as a Hollywood star (“India’s Pearl White”); and she played a fictional character who transformed herself from (feminized) princess to (masculinized) masked avenger and back again. I was primarily fascinated by her “whiteness” and the apparent paradox of a light-­skinned “Eu­ro­pean” ­woman’s popularity as an Indian nationalist heroine, especially as ­t here was no attempt to darken her complexion through makeup. Her per­for­mances ­were not a s­ imple case of brownface minstrelsy, as seen with Dave Carson, whom Kellen Hoxworth discusses in this volume. In attempting to understand why Nadia was so popu­lar in pre-­independence India, I engaged with debates on hybridity, fluidity, and mimicry: the films and her persona offered a space within which a variety of modes of modern and traditional feminine identities w ­ ere in play, including that of the virangana (warrior ­woman). I drew on Parama Roy’s (1998) work on the formation of

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Indian national identities, which described a variety of forms of impersonation and mimicry that existed alongside the more acknowledged trope of Anglicization, including what she referred to as colonial mimicry in reverse. Roy argues: Of all the figures in the colonial scene—­western man, Indian man, western ­woman, and Indian ­woman—it seems that it is only the western ­woman whose identity is available—­for the Indian man—as relatively open, mobile, malleable. She is distinct from the Indian w ­ oman, whose identity has to be, in the nationalist context, fixed quite as much as the Indian male’s is. What we have h ­ ere is the familiar pro­cess of (colonial) mimicry performed in reverse, and for the Indian nationalist male; (Hindu) nationalism demands at this point its mimic w ­ oman. (1998, 123) My 2005 article concluded that the Wadias’ genius was to recognize, ­whether consciously or not, the power of Nadia’s whiteness as a fluid sign.3 In the Indian nationalist context, the fluidity of the white w ­ oman could be empowering for Indian men, especially as, at the time, ­t here was already considerable fluidity around visual markers of Indianness, as I ­w ill discuss in more detail below. I stress h ­ ere that class complicated this further: although Nadia undoubtedly derived im­mense social capital from her position as a white ­woman in colonial India, she was si­mul­ta­neously widely disparaged on account of her precarious, underclass f­ amily background. As McClintock (1995, 5) has argued, race, class, and gender should be considered in tandem when exploring impersonation in colonial India. While the racial and gendered aspects of Nadia’s on-­screen impersonations form a focus for the current chapter, I additionally contend that audience consumption of Nadia’s persona had a visceral component that cannot be contained within analyses of the visual images—or even of the stories themselves—­ that have circulated widely in India. How did this mode of engagement inflect her on-­screen racial and gender impersonations? Using her 1938 film Lootaru Lalna as an example, and building on Christopher Pinney’s insights on religious and po­liti­cal oleographs (2004), I w ­ ill suggest that the potency of Nadia’s multilayered impersonations was magnified through the embodied ways in which audiences engaged with her image. Referencing Kathryn Hansen’s (1999a) groundbreaking work on impersonation in theatre and ­silent cinema, I further argue that Nadia’s impersonations offered her audiences not only new ways of being visually pre­sent, but also new ways of moving in the world, traces of which are anecdotally evident in the corporeal form in which the memory of Nadia circulated among her fans in l­ater years.

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Muscle Memory In June 1935, Hunterwali launched Mary Evans as Fearless Nadia, a star persona derived from her stage name, Nadia, which had brought her some success as a singer, dancer, and acrobat on the Indian variety entertainment cir­cuits. The film was based on Douglas Fairbanks’s Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920) and was set in a Ruritanian kingdom, with Nadia playing a Robin Hood–­style princess with a double life, who traded her sari or riding breeches for a mask, shorts, and cloak whenever the need arose. With the use of her whip (her hantar), swords, fists, and boots, she rescued her kingdom’s oppressed from a ruthless tyrant. Against all expectations, the film was a sensational hit: it ran for more than twenty-­five weeks in Bombay, became Delhi’s first blockbuster, and spawned an unofficial merchandising industry of Fearless Nadia matchboxes, whips, and ­belts. While Hunterwali drew closely on the Orientalist codes of urban Parsi theatre, as her films went on, Nadia became increasingly identified as Bombaiwali—­ the w ­ oman from Bombay—­connoting cosmopolitan sophistication and modernity. The settings of her films ranged from Ruritanian palaces to the fashionably con­ temporary art deco sitting rooms of Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936), or the quasi–­Wild West frontier town of Diamond Queen (Homi Wadia, 1940). In her films Nadia regularly beat up gangsters or carried them triumphantly over her head before chucking them to an undignified and gory end. She was an impressive acrobat who could swing from chandeliers and somersault from g­ reat heights, and shots of her training in her gym started something of a keep-­fit craze at that time. She was also an accomplished ­horse­woman. As one fan, playwright and filmmaker Girish Karnad, fondly remembers: “The single most memorable sound of my childhood is the clarion call of Hey-­y-­y as Fearless Nadia, regal upon her h ­ orse, her hand raised defiantly in the air, rode down upon the bad guys. To us school kids of the mid-­forties Fearless Nadia meant courage, strength, idealism” (Karnad 1980, 86). It was this hand—or arm—­“raised defiantly in the air” that first raised the question of impersonation for me. In March 2007 I was interviewing el­derly ­people (mostly in their seventies and eighties) living around Grant Road, a lower-­ middle-­class/upper-­working-­class area of central Bombay (now Mumbai) and the heart of the former cinema, theatre, and red light district. I specifically questioned them about the cinema-­going habits of their youth in the late 1930s and 1940s. ­There was ­great excitement in the Dignity Day Center (a se­niors’ day care center) that after­noon as I had with me a DVD of Nadia’s Miss Frontier Mail, a film none of them had seen for at least fifty years. As I waited to play the film, the audience kept telling me, “wait please” and “just a l­ittle longer, please.” ­Fi­nally, the reason for the delay emerged: with a ­grand cry of “Hey-­y-­y,” a sprightly

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seventy-­year-­old leaped into the room, with a makeshift cardboard eye mask he had made covering his face and a small cape around his shoulders over a black shirt and black trousers. With his right hand raised in the air, he cracked an imaginary whip to the whistles, catcalls, and laughter of the assembled crowd. As the after­noon wore on and my research assistants and I asked them (in smaller groups) about their memories of Nadia and other stars of the era, we began to notice a curious phenomenon that I have seen many times since. Whenever we mentioned Nadia, t­ hese older fans’ eyes would light up, and they would smile and sigh, “Oh Hunterwali!” And as they did this, the same unconscious gesture invariably recurred: they would raise a hand to shoulder height and, with a flick of the wrist as they brought their forearm down, would mimic the action of cracking a whip. It seemed to be the trace of a deeply embedded muscle memory. To my original questions about Nadia’s influence, I add: What does it mean for a white film star in colonial India to circulate not only as image and as body, but also as gesture, and ultimately as muscle memory? How do Nadia’s race, class, and gender positionality—­a nd her own muscular gestures—­relate to thorny issues of impersonation in the 1930s and 1940s? Michael Taussig has written of our “facile use of terms such as identification, repre­sen­ta­tion, expression” that elide the complexity of the pro­cess of mimesis, which is marked by its “sticky webs of copy and contact, image and bodily involvement of the perceiver in the image” (1993, 21). It is this “bodily involvement of the perceiver in the image” that interests me. I suggest that Nadia offers a particularly useful example through which to examine this mimetic pro­cess, in part b ­ ecause of the kind of star she was, but also ­because of the especially visceral way in which her films ­were watched. The notion of the visceral experience of early cinema has been much discussed in cinema studies. Miriam Hansen (2000) has influentially used the term “vernacular modernism” to describe how early ­silent cinema offered an “alternative public sphere” within which contradictory experiences of modernity (as both good and bad, liberating and pathological) ­were reflected, experienced, and negotiated. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s writings of the 1920s and 1930s, among ­others, Hansen stresses the significance of the fact that cinema appeals directly to the senses and emotions, offering “a sensory-­ reflexive horizon” for this contradictory experience of modernity. She argues that the direct, sense-­based appeal of the “action and attractions, speed and thrills” of early Hollywood genres such as westerns and slapstick comedy led to this cinema becoming “the world’s first global vernacular” and inspiring “parallel but distinct forms of vernacular modernism” to develop elsewhere in the world, including India, which brought together ele­ments of Hollywood with indigenous per­for­mance and artistic forms. While Hansen’s model cannot be

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s­ traightforwardly applied in the Indian context, it is useful, especially in its stress on cinema’s sensory appeal and on the hybridity of responses to—as opposed to copying of—­Hollywood. I argued in my ­earlier work that the Wadias’ thrillers explored a dif­fer­ent mode of engaging with modernity and national identity than the so-­called respectable, mainstream filmmakers of the Hinduizing film industry of the 1930s. While the Indian mainstream was beginning to close off the pernicious influences of Western and Islamic cultures to celebrate an in­ven­ted traditionalism within a Hindu ethos (see Bhaumik 2001), the Wadias’ vision of modernizing India brought together global or transnational popu­lar culture and traditional Indian subaltern per­for­mance forms in an inclusive, hybrid, ludic space (Thomas 2013, 17). A crucial aspect of this cosmopolitan worldview was that their thrillers engaged audiences on a visceral level, including through comedy and slapstick, using the genres that, according to Hansen, “propelled their viewers’ bodies into laughter” (2000, 343). The Wadias’ films drew enthusiastically on not only American s­ ilent cinema but also the spectacular, embodied per­for­mance forms of the Indian bazaar, from wrestling and circus to popu­lar theatre, forms that Mary Evans was herself linked to both in the Indian popu­lar imagination and through her own early c­ areer.

White Bodies on Display Mary Evans was born in Australia but moved to Bombay at the age of three with her Welsh f­ ather, a foot soldier in the British army, and her Greek m ­ other, a former belly dancer on the transnational cabaret cir­cuit. Piecing together her life story is not ­simple, as ­t here are almost no archival sources to corroborate her own somewhat unreliable version.4 She told me she took dancing lessons in the late 1920s from a stern Rus­sian “ballet teacher,” Madame Astrova, supposedly a friend of Anna Pavlova. In early 1930, she began touring with Astrova’s troupe, singing and dancing on stage, her specialties being Rus­sian and gypsy dances, cartwheels, and the splits. Apparently the troupe performed in maharajas’ palaces, army barracks, open-­air village squares, and even outside the Taj Mahal. Feeling underpaid and exploited, she left Astrova in Delhi in late 1930 to join Isako’s circus but resigned from that a few weeks ­later to take up a cabaret ­career. The next three years or so are cloaked in mystery, and Mary was evasive whenever I—or o ­ thers—­quizzed her on this period, hinting at dark secrets. She claimed she joined a troupe of Rus­sian and German artists, performing gypsy dance routines on the vaudev­ille cir­cuit in army and civilian clubs, theatres, and cinemas. At some point she went solo and worked in cinemas singing playback or mouthing dialogues with the ­silent stars, as well as performing risqué songs 70

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in Hindustani and Punjabi. She also talked of unspecified dangers when traveling from village to village alone, with only “a c­ ouple of costumes and a gramophone player” (Wenner [1999] 2005, 33). The most she would say was that it was a “very turbulent” time in her life. What­ever she was ­doing was at a level that fell well below the radar of the mainstream press. Despite extensive archive searches, I have found only two incontrovertible references to Nadia from this period. On January 11, 1934, the Civil and Military Gazette announced that “Mlle. Nadia would make her first appearance in Lahore,” dancing solo on stage in a “­Grand Gala Cabaret” at the Regal Cinema. Nadia seems to have been the star attraction and headed the bill. For her first show on January 13, readers w ­ ere treated to a full-­length photo of Nadia bowing a saucy “come-on” in a short black vaudev­ille dress, high heels, and jaunty pillbox hat, along with the entrancing promise that she would engage in “gypsy dance, Indian flower dance, spot dance.” It appears she was a hit, as two days ­later a further advertisement promised that “due to enormous success of Nadia, another g­ rand cabaret dance at the Regal.” This per­for­mance, on January 16, boasted “an entire change of programme—­a Persian dance, Marwari dance, Jazz.” A ­ fter that the trail goes cold: the newspapers advertise no more Nadia per­for­mances. Nadia/Mary was clearly part of a demimonde of lower-­class Eu­ro­pean and Eurasian ­women whose lives have been only minimally documented in the histories of colonial India. While their appeal, as glamorous white or passing-­as-­ white bodies, allowed them to earn a living as performers in theatre, circus, and vaudev­i lle, their livelihoods ­were precarious: memoirs and con­temporary accounts suggest that some engaged in sex work, many w ­ ere exploited, and almost 5 all ­were considered to lack respectability. Both Anglo-­Indians and Indian-­born, working-­class Eu­ro­pe­ans6 who freelanced on the bottom rungs of the cir­cuit ­were taken on by traveling shows and often passed off to poorer audiences as exotic international celebrities. Nadia’s unhappy experience of circus life—­and her almost immediate withdrawal from it—­corresponds with other autobiographical accounts of that era. Qurratulain Hyder’s portrait of 1930s Dehra Dun tells of the exploitation of both girls and audience: her small-­town community was scandalized and saddened when their Anglo-­Indian neighbor, Diana Becket, a blonde who sold tickets at the local cinema and “gadded about in . . . ​fineries ­because the Tommies gave her money,” de­cided to join the circus (Hyder [1965] 2001, 213). Diana herself accepted her lot b ­ ecause her f­ ather needed the money and “as for the world it harasses me anyway,” only to find herself billed as “Sensational Eu­ro­pean Belle, The Ravishing Beauty of London, Miss Diana Rose, In the Well of Death, To­night and ­Every Night.” But a­ fter she broke both her legs in an inevitable motorbike accident in the Well of Death, she was abandoned by the circus man­ag­er when the show left town, and was left to spend the rest of her days in Dehra Dun in a wheelchair. Thomas

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In the global circulation of culture in the colonial period, Western carnival and circus culture often traced the steamship routes across the British Empire, traveling from Britain to Australia and Asia, in the same way that minstrelsy culture did, as Hoxworth’s chapter in this volume documents. Nadia’s belly-­dancing ­mother worked in one such troupe, sailing from small-­town Greece to Australia and performing in army garrison towns. Th ­ ere was a wide diversity of performers and groups from all over Eu­rope and Asia Minor. Newspaper advertisements of the day suggest that, alongside British artistes, t­ here ­were many Rus­sians, Hungarians, Armenians, Turks, “gypsies,” and other Eastern Eu­ro­pe­ans on all ­these cir­ cuits. In fact, as Kathryn Hansen notes, in the early de­cades of the twentieth ­century, the terms British, Irish, Anglo-­Indian, Eu­ro­pean, Eurasian, or Jewish ­were employed without ­great specificity and often interchangeably: “the distinctions ­were often lost on the audience or muddled. . . . ​The primary constructed identity . . . ​was as ‘white’ or ‘foreign’ ” (Hansen 1999a, 41). When I asked el­derly fans in 2007 about Nadia’s ethnicity, their answers w ­ ere as often “Parsi,” “Muslim,” “Jewish,” or “foreign,” as “British,” “Australian,” or “Anglo-­Indian.” It is evident that whiteness and Indianness ­were fluid social categories, both in terms of ­actual ethnicities and origins, and in terms of hierarchies of respectability—an ambiguity the Wadias used to their advantage. Nadia’s whiteness could be exploited in the films but si­mul­ta­neously disavowed within a nationalist narrative. While her vis­i­ble whiteness was a form of social capital that gave her prestige (Cowaloosur 2016, 76) and to some extent allowed for her transgressions, her underclass roots and “disreputable” life as a performer significantly undermined this power, to the extent that, as Mary Evans, she was socially ostracized by both “respectable” Indians and upper-­class Eu­ro­pe­a ns. As a white ­woman who participated in forms of working-­class ­labor, Nadia stands at the interstice between race and class, and no doubt her whiteness significantly buoyed her to rise above her lower-­class beginnings. Yet many white ­women who had lived in India all—or almost all—­their lives saw themselves as complexly but fundamentally Indian. For example, while Mary expressed some confusion about her precise identity, she was always emphatic that she was not a “foreigner.”7 The per­for­mances of ­these working-­class white ­women ­were invariably premised on providing visceral “thrills,” which included the thrill of gazing on white female flesh. Newspaper advertisements for theatre, circus, and early cinema boasted of choruses of Eu­ro­pean ­women, often stressing that they ­were “playing Indian roles,” albeit with no attempt to darken their complexions through makeup. On the contrary, as Hansen points out, advertising for the Parsi theatre in the 1920s made much of the whiteness of its female stars: handbills for Betab’s plays boasted of “gori-­gori misen” (white-­white misses), who would

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“pre­sent enchanting songs and dances,” while Betab’s autobiography tells of the constraints u ­ nder which the theatre writers worked: “If the dramas of that time ­didn’t have a gori bibi [white ­woman] and a kale miyan [dark man], they w ­ ere not plays at all” (Betab, cited in Hansen 1999a, 42). The acceptability—or frisson—of the ethnic fluidity of female performers in both theatre and the kotha (courtesan h ­ ouse) tradition also had a longer history: Mary Fenton, an Irish soldier’s d ­ aughter, had wowed the late nineteenth-­century Parsi stage with her impersonations. “Her ability to mimic Parsee and Hindu modes of femininity, her touching singing, accurate pronunciation, acting talent and fair skin . . . ​ created a sensation in the theatre” (Hansen 1999a, 30). Nadia’s professional dance ­career seems to have begun along exactly ­t hese lines: the only newspaper reference I found to Nadia’s teacher Madame Astrova was in a Bombay Chronicle advertisement for Yazadegard Sheriar at Bombay’s Royal Opera House (September 6, 1930, 10). With “dances arranged by Madam Astrova and Miss Therese Nepean,” it boasted the production would feature “a cast of over 30 Eu­ro­pean artists singing and playing Indian roles.” As we know that Nadia was working with Astrova in the summer of 1930, it is more than likely she was one of t­ hose thirty artists “singing and playing Indian roles.” Thus, Nadia’s stage c­ areer was, from the very start, built around the spectatorial plea­ sure of witnessing a white body performing Indianness.

Nadia Enters Films Nadia’s entry into films was premised not just on her skin color but also on her physical skills and versatility: she arrived at Jamshed and Homi Wadia’s offices in 1934 with a photo­graph a­ lbum of her cabaret routines. As the pictures show, vari­ous forms of impersonation ­were the stock in trade of the variety entertainment cir­cuits. Alongside saucy cheesecake images, her costumes and poses reference a plethora of exotic O ­ thers, ranging from romanticized Marwari peasant to beret-­wearing modern office girl, and from Greek statue in diaphanous white toga to Arabian temptress in harem pants and veil—an Orientalist disguise that owed more to the Ballets Russes and cosmopolitan modernity than to any au­then­tic Arab culture. Jamshed Wadia wrote in his memoirs, “She carried a sexy figure which even then was rather on the plump side,” but crucial to his interest was not only her “milky white skin” and “flaunting torso” but also her ability to ­ride h ­ orses and do the splits (Wadia 1980). He had already made a string of successful s­ ilent stunt films that referenced early Hollywood action serials such as Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline and Helen Holmes’s ­Hazards of Helen. Indeed, the Wadia ­brothers’ final ­silent film, Amazon/Dilruba Daku (Homi Wadia, 1933),

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was openly inspired by their love of Douglas Fairbanks’s films. A pe­tite Indian actress, Padma, the so-­called “nightingale of Bengal,” played that masked and booted female avenger, sporting jodhpurs and a whip. It is impor­tant to stress that the Wadias did not invent the masked fighting ­woman. And it was disingenuous of Jamshed to claim, as he often did in l­ater years, that his heroines—­Nadia and Padma—­were quite so radical. Fighting ­women had been a feature of Indian s­ ilent cinema from the mid-1920s, many drawing on the virangana warrior ­woman motif, a staple in the history of Indian popu­lar culture in theatre and early cinema. A trawl through the pages of the Bombay Chronicle or Hindustan Times of the 1920s and 1930s reveals a plethora of active, booted females, many (but far from all of them) Eu­ro­pean or Anglo-­ Indian. The earliest reference I have found to ­t hese fighting ­women of the s­ ilent screen is from 1925, when Sharda studios launched a Miss Jones in Bajirao Mastani (Bhalji Pendharkar), a film based on the legendary love affair between the eighteenth-­century Maratha King Bajirao and his second wife, Mastani, who accompanied him into b ­ attle. Miss Jones, a white Eu­ro­pean w ­ oman, was prob­ably India’s first female action queen. Although we cannot be sure what she actually did on screen, she, and her impersonation of an Indian ­woman, ­were clearly a major draw: the Bombay Chronicle bragged, “See an [sic] Eu­ro­pean Actress Playing Mastani . . . ​Real Fighting Scenes” (December 19, 1925). Fluidity of gender roles and, more broadly, w ­ omen in disguise w ­ ere common currency in Indian s­ ilent cinema. Discussing Sulochana (aka Ruby Myers), the top star of the s­ ilent era and another “Anglo-­Indian” (in fact Baghdadi Jewish), Kaushik Bhaumik argues that her popu­lar appeal in the late 1920s and early 1930s was overwhelmingly based on her romantic action adventure roles, “which fused the personae of the heroines of the imported serial films like Pearl White with that of the Oriental femme fatale of the Arabian Nights genre of films . . . ​ roles that involved slipping in and out of multiple personae—­from demure middle-­class girl, to heroic horse-­riding adventuress, to sultry Oriental seductress” (Bhaumik 2005, 90). Th ­ ese roles also involved gender impersonation; for example, in Wildcat of Bombay (Mohan Bhavnani, 1927), Sulochana’s eight characters included a policeman, a gardener, and a Hyderabadi gentleman. Bhaumik concludes that films of the 1920s “generated a heterogeneous mass of images of femininity, few of which had anything to do with traditional feminine values” (2005, 88), and that t­ hese continued well into the sound era. In this context, by 1934 the Wadias ­were keen to try a talkie version of their Amazon film. Mary Evans/Nadia fitted the bill, especially as she could actually do her own stunts, unlike Padma and most of the ­others. The Wadias tried Nadia out in a ­couple of small roles, first in Josh-­e-­Watan/ Desh Deepak (Light of the World, J. B. H. Wadia, 1934), one of the five Arabian Nights–­style melodramas with which they launched their first talkie studio, 74

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Wadia Movietone. Although on screen for only three minutes and billed as part of the “laugh team,” Nadia’s role as a voluptuous slave girl and nationalist supporter hit the cinemas in full color. Twenty-­five prints ­were hand-­colored to emphasize her blonde curls, azure blue eyes, and abundant flesh barely contained by her tight choli (blouse) and diaphanous golden sarong. Jamshed Wadia already knew the features that, together, would sell Nadia to Indian audiences: a curvaceous white body, a talent for comedy, and populist nationalism (Thomas 2005, 44). Once Hunterwali was released and she cracked her whip, declaring “Aj se maim hantarvali hum” (“From t­ oday I am the ‘­woman with the whip’ ”), Nadia’s public image became fixed; her two trademark gestures—­her yell of “Hey-­y-­y” and her cracking whip—­assured her the affection of the C-­circuit audiences for the next two de­cades and beyond. How do we explain the power and appeal at that time not only of Nadia herself but specifically of t­hese two gestures? First, both are archetypally empowering. Additionally, both also reference other popu­lar per­for­mance forms that have a direct relationship with Nadia’s own biography. When asked about the “Hey-­y-­y” gesture, Nadia’s own explanation was that it originated in her cabaret ­career: at a loss for something to do while filming a key scene, she turned to a gesture from her gypsy and Rus­sian dancing, where she would raise a tambourine in her hand and shout “Hey-­y-­y.” The Wadias liked it, and somehow it stuck. Her whipping is more complex. While the dominatrix is a familiar sadomasochistic trope—­a nd undoubtedly part of her appeal for some audiences—­I argue that her whipping gesture also has an association with circus culture, which was itself integral to her star persona. Although her stint in Isako’s circus lasted less than six weeks and her two circus-­themed films came late in her c­ areer—­Circuswale (Balwant Bhatt, 1950) and Circus Queen (Noshir Engineer, 1959)—­the myth that Nadia came from the circus has had enduring currency, from the late 1930s when filmindia quipped that she was “a foreign girl. ­People suspect her of having come from some circus” to more recent times when Cate Blanchett announced in 2005 her proposed film about “former circus-­artiste” Fearless Nadia. Somehow, circus—­rather than cabaret dancing or theatre, of which she did much more—­became a key part of her star my­thol­ogy, presumably ­because of the romantic power of association and the similarity of their corporeal experiences. Nadia’s on-­screen roles showcased circus-­style physical skills—­acrobatics and ­horse riding—­and her costumes w ­ ere similarly skimpy and sexy. On a number of occasions when I asked older men if Nadia’s roles and costumes had shocked them in their youth, they replied, “No, I’d seen w ­ omen like that in the circus as a child.” In early ­twentieth-­century India, as elsewhere around the world (Davis 2002, 82–141), the circus was a space where audiences could gaze upon almost naked, often white, female flesh within a context that Thomas

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sanitized it as innocent fun, as if for ­children. Moreover, ­people of all classes went to the circus in India; it was the acceptable form of the bazaar and one of the few forms of vernacular popu­lar culture approved of by India’s nationalist elite. It was perceived as a hybrid, modern space of mimicry, spectacle, and inversion of gender. However, another key link between Nadia’s films and t­ hese lower-­class per­for­mance and entertainment traditions is not only that the ­performers within t­ hese forms ­were invariably othered and “exotic”—­Muslim, gypsy, and white—­but the visceral ways in which the bazaar entertainments ­were watched as attractions.

Embodied Spectatorship My 2007 session with aging Nadia fans in the Dignity Day Center confirmed that audiences remembered the cinema atmosphere as much as Nadia’s films themselves. The general air of bedlam within the cinema halls had stayed with them over the years. They eagerly showed me how they used to whistle, how they would yell and “backchat” as the movie went on, and how they would slap their friends about in their barely contained excitement at the movie. Almost all had stories to tell of playing out Nadia scenarios a­ fter the movie: “We’d go to the beach and knock each other around,” and “­Mother w ­ ouldn’t allow us to do this on the furniture and sent us out of the ­house.” Moreover, the most effective threat their parents would make was to “get Nadia and John Cawas on to you” if you ­were naughty. While one might dismiss ­t hese as romanticized reminiscences long a­ fter the event, they acquire added significance through their close overlap with the contemporaneously published eyewitness account by Patel with which this essay began. Pinney has argued that the meaning of India’s popu­lar chromolithographic art lies less in what his village interlocutors say about ­these images than in what they do with them, and how they move their bodies in relation to them in a complex bodily praxis. He sees popu­lar visual culture as “an experimental zone where new possibilities and new identities are forged” (Pinney 2004, 8). Drawing on Taussig (1993) and Benjamin ([1935] 1969), he suggests that “the power of the image and visually intense encounters . . . ​have within them the possibility of physical transformation” (9). He builds on ­t hese insights to argue that a dif­fer­ent history of the Indian nationalist movement emerges from chromolithograph imagery than that found in the nonvisual histories written by the elite. Chromolithographs show a “popu­lar messianism” largely written out of mainstream versions of nationalist history. This history is not only dif­fer­ent in subject ­matter—­celebrating the more violent agents of nationalist activism, including Bhagat Singh and other such martyrs—­but also 76

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in its emotional impact, given the visual intensity and power­ful affect of the images. Can we extend Pinney’s argument to the Wadias’ (and Nadia’s) stunt films? Did “visually intense encounters” with the films of Fearless Nadia have potential to transform? Parallels must be drawn with care: Indian heroes and gods are dif­ fer­ent from white actresses; moreover, the Wadias ­were not vernacular artists but ­were themselves elite, educated filmmakers who had grasped the mindset of popu­lar audiences. While they cannot, ­under any circumstances, be deemed the voice of the subaltern, their box-­office success both within and, more significantly, outside metropolitan cir­cuits indicates that they w ­ ere firmly in tune with subaltern dreams and aspirations. Lootaru Lalna (Dacoit Damsel, Homi Wadia, 1938) provides an in­ter­est­ing example. Although the film is lost, its song booklet remains. Its cover consists of sketchy vignettes of stunt and comedy action and, in the center, a power­f ul, backlit image of the masked Nadia, with plunging neckline, fondling her whip (see Figure 3.1). My interest h ­ ere is in her headgear—­a somewhat preposterous trilby adorned with a plumed feather. On one hand, this image is one of hybridity and cosmopolitanism: she is ambiguously masculine/feminine and ambiguously Western/traditional. However, in the context of 1930s India, the trilby would have signified considerably more than this. Pinney has alerted us to the fact that from 1931 onward the image of Bhagat Singh circulated widely, and that the visual shorthand in all t­ hese images was his trilby and moustache. By 1938, Bhagat Singh’s trilby was well ensconced in the popu­lar imagination as the sign of a dif­fer­ent, more violent nationalism than that of the Gandhian mainstream. Nehru’s autobiography describes Singh’s “sudden and amazing popularity” in t­ hose years, and Pinney cites a 1937 secret government report that confirms the same: “His photo­graph was to be met with in many ­houses, and his plaster busts found a large market” (Nehru and the report cited in Pinney 2004, 124). The popu­lar association of the trilby with Bhagat Singh can hardly have been outside the Wadias’ awareness when they constructed this visual incarnation of Fearless Nadia. ­There is no evidence the Wadias supported Bhagat Singh’s violent activism; although Jamshed was a close friend and supporter of the Marxist revolutionary intellectual M. N. Roy, he was himself firmly opposed to vio­lence. But clearly, both Wadia ­brothers understood and played deftly with the potency of visual language. In what does the potency of this image lie? Pinney, drawing on Simeran Gell, suggests that the basis of Bhagat Singh’s appeal lay precisely in his skilled mimicry of the En­glishman. Where Gandhi was seen by many Indians as a somewhat embarrassing “poor shambling man,” Bhagat Singh was the antithesis of that. A favorite story tells how Singh escaped from ­under the noses of dozens of CID officers assembled at Central Railway Thomas

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Figure 3.1. ​“Fearless Nadia: Booklet Cover of Lootaru Lalna (1938).” Courtesy of Roy Wadia/Wadia Movietone Pvt. Ltd.

Station in Lahore. With a beautiful En­glish ­woman on his arm, he boarded the first-­class carriage of a train, dressed smartly in trilby and suit, perfectly disguised as an En­glish gentleman (Pinney 2004, 126–127). The trilby subsequently became emblematic of his admired ability to “pass.” In the case of Nadia, this mimicry becomes especially intriguing and overdetermined. In Lootaru Lalna ­there are multiple layers of masquerade: white ­woman Nadia, known as “India’s Pearl White,” plays an Indian princess who rescues her country—in allegorical terms, India—­while masked and disguised as a man, whose disguise references the popu­lar hero of Indian revolutionary nationalist politics, Bhagat Singh, whose own potency derives from mimicry and disguise. The image had both density and intensity and would have set up a fluid range of spectatorial positions and pleasures. We can assume that its potency and ambivalent messages would have worked at a deep and emotive level, especially when accompanied by the dynamic visceral viewing experience (and complex bodily praxis) within the cinema space itself. But how do we move on from ­here—­t he visual intensity of the encounter—to the possibility of physical transformation? Indeed, to the embodied memory of the whip hand that I encountered at Dignity Day Center and elsewhere?

Audiences and Impersonation Hansen (1999a) has argued that impersonation was key to Indian w ­ omen becoming vis­i­ble in the public sphere in early twentieth-­century India. Men played w ­ omen in Indian theatre, while white w ­ omen played Indian w ­ omen in both twentieth-­century theatre and in s­ ilent cinema. This was not just ­because of the stigma attached to “respectable” Indian w ­ omen performing in public; rather, she argues, the practice suited both men and ­women.8 In “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble,” Hansen writes, “­these practices made ­women, fi­nally and on a mass level, publicly vis­i­ble, no longer objects of ­imagined desire but represented in the flesh (even if not female or Indian flesh), with a cluster of visual signs, habits, and gestures to denote femininity” (1999a, 48). She details a history of race and gender impersonation in Urdu Parsi theatre, as well as on the Gujarati and Marathi stages and in s­ ilent cinema. Two questions arise: What models of femininity did ­t hese pop­u­lar­ize, that is, which par­tic­u ­lar “visual signs, habits and gestures” bespoke modern Indian femininity? What light does this pro­cess throw on Nadia’s long-­r unning appeal within popu­lar cultural memory? Hansen’s examples demonstrate that impersonators w ­ ere involved in circulating competing models of femininity. On the one hand, she describes the lineage of the virangana (warrior w ­ oman) trope, of which Nadia with her whip Thomas

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is a direct descendant, now inflected with a Western and perhaps imperialistically sadistic valence. Even on the Urdu Parsi stage in 1874, when the Victoria Com­ pany played Delhi, whipping was a hit. Hansen notes, “Kavasji Manakji Contractor, a female impersonator whom Nazir affectionately called ‘Bahuji,’ created a sensation by delivering countless lashes to the tormented dancing figure of Baliwala playing Lotan” (1999a, 28). On the evidence of the g­ reat number of whips and swords found in Indian newspaper advertisements of the day, it seems ­t here was a draw, if not a fetish, for feisty female characters bearing weapons on the s­ ilent screen. On the other hand, Bal Gandharva and Jayashankar Sundari, two female impersonators of late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century theatre, who, according to Hansen, greatly influenced the clothes, demeanor, and mannerisms of middle-­class Indian ­women, suggest ­t here was briefly a market for a “respectable” role model for ­women in the 1920s. Hansen claims that shifting plea­sure, power, and gender norms underpinned the practices of both the Anglo-­Indian actress and the impersonator: The Anglo-­Indian actress, like the female impersonator, thus enabled a fluidity of spectatorial positions. In the viewer’s gaze, she shifted readily between the fantasized En­g lish memsaheb, the material Anglo-­Indian actress, and the fictional Indian heroine. She could be Other, as well as one’s own, affording the pleasures of both attraction and control. (1999b, 146) In the case of Nadia, we find that spectatorial plea­sure was combined with mimetic gesture, particularly her signature greeting, a hand raised in the air and a raucous “Hey-­y-­y.” Significantly, Nadia’s gestures ­were as lusty and authoritative as Bal Gandharva’s w ­ ere controlled and deferential. Yet, as far as we can tell at this distance, both worked to shape ideals of Indian womanhood—­a lbeit dif­fer­ ent ideals—in the public sphere of the 1920s and 1930s. And it would have been against the backdrop of the female impersonators’ aspirational middle-­class decorum that Nadia’s exuberant whipping—­and her overall popularity among working-­class audiences—­made at least some of its meaning. The question of how far Nadia’s ethnicity and gender gave her the power to impersonate—­and influence—is a complicated one. Certainly, many of ­today’s viewers would find the trope of a visibly white w ­ oman rescuing good Indian men and ­women from Indian villains (whom she frequently beat) uncomfortable— an example of the “memsahib-­savior” complex, with a white ­woman rescuing brown w ­ omen (and men) from brown men, an inverse of Gayatri Spivak’s famous maxim (1988). Moreover, we should allow the possibility that the whip, in Nadia’s white hand, worked to slyly fetishize a white dominatrix, one who could even mimetically turn the ­tables on a revered nationalist hero by donning his signature 80

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hat. However, I contend that, in the context of 1930s India, it was precisely the ambiguity around Nadia’s ethnicity and her on-­screen impersonations of Indianness that rendered her persona so potent. In the popu­lar imagination, as her el­derly fans’ comments quoted ­earlier on her perceived ethnicity indicate, Nadia was “not quite white” (Thomas 2005, 64). Moreover, the Wadias neither portrayed Nadia as a Eu­ro­pean memsahib nor, conversely, used makeup to make her appear more ethnically Indian. In fact, she regularly played Indian roles while flaunting blonde hair, white skin, Eu­ro­pean features, and Anglicized Hindi diction throughout, with audiences apparently untroubled by the fact that her on-­screen ­fathers and ­family members w ­ ere all played by unambiguously Indian actors. What the Wadias exploited was Nadia’s fluidity: as Roy, whom I quoted ­earlier, has argued, Indian nationalist men, perhaps paradoxically, sought out the figure of the white ­woman “as relatively open, mobile and malleable” (Roy 1998, 123) in order to model socially transgressive, revolutionary activity. The fluidity of the underclass white w ­ oman’s impersonations could unsettle normative racial, class, and gender categories, even as they worked to ensconce new ideals of gender on the cinema screen. How might Hansen’s (1999a) insights help us to understand the impersonations—of demeanor, clothes, and mannerisms—­that Nadia inspired among her audiences? Pushing Hansen’s insights further, I suggest that the male impersonators and white w ­ omen gori bibis not only helped to make Indian w ­ omen vis­i­ble; they also offered a direct, muscular experience of how to perform that femininity. Given the visceral and noisy ways in which Patel and o ­ thers tell us audiences consumed the Wadias’ films, t­ here would have been direct imitation of the on-­screen action both within the auditorium and outside it, as fans’ stories of watching—­a nd reenacting—­Nadia’s films confirm. Beyond that t­ here is tantalizing, if inconclusive, evidence to suggest that, on a physiological level, the kinesthetic empathy that Nadia’s viscerally engaging impersonations provoked ran deep for viewers and remained in their long-­term muscle memories, with audience fans unconsciously mirroring her whip-­cracking gestures many de­ cades ­later.9 ­There ­were also myriad more tangible ways in which the potent impersonations of the Nadia persona influenced audiences; ­people I interviewed told me she was a role model for young ­women in the more conventional sense of dress and demeanor, as well as in the sense of showing them how to answer men back disdainfully and how to “walk tall and be brave.” She also encouraged ­women to be physically active and helped pop­u­lar­ize gym sessions. According to interviews with lower-­class audiences conducted by Neela Karnik in the 1980s, “For peasants, factory workers or underprivileged ­house­wives, Nadia represented a ­woman with whom they shared an intangible affinity and whose physical attributes they could relate to and be proud of” (Karnik, cited in Wenner [1999] Thomas

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2005, 187).10 The power­f ul ability of Nadia to embody—­and potentially shape—­ new ideals of Indian womanhood is clear. A 1944 photo­graph from the f­amily a­ lbum of a middle-­class aficionado gives some clues to this. Around the time I did my research with el­derly Nadia fans around Grant Road, I tracked down two of the remaining three children of Patel— the tyrannical filmindia editor who wrote of taking his four c­ hildren with him to review Diamond Queen. They both still remembered Nadia very fondly. In order to show how much Nadia had meant to them, the f­ amily produced a photo for me in which Abida Mir, the s­ ister of Patel’s Muslim son-­in-­law, can be seen standing tall and proud beside her men’s bicycle, hand confidently placed in the pocket of shorts that hang well above her knees, with a masculine white shirt, large round sunglasses covering her eyes, a cocky smile, and—­crucially—­a trilby jauntily placed to the side of her head. Abida Mir claimed that when she posed for this as a teenager in 1944, she i­magined herself as Nadia, and that whenever she wore this outfit, she felt just as cool and confident and ready for action as her role model. What mattered about Nadia was less that she was a white body than that the complex layers of her corporeal impersonations across gender, class, and race—­and her play with visual signs and gestures—­provided fans such as Abida Mir with visceral lessons in exactly how to make waves in the world and get ­things done.

Notes 1. In keeping with standard academic practice, titles of Indian films appear with their common romanized spellings, without diacritic marks. 2. According to industry parlance from the 1930s onward, the “A-­circuit” consisted of cinemas in cities and larger towns; the “C-­circuit” involved cinemas in rural districts, smaller towns, and the poorest urban areas, where the lower-­class and unlettered audiences lived, and included traveling cinemas. 3. I suggested, “She was white but not white—­and white but not (Pearl) White” (Thomas 2005, 64). 4. I draw h ­ ere primarily on my own interviews and meetings with Mary Evans in 1986, but collate this with the version put together by her nephew, Riyad Wadia (1994), whose account Dorothy Wenner ([1999] 2005) follows closely, as well as my own archival research. Unfortunately, the account Mary told both me and Riyad does not always fit with other historical facts and dates. 5. See, for example, Santosh Kumar Mukherji ([1934] 1986, 288). 6. “Anglo-­Indian” is a catchall term used variously to describe ­t hose of mixed parentage and sometimes also Indian-­born Eu­ro­pe­a ns or Central Asians. 7. In an outtake from a filmed interview with her nephew Riyad, she exploded indignantly when he referred to her being perceived as a foreigner: “No, Riyad, I am an Indian, I’ve lived ­here all my life.” 8. It should be stressed that Hansen’s argument is specific to a “period of transition” that was a “passing phase” (1999a, 47–48). Moreover, she is writing about social trends: undoubt-

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edly, individual cis w ­ omen actors (or aspiring actors) of the day experienced female impersonators as unwelcome competition. 9. ­Here I gesture ­toward a body of work in the area of dance on film and kinesthetic ­empathy. For some years it has been known that simply watching a film of someone dancing can improve the viewer’s subsequent per­for­mance of that dance. Recent work in neuroscience has isolated mirror neurons, nerve cells activated in the brain not only when we ourselves move but also when we watch o ­ thers perform. When viewing dance, spectators are “dancing along” with the action, provoking minute muscular movements that provide a form of ­rehearsal of the action watched, leaving a trace in muscle memory (Hagendoorn 2004). We can assume the same might apply to gestures such as whipping. 10. Unfortunately, Wenner gives no further details of t­hese potentially revealing interviews, nor have I been able to track them down myself. Neela Karnik, a Pune-­based sociologist, died in 2001.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. [1935] 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–36.” DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford. —­—­—. 2005. “Sulochana: Clothes, Stardom and Gender in Early Indian Cinema.” In Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, edited by Rachel Moseley, 87–97. London: British Film Institute. Cowaloosur, Vedita. 2016. “Not Quite Black: Black Skin in Popu­lar Indian Cinema.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 51, no. 52:76–84. Davis, Janet M. 2002. The Circus Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gandhy, Behroze, and Rosie Thomas. 1991. “Three Indian Film Stars.” In Stardom: Industry of Desire, edited by Christine Gledhill, 107–131. London: Routledge. Hagendoorn, Ivar. 2004. “Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, nos. 3–4:​ 79–110. Hansen, Kathryn. 1999a. “Making W ­ omen Vis­i­ble: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in ­Silent Cinema.” In ­Women Narration and Nation: Collective Images and Multiple Identities, edited by Selvy Thiruchandran, 22–52. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing. —­—­—. 1999b. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2000. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 332–350. London: Arnold Publishers. Hyder, Qurratulain. [1965] 2001. “Memories of an Indian Childhood.” In The Picador Book of Modern Indian Lit­er­a­ture, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, translated by Hyder, 205–219. London: Picador. Karnad, Girish. 1980. “This One Is for Nadia.” Cinema Vision India 1, no. 2:84–90.

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McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mukherji, Santosh Kumar. [1934] 1986. Prostitution in India. New Delhi: Inter-­India Publications. Patel, Baburao. 1940. “Diamond Queen Advocates Democracy.” filmindia, August 1940. Pinney, Christopher. 2004. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Po­liti­cal Strug­gle in India. London: Reaktion Books. Roy, Parama. 1998. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Par­tic­u­lar History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thomas, Rosie. 2005. “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts.” In Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha, 35–69. New Delhi: Sage. —­—­—. 2013. Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Wadia, J.  B.  H. 1980. “The Fascinating Story b ­ ehind the Making of Hunterwali.” Unpublished memoir. Wadia, Riyad Vinci. 1994. Unmasked: The Life and Times of Fearless Nadia. Unpublished research notes, courtesy of Wadia Movietone Private Ltd. Wenner, Dorothee. [1999] 2005. Fearless Nadia. Translated by Rebecca Morrison. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

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CHAPTER 4

In Gandhi’s Guise Chaya Chandrasekhar, Janice Glowski, and Sumathi Ramaswamy All impersonation is personation (Mankekar 2015, 189).

W

hat does it take to impersonate the inspiring but impossible figure of Mahatma Gandhi? This is the question that animates this essay, in which we anchor ourselves to Byagadehalli Basavaraju, a schoolteacher from rural Karnataka who, since August  2001, has periodically taken on the persona not of Gandhi per se, but of a statue or sculpture of the Mahatma. Covering his body with silver paint and transforming himself into a flesh-­and-­blood murti (sculptural form) of Gandhi, he seeks to bring (back) Gandhi’s story and ideals into a neoliberal India that has long turned its back on the putative ­father of the nation. As he does so, Basavaraju has come to the attention of the Bengalurubased artist Cop Shiva, who has begun to meticulously photo­graph his silvered-­ body per­for­mances in a series of black-­a nd-­white images that also serve to remind us that Gandhi was the most photographed Indian of his time. For Basavaraju, as indeed for most Indians of his generation, the Mahatma arrives much mediated into their lives through his image. What does it mean, then, to walk into such an image, animate it, and then have an artist freeze it, again, in the form of a photo­graph? To answer this question, we also consider other Gandhi impersonators who have left a trace in the con­temporary archive. And we are provoked to make an argument about the Mahatma himself as a master impersonator of his time.

Becoming Gandhi In the late 1990s, Byagadehalli Basavaraju became disheartened by what he saw as con­temporary India’s departure from Mohandas Gandhi’s teachings on self-­reliance, religious tolerance, and swachh Bharat (clean India).1 His country’s

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continuing shift ­toward increased global economic engagement and the adoption of neoliberal policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s encouraged a march ­toward greater urbanization, industrial production, and multinational corporate influence. Although the country’s steady economic growth eventually reached between 6 and 8 ­percent, most analysts argue that inequalities have also deepened, with rural India frequently bearing the brunt, as witnessed in growing numbers of farmer suicides. Basavaraju’s fellow villa­gers, like so many around the country, departed in droves for the city, seemingly leaving ­behind Gandhian ideals of empowerment through a self-­reliance rooted in the toils of the subsistence farmer. This period also saw a resurfacing of interreligious tensions that characterized the period prior to Partition (August 15, 1947). The media’s focus on violent upheavals, such as the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya (December 1992) and the Godhra train burning in Gujarat (February 2002)—­ironically on a ser­v ice called the Sabarmati Express, named ­after Gandhi’s former residence in Ahmedabad—­continued to reinforce a dominant narrative of religious dissonance on the subcontinent, threatening to drown out examples of tolerance and harmonious cohabitation among diverse p ­ eoples—­t he latter more resonant with the schoolteacher’s experience. As an educator with a proclivity for creativity and per­for­mance, Basavaraju was determined to bring back Gandhi’s tutelage on religious tolerance into the minds of his fellow Kannadigas, and especially ­children (see also Pinney 2018, 109–111). India’s long tradition of theatre, per­for­mance, and visual culture became his vehicle for resuscitating the Mahatma’s teachings. He wrote and performed in a play that ultimately served as the nascent inspiration for his practice of impersonating a sculpture of Gandhi. Basavaraju’s play opened in March 2000 at a Boy and Girl Scout convention (he also is a scout leader) in Chikmagalur, near Kadur. The production included four protagonists played by other scout leaders: a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim, and a Gandhian. Basavaraju played the central role of an “emergent” stone sculpture. The scout leaders, in mimetic gesture of both devotee and artist, sequentially stood center stage over Basavaraju, who was crouched, arms in and head tucked, pretending to be a rock. The Hindu devotee approached Basavaraju and, signaling the act of stone carving, tapped hammer to chisel around the schoolteacher’s body. Basavaraju unfurled to a standing posture that indicated he had become a murti of the Hindu deity Krishna. The Hindu devotee proclaimed to the audience, as he looked upon his deity, that Krishna was the greatest of all gods. With that, Basavaraju returned to a bent position, awaiting the Christian devotee’s parallel per­for­mance that resulted in Basavaraju standing with arms stretched wide in unmistakable reference to the crucifixion. A declaration of Christ’s superiority was made by the performer, and once again Basavaraju returned to play the creative potential of 86

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an uncarved rock. In reference to the unfathomable nature of the Islamic God, Basavaraju responded to the Muslim devotee’s sculpting by remaining on his knees, hands open in prayer, while proclaiming Allah to be the best. In a final vignette, Basavaraju emerges as a stone sculpture of Gandhi. ­Here Basavaraju summarily proclaims Gandhi to be the best, not b ­ ecause of his individual identity, but b ­ ecause he viewed all religions and devotional foci as equal. Visual simplicity characterizes the play’s unambiguous message, as Basavaraju gave equal time on the public stage to well-­k nown imagery from the three religious traditions. Moreover, that Gandhi emerged from the same medium as the religious references underscores Basavaraju’s re­spect for Gandhi as the Mahatma or ­Great Soul.2 In another educational moment, the play also emphasized, through two turns, one of Gandhi’s enduring themes: the diversity and unity of India’s p ­ eople and its major religious traditions. First, Basavaraju uses a semiotic-­based pedagogy to transmediate the often-­quoted trope of the One (stone and artistic pro­cess) and the Many (multiple deities) into the visual meta­phor of repeated, emergent sculptures from a single stone.3 Second, Basavaraju’s placement of the Gandhi sculpture at the end of the visual narrative recasts the transmediated One and Many cultural text as Unity in Diversity. For Gandhi, this rhetorical phrase was more than a socio-­philosophical ideal; it functioned as a keystone description of the new Indian nation’s path to success and harmony. “Our ability to reach unity in diversity ­will be the beauty and test of our civilization” (CWMG 25:552).4 Basavaraju’s use of a sculptural reference not only visually enriches the Gandhian ideals he seeks to revive, but also acts as the foundation for the schoolteacher’s transition from a rural thespian to Gandhi impersonator. Stepping off the stage and into the community at large, Basavaraju built upon his play’s theme and began performing as a sculpture of Gandhi at special events. Impersonation in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, typically involves the imitation of a well-­k nown historical or con­temporary individual, creating an illusion of the person’s presence. In addition to physical likeness, a convincing impersonation usually includes an accurate imitation of the person’s dress, movement, activities, gesture, and speech. The impersonator’s animation and engagement are critical for captivating an audience. However, Basavaraju—­both in his personal practices of impersonation and in the wider milieu of Gandhi imitators—­painstakingly impersonates a sculpture, rather than the flesh-­a nd-­blood man. Although Basavaraju regularly engages in the act of impersonation with a repertoire of personages totaling approximately eighty separate identities,5 and his per­for­mances usually involve standing still (on view more than actively convincing the audience of his authenticity), only as Gandhi does Basavaraju impersonate an inanimate repre­sen­ta­tion of a historical figure (see Figure 4.1).6

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Figure 4.1. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi “standing sculpture,” Kadur, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva, 2011.

Silver Per­for­mances Basavaraju tells us that his decision to “stand sculpture” when impersonating Gandhi is foremost out of re­spect for the ­father of the nation. From preparation to per­for­mance, the schoolteacher’s admiration for the Mahatma is vis­i­ble through the care he takes in becoming a sculpture and his discipline during the per­for­mance. He applies thick silver paint, careful to cover e­ very vis­i­ble part of his body. Like other impersonators, he dons the leader’s most recognizable dress and paraphernalia, objects that have become not just iconic but also iconographic to the image of the Mahatma: round glasses, the white shawl and lower garment (dhoti), sandals, a waist watch, and a walking stick. A copy of the Bhagavad Gita is kept close, as evident in Figure 4.1. Each iconographic ele­ment, as with so much traditional Indian art, serves to identify Basavaraju as the Mahatma and is replete with layers of meaning and alive with contextual references.7 For example, the dhoti, which is hand-­spun from Indian cotton, became a po­liti­c ally charged symbol of the Swadeshi movement and Gandhi’s encouragement of Indians to boycott British textiles. The walking stick immediately brings to mind Gandhi’s adoption of this h ­ umble artifact in his “disobedient” ambulatory per­for­mances most famously exemplified by the Dandi

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Salt March in Gujarat (March  12−April 6, 1930). Basavaraju’s careful inclusion of each iconographic ele­ment pays homage to the narrative that has evolved around the Mahatma—­one that the schoolteacher feels is worthy of sharing with ­others. In a photo­graph by Cop Shiva, a group of men gather around the schoolteacher as Gandhi (Figure 4.1). Basavaraju’s silvery form and disciplined, rigid stance contrasts with the more animated figures around him. Proud of his ability to remain motionless without responding to viewers, he tells us that he once “stood sculpture” for nine hours. When asked if he ever performed as Gandhi “the man” rather than Gandhi the sculpture, Basavaraju stated that it had never occurred to him to impersonate the Mahatma as a flesh-­and-­blood personage. He also stated that he only knows the leader through public statues and photo­ graphs, having never met him in person. For Basavaraju, then, to impersonate the known Gandhi is to impersonate the image of the leader. Basavaraju also impersonates Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), former chairman of India’s constitutional drafting committee and champion of Dalit rights. Gandhi’s con­temporary and sometimes adversary, Ambedkar is remembered through sculptures, photo­graphs, poster prints, and other images that occupy the public sphere. Basavaraju knows Ambedkar as he does Gandhi, only through material culture and narrative. Yet in a reversal of logic, he does not don metallic body paint when impersonating Ambedkar and other prominent historical figures that he has not met. Thus, when it comes to Gandhi, more is at stake for Basavaraju to liaise between identity, impersonation, re­spect, and sculpture. Basavaraju’s choice to impersonate a Gandhi sculpture out of re­spect for the historical person points to both the centrality of an Indian visual ethos and the historical establishment of the Mahatma’s iconic forms and resulting iconography. This visual ethos, in large mea­sure, results from how one accesses and connects with the Other through ideal repre­sen­ta­tion or visual likeness in the form of paintings, sculptures, calendar prints, digital images, and even maps (Davis 2007). The pervasive practice of art objects functioning as a conduit for connection between the revered and an adorant is relevant. In Hindu devotional practice, for example, a devotee’s engagement with a deity through sight, referred to as darshan (“seeing and being seen”) in Sans­k rit, is an awareness or insight that involves engaging all of the senses and the intellect in a way that affords connection. In this context, the physical image is paramount, a primary means for relating to the intangible. The practice of darshan also extends to impor­tant personages such as po­liti­cal leaders, religious teachers, even film stars (Eck 1998). In public appearances, they pre­sent themselves to adoring fans and followers who flock for visual interaction and connection. Gandhi’s established iconography, the extensive remediation of his image, and at times overt religiosity, helped



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create a singular, identifiable, and iconic repre­sen­ta­t ion that, for Basavaraju, invokes the visual ethos of India’s sculptural tradition. Kajri Jain describes how the princi­ples of traditional Indian aesthetics, which involve visual meta­phor and other conventions—­adherence to which requires significant knowledge and attention—­a re thought to contribute to an image’s auspiciousness and effectiveness. She further discusses how the post-­independence Indian state “tap[ped] into this kind of sacred economy with re­spect to the value and efficacy of images” (Jain 2007, 157). Depictions of leaders like Gandhi in the public “bazaar” take on this cachet. Through the image, the leader becomes more transcendent yet available. Moreover, as with images of deities, when depictions of leaders are associated with iconographic correctness, they also are interpreted as having greater efficacy (Jain 2007, 152). Such increased potency sets up a potential for greater connection and communication between the viewer and the viewed. In this broader context, Basavaraju’s preparative care and aesthetic attention to impersonate an iconographically correct sculpture takes on new meaning. As a meticulously created Gandhi sculpture, the schoolteacher’s mimetic per­for­mance is amplified; he not only reminds the viewer of the Mahatma and his teachings but also maximizes the potential for the onlooker to connect directly and personally with his embodied presence. Basavaraju recalled to us with appreciation and satisfaction how, on separate occasions, mega-­fi lm star Aishwarya Rai and Member of Parliament H. T. Shangliana respectfully bent to touch his feet in acknowl­edgment of the M ­ ahatma.

Emergent Interruptions In 2010, Byagadehalli Basavaraju chose to “stand sculpture” during the 77th Kannada Lit­er­a­ture Conference in Bengaluru. On security at the gathering was Shivaraju B. S., then a constable with the Karnataka Police Department. In another guise, Shivaraju is the photographer Cop Shiva. Born into a ­family of meager farmers, Shiva grew up in Ramnagar, a village some thirty miles from Bengaluru. At age nineteen, he moved to the city to seek job opportunities in support of his ­family. A ­ fter a period of what Shiva describes as “life on the streets,” he landed the job as a policeman. Shiva’s ­career as a photographer began in 2009 when he encountered 1 Shanthiroad, an art center in Bengaluru that hosts artists in residence, national and international guest speakers, curated exhibitions, and arts workshops. Self-­ taught, largely through his involvement as a coordinator within the creative environment at 1 Shanthiroad, Shiva began taking pictures with a twelve-­ megapixel camera, focusing on themes of per­for­mance, masquerade, and trans90

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formation (Jayaram 2015). Encountering Basavaraju at the Lit­er­a­ture Conference, Shiva de­cided to photo­graph the schoolteacher’s Gandhi impersonation. Basavaraju welcomed Shiva’s involvement, and, to date, their ongoing collaboration has resulted in the photographer accompanying the schoolteacher on more than five photo shoots and a rich corpus of thousands of black-­and-­white photo­graphs. The relationship between subject and photographer has developed over more than a de­cade into a deep friendship built on mutual re­spect. The men acknowledge that their ­humble backgrounds and search for social standing within their respective communities brought them closer together. Shiva notes that Basavaraju’s dedication to his act, in par­t ic­u ­lar, attracted him. “It takes him hours to prepare; he does his impersonations on holidays, or ­after a full day’s work, and for no payment or benefits. . . . ​It takes guts to adopt a guise, particularly in India where p ­ eople can be very critical of anyone that goes against the norm. Still he performs, so he can convey the message of Gandhi and fulfill his duty as a teacher.”8 Basavaraju says of Shiva, “He encouraged me to get a better job, and now I am saving to build a ­house. It is ­because of him that I have what I have t­ oday; more p ­ eople know of my work as Gandhi.”9 Literary scholar, writer, and theatre actor Akhila Ramnarayan first identified the unique impersonator–­photographer collaboration (Ramnarayan 2016). “What makes Basavaraju’s Gandhi stand apart is the impersonator’s creative compact with Cop Shiva. . . . ​We would not know t­ hese modern-­day Gandhis but for the documentarians who let us into their worlds” (Ramnarayan 2016, 73–74). Shiva’s photo­g raphs help to disseminate the schoolteacher’s per­for­ mance beyond the local. They show the schoolteacher as Gandhi walking through village streets, in playgrounds and classrooms, and among reverent or curious bystanders.10 In some images the schoolteacher in his guise plows fields, rides a bicycle, or stops to talk to passersby. He is active and interactive within his environments. Yet, as already noted, Basavaraju’s per­for­mance involves him standing as a statue, without engaging his audiences. What, then, are we seeing in Shiva’s photography? Are we witnessing an expanded per­for­mance of the schoolteacher’s mimetic gesture, or does the photographer play a role in this exercise of impersonation? Ramnarayan states that Shiva’s involvement in Basavaraju’s proj­ect goes beyond strict chronicling. “Each photo­graph tells a story, comments on the relationship between past and pre­sent, and forges a conversation between actor, photographer, and audience on the art, craft, and politics of being Gandhi, Indian, and ­human in the postcolonial pre­sent” (Ramnarayan 2016, 74). Indeed, the creative compact between impersonator and artist merits further investigation. One may adapt John Szarkowski’s well-­k nown “mirrors and win­dows” scale to frame Shiva’s creative pro­cess within the Gandhi series (Szarkowski 1978).

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Figure 4.2. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju preparing for his Gandhi guise, Byagadehalli, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva, 2012.

Szarkowski’s “win­dows” describe photo­g raphs that are exploratory in nature, seeking to look out beyond the photographer. In the photos that align closer to this side of the spectrum in the Gandhi series, Shiva’s involvement with the subject seemingly extends only as far as framing the composition within the viewfinder. Szarkowski’s “mirrors” are experiments in self-­expression, crafted like self-­portraits that look within the artist. To construct pictures that would lie closer to the “mirrors” end of the continuum, Shiva adopts what photo critic A.  D. Coleman terms the “directorial mode” of photography that involves prearranging or fabricating a scene that would other­w ise have not existed (Coleman 1976). In several photo­g raphs, Shiva strategically choreographs the setting to create images that interrupt India’s postcolonial and neoliberal discursives. Four examples from the Gandhi series illuminate Shiva’s photographic pro­cess and exponential agency. In an image showing Basavaraju’s preparation for impersonation, the schoolteacher appears in the center of the composition draping his dhoti (Figure 4.2). To the right, two schoolgirls stop to consider the Gandhi guiser. One girl leans into the other as if to whisper to her friend about the apparition before them. When asked about this image, Shiva recalled that the photo was not staged. The girls approached as he was photographing Basavaraju’s laborious preparation. Seeing an opportunity to capture viewer reaction to the schoolteacher’s imper92

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Figure 4.3. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi standing between paintings of Jesus and a Hindu goddess, Kadur, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva, 2011.

sonation, Shiva brought the girls into the ambit of his camera’s viewfinder and made the picture, recording an instance that occurred before the camera lens. In a photo­graph of the schoolteacher in his Gandhi vesham (guise) in front of a wall painted with murals and signage, the directorial aspect of Shiva’s photographic pro­cess is revealed (Figure 4.3). To make this picture, Shiva invited Basavaraju to stand between paintings of Jesus’ crucifixion and a Hindu goddess. With this triad, he established a narrative tension that si­mul­ta­neously reaches back to Gandhi’s promotion of religious pluralism and reminds viewers of the landscape of rising Hindu nationalism in con­temporary India. Shiva notes, “Religious diversity exists on the streets, among the ­people. But politics and propaganda threaten this real­ity. I was thinking about that when I made this photo.” H ­ ere we see, mirrored in the photographic composition, Shiva’s increased agency and his politics. A third image illustrates even greater directorial agency in Shiva’s photography (Figure 4.4). Margaret Bourke-­White’s 1946 photo­graphs of Gandhi seated at his beloved charkha (spinning wheel)11 are among the most evocative and remediated images of the leader.12 Shiva wished to produce a similar photo­ graph with Basavaraju at his home. Basavaraju did not possess a charkha, nor had he ever intended to use it as a prop in his “standing sculpture” per­for­mance. Shiva asked the schoolteacher to have a spinning wheel made in order to realize his

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Figure 4.4. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi at a spinning wheel, Byagadehalli, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva, 2012.

pictorial vision and covered the cost of the charkha’s production. To create the photo­graph, he carefully choreographed the setting and directed Basavaraju through the photo shoot. In Shiva’s photo­graph, the silver-­painted, spectacled schoolteacher as Gandhi sits before a large wooden charkha, arms extended, holding the thread he weaves. A copy of the Bhagavad Gita rests on the base of the charkha while Basavaraju’s walking stick strategically leans against a wall in the background. Indicative of Shiva’s careful aesthetic planning, the door to Basavaraju’s home perfectly frames the schoolteacher’s body. Chance encounters also provided Shiva opportunities to discover new narratives within unanticipated contexts. For example, one image shows the schoolteacher as Gandhi alongside a group of farmers cultivating land with the traditional ox-­drawn plow (Figure 4.5). While the photographer and impersonator ­were between locations on a photo shoot, they came across farmers working in a field. Seeing Basavaraju’s Gandhi guise, the men and ­women called out, inviting him into conversation. B ­ ecause he was not “standing sculpture,” the schoolteacher began making his way ­toward the group to engage the farmers. Shiva ­stopped Basavaraju from venturing into the field, as it might ruin the silver body paint. Basavaraju, however, insisted on joining the farmers in their ­labor. When Shiva saw the schoolteacher b ­ ehind the plow, he quickly retrieved his camera, framed the scene, and captured the photo­graph. For Shiva, the set94

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Figure 4.5. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi plowing, Byagadehalli, Karanatak, India. © Cop Shiva, 2012.

ting evoked Gandhi’s view that village life, ­free from colonial influence and dependence, was the India of self-­reliance—­t he au­t hen­tic India. What we see in Shiva’s photo­g raphs, however, is more than sentimental nostalgia. Through his conscious use of black-­and-­white photography—­bleeding scenes of their natu­ral color—­and with his creative framing, Shiva’s photo­graphs unsettle notions of timelessness and relocate the viewer from the historical time frame into a new, con­temporary narrative moment. Like Brechtian theatre’s Verfremdungseffekt,13 deliberately distancing and disengaging audiences to encourage reaching alternative conclusions, the viewer at once recognizes the scene in Shiva’s photo­g raphs but is pushed into contradiction with it ­u ntil another understanding is reached. The silver Gandhi at the plow disorients the viewer and brings into stark focus India’s numerous disturbing agrarian crises, forcing one to confront current realities of farmer suicides, climate change, ecological fragility, and government neglect.

Impersonation in Three Parts We see in this example of Gandhi impersonation and the creative compact between Shiva and Basavaraju, three distinct yet mutually dependent parts:

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impersonator, photographer, and photo­graph. We find affinity for ­t hese in the photo-­performances of con­temporary Bengaluru-based artist Pushpamala N., who meticulously re-­creates artworks on the basis of reanimating archival photo­ graphs and prints, walks into her re-­created image as impersonator, and freezeframes the enactment through photography, thus allowing for new networks of circulation and reception.14

The Impersonator Discipline anchors Basavaraju’s per­for­mance. ­W hether through meticulous preparation or stalwart immovability, the schoolteacher’s controlled mimesis of Gandhi’s most iconographic image legitimizes and brings “allure” to his impersonation, which over time has become praxis. As in Ajay Sinha’s discussion of Pushpamala’s work, discipline is a pivot, a fulcrum through which the artist “reach[es] out to the authenticity of the original image” (Sinha 2011, 235). For Basavaraju, sculptural primacy most effectively resuscitates a Gandhian ethos, thus accomplishing his didactic aims.

The Photographer Shiva animates Basavaraju’s other­w ise motionless act through se­lection and direction. He freezes instances in time, turning action back to a static state, but opens new narrative possibilities for the photo­graph and its referent. On occasion, visual moments spontaneously pre­sent themselves before Shiva’s camera lens. At other times, he invites the schoolteacher to bring his act to arenas with potential for dialectic with Basavaraju’s Gandhi and the gulf between the Mahatma’s ideologies and pre­sent realities in a neoliberal India. As the relationship between impersonator and photographer has developed over the years, Shiva’s agency in the impersonation proj­ect has expanded to a more intentional yet nuanced po­liti­cal gesture. For example, Shiva identified plans to bring Basavaraju’s act next to a dargah (tomb of a Muslim saint) to explore the narrative possibilities that might arise from placing a Gandhi impersonator within a Muslim setting.15

The Photo­graph The photographic product of Basavaraju and Shiva’s creative compact takes its place as a component of the impersonation endeavor. From a corpus of thousands of photo­g raphs, Shiva’s agency as an artist extends to the se­lection pro­cess, bringing to it a discerning eye based on aesthetic princi­ples and compelling narrative potential. Subsequent se­lection pro­cesses (curatorial, editorial, ­etc.) for 96

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exhibition and circulation disseminates and recontextualizes the impersonation for viewers. The photo­graphs, then, provide opportunities for new readings and what Sinha describes as “a dissemination of the au­t hen­tic into the body politics of the national subject” (Sinha 2011, 255n12).

Donning the Mahatma’s Mantle Basavaraju joins the ranks of numerous o ­ thers—­a ll male—­who episodically or routinely put on the guise of Gandhi, and not just in India. How do we explain this “desire for the revenant,” for the dead man who returns (Moffat 2016)? And not just any dead man but also the f­ ather of the nation, the beloved Bapu of the Congress/Indian nationalist imagination. On the one hand, ­there appears to be a reluctance to let go of the ­father. On the other, we are confronted with the impertinence of stepping into the f­ ather’s shoes by putting on his mantle, literally. A few months ­after Gandhi’s violent death on January 30, 1948, the self-­anointed Gandhian Baburao Patel insisted “that a man has yet to be born who can represent [Gandhi] on the screen or the stage.” Such a perspective disqualifies “­every living person from impersonating [Gandhi]” (cited in Singh 2016, 66). Despite the prevalence of such sentiments in the immediate aftermath of Gandhi’s passing, many have since obviously overcome a “desecration anxiety” and gone on to don Gandhi’s guise, and even make a living ­doing so (Singh 2016, 66). What accounts for this predilection, even compulsion? If we are not inclined to dismiss ­t hese as eccentric, attention-­grabbing antics, we need to ask what work is done by such figures and to what effect? To begin with, Basavaraju falls between two camps of such Gandhi guisers, even as he stands out for impersonating not the Mahatma himself but the latter’s sculpted form, his murti. ­There are t­hose who become Gandhi for just the occasion, typically the school fancy dress, the annual parade on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, or the living tableau on the occasion of In­de­pen­dence or Republic Day. Alternately, some have been called upon to perform the role of Gandhi in school or college plays, and, of course, in the movies, one of the earliest examples being J. S. Casshyap in Nine Hours to Rama (1963) and more recently, Neeraj Kabi in Viceroy’s House (2017). As already noted, Basavaraju himself began his ­career as a Gandhi impersonator in one such episodic manner when he performed in a play in 2000. In contrast to such occasional events are lifestyle transformations in which the Gandhi guiser inhabits the Mahatma’s persona in a more or less permanent manner.16 It is worth recalling h ­ ere Michael Taussig’s comment that if it works, the copy “gains through the sensuous fidelity something of the power and personality of that of which it is a model” (Taussig 1993, 16). In Gandhi’s own

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lifetime (and quite likely with his collusion), the closest to reach “sensuous fidelity” was “Acharya” Vinoba Bhave (1895−1982), who, despite his shock of hair and prominent beard, approximated his mentor in looks and lifestyle. Closer to our times, consider A. Shanmugham, a seventy-­seven-­year-­old Tamilian from Sathyamangalam in Erode district, who began touring the country like Gandhi, dressed like the Mahatma (dhoti, shawl, and the trademark Gandhi watch), even calling himself “Erode Shanmugha Gandhi.” On his appearance in Pondicherry in 2013, journalist D. Bosco caught up with him when he posed for photo­graphs with some curious passersby in front of the Gandhi statue on the beachfront. As a child, Shanmugham recalls participating in a padayatra led by Gandhi in 1945, the only time he came in direct contact with the Mahatma. Although this encounter made a huge impression on him, unlike the young Vinoba who gave up every­t hing ­after his first meeting with Gandhi in 1916, Shanmugham went on to lead a ­house­holder’s life, and it was only ­after marrying off his two ­daughters that “he started imitating Gandhiji.” This then became a full-­time preoccupation. “My appearance and dressing style imitating Mahatma Gandhi attract p ­ eople. Wherever I go, p ­ eople come and talk to me, inquire what propelled me to imitate Gandhi, and take photo­graphs. I take the opportunity to request them to adhere to Gandhian princi­ples for individual growth and nation’s growth” (Bosco 2013). A dif­fer­ent trajectory—­and reason—is offered by Gangappa, an agricultural laborer in Andhra Pradesh, who since 2016 (when a memory of having met Gandhi as a child suddenly came upon him) has been playing the Mahatma. A poor peasant and therefore already Gandhi-­like in his attire, he nevertheless used as props a Rs. 10 box of Pond’s powder that makes him “shine like Gandhi,” a Rs. 10 bamboo staff, and some sunglasses from a local store. Dressed as such, and traveling to village fairs and local bus stops, the eighty-­three-­year-­old Gangappa/Gandhi makes more money from the alms he receives than he did when he was a field laborer. “It’s a s­ imple life. And better than it used to be. Being Gandhi has meant that he no longer has to worry about his meals and shelter” (M. 2017). But it is not just in small towns and cities where Gandhi look-­a likes appear, as the recently documented example of Mahesh Chaturvedi in Delhi suggests. A sixty-­eight-­year-­old with a striking physical resemblance to the Mahatma, Chaturvedi was once a professor, but everything changed in 2002; “Gandhi came to me one night and I left every­thing with one dhoti and a gamcha [towel].” Bare-­chested, dressed in a dhoti, wearing round spectacles, and carry­ing a bamboo staff, Chaturvedi travels about the country spreading Gandhi’s “incon­ve­ nient” message in neoliberal India (Imhalsy 2007, 186). Journalist Mansi Thapliyal shadowed him in 2012 and has photo­documented a day in the life of a man who firmly insisted to her, “I am Gandhi, his soul resides in me.” For Thapliyal, 98

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meeting a “modern-­day Gandhi” was clearly revelatory. “To me, he is a living, breathing portrait of Gandhi, someone who I can talk and laugh with, unlike the ­silent framed images and statues of the ­great man I see across the country. Chaturvedi reminds me of how impor­tant it is to lead a life of teachings encouraged by the likes of Gandhi” (Thapliyal 2012). The most well-­documented of such men is Ram Dayal Srivastava, aka Ram Gandhi, whose mimetic per­for­mances in Bhopal for the camera circa 1998 have been analyzed with ­great acuity by anthropologist Emmanuel Grimaud. “When I was 60 years old, I heard a voice calling me in my dream: ‘Gandhi needs you.’ Go and follow his path, make his dream alive!” (cited in Grimaud 2005, 781). In his public appearances from the early 1990s dressed up as Gandhi, he came to be recognized with greetings of “Gandhiji!” Grimaud suggests that Ram’s evolution ­toward “look-­a likeness” is a result of his physical resemblance to the Mahatma, the work of the camera and photography that convinced him that he indeed looked like Gandhi, and the public’s “need for a physical form, not a statue of Gandhi but a fully animated replica” (Grimaud 2005, 782). Grimaud’s analy­sis also confirms a point that we made ­earlier, that the camera—­and media more generally—­plays a critical role in such acts, reminding us that impersonations only work if t­ here is an audience to witness. One impersonates for the benefit of another. Indeed, Ram Gandhi was much sought ­after by his fellow citizens, who wanted to be photographed in his com­pany, thus offering “a unique and anachronistic repre­sen­ta­tion of themselves” (Grimaud 2005, 780). Such accounts underscore that impersonating Gandhi in our times comes with some perks: perhaps a story in the local newspaper or an appearance on TV, or the attention of onlookers who stop to pay homage and even seek blessings, affirming both the impersonator and the value of such exchanges. It is nevertheless not an easy task. Young boys ridiculed Gangappa and asked why he wanted to dress up as Gandhi when no one ­else cared about him. Kunhikrishnan of Kerala had to give up his nonvegetarian diet (although not willingly!), and Chaturvedi in Delhi ­adopted a life of strict austerity (but did not forgo the use of his cell phone!). Journalist Deepa Soman writes that for such men, “being Gandhi comes with a responsibility” (Soman 2012). A similar sense of responsibility is said to have propelled Sai Ram, resident of Bhubaneshwar, also known as “Silver Gandhi” in his community. In April  2020, soon ­a fter the Indian government announced the world’s most stringent lockdown to cope with the spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Sai Ram took to the streets dressed as Gandhi, his body covered in silver, but also sporting a face mask, as he spread awareness of social distancing and the importance of sanitization. Although he used his own money to buy the masks and sanitizer, Sai Ram clearly also saw himself as an agent of the state in “keeping the coronavirus at bay” (“Coronavirus Outbreak” 2020).

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For some, anatomical similarity to Gandhi is the bedrock on which other critical transformations are grafted, including behavioral changes like celibacy and fasting. But one’s physiognomy does not necessarily have to match Gandhi’s. So distinctive is Gandhi’s look in modern India—­and globally—­t hat donning a white dhoti, wearing round glasses, and walking about in sandals with a staff in hand is enough to summon up the “untimely” image of the Mahatma! Th ­ ese (near) look-­alikes are only efficacious ­because of our sense of déjà vu, something we have already seen and with which we have intimate familiarity. By the same token, this very iconicity has also captured Gandhi and immobilized him—as image and statue, as photo­graph and printed poster. What this brief account of Gandhi guisers also suggests is that ­t hese flesh-­a nd-­blood (near) look-­a likes bring the Mahatma back to life in a country and context in which he pre­ sents the strange anomaly of being everywhere but nowhere. Such (near) look-­ alikes resurrect the incon­ve­nient Gandhi, their very appearance on the streets and squares of modern India yet another instance of “untimely provocation” (Mazzarella 2010). At the same time, ­t hese impersonators also persuade us to look anew at the Mahatma from the vantage point of his posthumous doubles and duplicates, and to recall that Gandhi himself sought to look like the poor of India and went to enormous lengths to transform himself in their likeness. In other words, to impersonate is to duplicate in one’s Self the Other. ­Today, the everyman—­a nd indeed, it is men from the humbler sections of Indian society—­returns the compliment by donning the mantle of the Mahatma. “Original” and “copy” come to mirror and echo each other in a cascading series of (near) look-­alikeness (see also Introduction to this volume).

From Mohan to Mahatma, in Three Acts The year 1964 saw the publication of a book with the revealing title Bahuroopee Gandhi (Many-­Formed Gandhi). Directed ­toward young readers, the book introduces Gandhi through a series of guises that he assumed over the course of his ­career: Toiler, Barrister, Tailor, Washerman, Barber, Scavenger, Cobbler, Servant, Cook, Doctor, Nurse, Teacher, Weaver, Spinner, Bania, Kisan, Auctioneer, Beggar, Looter, Jail-­Bird, General, Author, Journalist, Printer-­Publisher, Fashion-­Setter, Snake-­Charmer, and Priest. Not particularly sophisticated in its take on each of t­ hese guises, this charmingly written book (illustrated with R. K. Laxman’s drawings of the “bahuroopee”) nevertheless has at its kernel a stunning truth, namely, that Gandhi himself was a virtuoso choreographer of his own image and a master impersonator (Bandyopadhyay, 1964). While the

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scope of this essay precludes a consideration of each of the guises enumerated in Bahuroopee, we highlight three acts of impersonation critical to the transformation of the child Mohan into the revered Mahatma, indeed to Gandhian-­ style civil disobedience.

Act 1: Dressing Up: “Playing the En­glish Gentleman” Around 1888, Gandhi worked hard to transform himself “from a Kathiawadi boy to En­glish gentleman” (Tarlo 1996, 64). He shaved off his shikha (top knot), learned to dance, to play the violin, and to speak French, and, of course, donned the black-­and-­white suit of the respectable En­glish gentleman. As he charmingly recounts t­ hese sartorial “experiments” years l­ ater in his memoir, it was not easy to step into the master’s skin or clothes. Yet he does eventually come to master the act: a much-­reproduced photo­graph from his days as a ­lawyer in Johannesburg in the subsequent de­cade gives us visual confirmation of a successful impersonation carried off. It is worth recalling Gandhi’s awareness that he was “playing the En­glish gentleman” (Gandhi 2018, 119, emphasis added). In other words, he exhibits a self-­consciousness about impersonating another. As importantly, it was only by attempting to copy the master that Gandhi came to understand the perils of mimicking the West that he then trenchantly wrote against in his seminal text Hind Swaraj (1910).

Act 2: Dressing Down: “I Have Become a Villa­ger”17 Yet Gandhi does not offer a ­wholesale critique of mimicry or copying. On the contrary, Gandhian-­style disobedience itself relied upon being able to pull off an essential act of impersonation. Indeed, in order to pursue a life of radical simplicity essential to his philosophy of satyagraha, Gandhi needed new models to emulate, and he found them in the impoverished figure of the indentured coolie in 1913, and then subsequently from 1915, the (­imagined) peasant (largely from Kathiawad, but soon more generically from other parts of India) (Tarlo 1996, 62–93). His “rustic” per­for­mance was so effective that “at the National Congress meeting in Lucknow (1916), two grandly dressed landlords actually mistook him for a stray village peasant” (Tarlo 1996, 70). In other words, to recall Taussig again, ­here was an act of guising that worked b ­ ecause it was carried out with sensuous fidelity. Yet t­ here is profound irony in impersonating “the least, lowliest, and the lost,” for, as has been frequently quipped, it cost a lot to keep Gandhi in bare and spare poverty. Impersonating the lowly peasant was certainly efficacious and ethical politics, but it was not cheap—­ nor easy.



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Act 3: G­ oing Naked but Not Quite A photo­graph by Shiva shows Basavaraju as Gandhi posing with a Digambara (“sky clad”) monk in Shravanabelagola (Figure 4.6).18 In contrast to many photo­ graphs in the series—or from Gandhi’s own lifetime—­Basavaraju is quite overdressed, with only his silvery legs uncovered. In contrast, his companion stands completely naked, as is the wont of the Digambara monk, staring boldly at the photographer (and us), carry­ing only a whisk and a kamandalam (­water pot). Much has been written about the moment when in Madurai in September 1921 Gandhi famously ­adopted “the loin-­cloth,” a garment that was “not more than a cubit in width” (Krishnadas 1928, 203).19 Gandhi himself explained his choice in the following manner: “In India several millions wear only a loin cloth. That is why I wear a loin cloth myself. They call me half-­naked. I do it deliberately in order to identify myself with the poorest of the poor in India.” L ­ ater, he observed, “the loin cloth, if you so choose to describe it, is the dress of my princi­ ples” (CWMG 48:79). Emma Tarlo shows that Gandhi’s transition to the short but modest dhoti was hesitant and filled with apprehension. Taken in the spirit of showing his sympathy for the peasants of India “­dying of hunger and nakedness,” his sartorial turn ­toward the loincloth was meant to be a temporary mea­ sure u ­ ntil freedom would miraculously cover the bare body of the Indian.

Figure 4.6. ​Byagadehalli Basavaraju as Gandhi with a Digambara Jain monk, Shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India. © Cop Shiva, 2015.

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At the same time, Gandhi also aspired to a state of total nudity, like some ascetics of India whom he admired. This is, however, one impersonation that he never did quite pull off, much to his own regret, possibly ­because he was a­ fter all forged in the cauldron of Victorian and middle-­class Indian sensibility (CWMG 77:391–392). Does the photographic encounter between Basavaraju and the Digambara monk—­intentionally or inadvertently—­point to the limit reached by the master impersonator? The photo­g raph indeed brings to mind Georges Bataille’s comment, “Stripping naked is the decisive action. Naked­ness offers a contrast to self-­possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a pos­si­ble continuance of being beyond the confines of the self” (cited in Boodakian 2008, 15). Gandhi ­stopped short of this “decisive” step, and in d ­ oing so, opened up a conceptual space between “bareness” and “nudity” that allowed him to shut­t le between ascetic withdrawal and worldly engagement. Shiva’s luminous photo­graph pairing Basavaraju-­as-­ Gandhi with a totally naked man reminds us of the public possibilities—­but also risks—of male nudity.

The Impersonator’s Homage? In his own lifetime, Gandhi worried over being turned into image and fussed at paint­ers and sculptors who wanted him to sit for his portrait, and also at photog­ raphers who hounded him at ­every turn (Ramaswamy 2020, 26–35). How, then, might he respond to Basavaraju’s silver per­for­mances, which, even while seeking to vivify the Mahatma and bring him into the lives of everyday Indians, freezes him into a flesh-­and-­blood murti? The Mahatma appears in the lives of Gandhi guisers as a much-­mediated image, especially as the photo­graph turned his brown body into black and white, casting it in a silvery hue, and as the ubiquitous statue in city squares, village streets, and public grounds. Pervasive and seemingly inescapable, the image also turns the Mahatma into a banal, even stagnant, presence. ­Every impersonator, including Basavaraju, has to grapple with the weight of this image archive as he seeks to make the ­father of the nation relevant again in a country where he has been rendered largely irrelevant. The impersonator’s homage in this instance might thus well not be welcomed by the impersonated. As seen with Cop Shiva’s photo­graphs of Basavaraju, artists seize the vast visual milieu of the impersonated and in acts of creative production extend it into wider con­temporary discourses. Baroda artist Balaji Ponna’s 2009 fiberglass sculpture titled Gopal & Gulam works similarly (Figure 4.7). It shows two boys in the guise of Gandhi, gathering alms—­a practice that surely would not have pleased Gandhi, who wrote trenchantly against begging.20 Captivating in its

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Figure 4.7. ​Balaji Ponna, Gopal & Gulam, 2009. Fiberglass with mixed media, 81˝ × 50˝ × 30˝. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

intense realism, the sculpture is made all the more poignant for its near-­miss Gandhi attributes (plastic-­rimmed glasses, keys, and rubber flip-­flops). The figures’ silvery bodies, reminiscent of Basavaraju’s impersonation, amplify Ponna’s focus on the child beggar as Gandhi, a move that draws out the paradox of Gandhi’s celebrity in neoliberal India and simultaneous disregard. This too is a truth that tugs at the edges of e­ very photo­graph that emerges from the camera work of Cop Shiva.

Acknowl­edgments The authors thank Byagadehalli Basavaraju and Cop Shiva for the time they have given to this proj­ect. Our discussion is based on interviews in October 2016 (Chandrasekhar), March 2018 (Ramaswamy), and May 2018 (Chandrasekhar and Glowski). Additionally, we acknowledge Sandhya Annaiah for her translation help with Ramaswamy (March 2018), Suresh Jayaram for his insights (March and May 2018), and Akhila Ramnarayan. The exhibition On Being Gandhi: The Art and Politics of Seeing, curated by Chandrasekhar and Glowski (The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University, 2016; Duke University, 2017) also advanced our understanding.

Notes 1. Activist-­style, Basavaraju promoted swachh Bharat several years before the Indian Government’s 2014 Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was launched on the 150th  anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday. Although not a “Gandhian” per se, Basavaraju tries to live according to many of Gandhi’s tenets. 2. In conversations with Basavaraju, he gave no indication that he deified Gandhi. Instead, he spoke of Gandhi as a man to re­spect and emulate. Nevertheless, his choice to perform Gandhi with references to deities aligns with wider notions of the Mahatma as more than an ordinary man and freedom fighter (Amin 1984). 3. For more on semiotic-­based pedagogy and transmediation, see Carey (2012). 4. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 25:552 (henceforward CWMG). 5. Basavaraju stated that he performs approximately eighty to ninety-­t wo distinct impersonations. Of ­t hese he only impersonates Gandhi as a sculpture. 6. Photos in Figures 4.1–4.6 are by and courtesy of the photographer Cop Shiva. 7. Gandhi’s iconography, so pervasive and well known, appears throughout India in a visual shorthand that invokes memory and creates association (Ramaswamy 2009, 2020). 8. Interview with Shiva, Bengaluru, May 2018. 9. Interview with Byagadehalli Basavaraju, Kadur, May 2018. 10. On this, see “B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Art of the Child in Modern India,” https://­sites​.­duke​.e­ du​/­bisforbapu​/­learn​-­more​/­education​-­child​/­. 11. For example, see “Gandhi Using His Spinning Wheel at Home” (Bourke-­W hite 1946).



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12. For a study of the genealogy of spinning as a practice and the charkha as national icon, see Brown (2010). 13. Art critic Trisha Gupta equates Cop Shiva’s photography to twentieth-­century German poet-­playwright Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956) theatre tradition (Gupta 2013). 14. For insightful analyses of Pushpamala’s photo-­performances, see Sinha (2011), and Juneja and Ramaswamy (2022). 15. Interview with Cop Shiva, Bengaluru, May 2018. 16. Although the examples we discuss ­here are from India, it is worth calling attention to Bernie Meyer, who calls himself “The American Gandhi” and emulates Gandhi “in dress, words, and actions” (Meyer 2019). 17. Nanda (2002, 206–215). 18. Interviews suggest that this was the photographer’s idea, not the protagonist’s. 19. See also Gandhi’s impor­tant statement, “My Loin-­Cloth” (CWMG 21:225–227). 20. Interview with artist, February 2018. See also Seelam (2011).

Works Cited Amin, Shahid. 1984. The Mahatma as More than an Ordinary Man and Freedom Fighter. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bandyopadhyaya, Anu. 1964. Bahuroopee Gandhi. Bombay: Popu­lar Prakashan. Boodakian, Florence Dee. 2008. Resisting Nudities: A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism. New York: Peter Lang. Bosco, Dominic. 2013. “Gandhi Look-­A like Tours the Country Spreading Mahatma’s Philosophy.” Times of India, December 3. https://­timesofindia​.­indiatimes​.­com​/­india​ /­Gandhi​-­look​-­a like​-­tours​-­t he​-­country​-­spreading​-­Mahatmas​-­philosophy​/­articleshow​ /­26802806​.­cms. Bourke-­W hite, Margaret. 1946. “Gandhi Using His Spinning Wheel at Home.” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Object no. 2008.506. https://­emuseum​.­mfah​.­org​/­objects​/­87414​ /­gandhi​-­using​-­his​-­spinning​-­wheel​-­at​-­home​?­ctx​= ­08c76479cd83e2687bdbae8db2906 76ebb2b73c0&idx​= ­0. Brown, Rebecca. 2010. Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India. London: Routledge. Carey, Allison E. 2012. “Transmediation and the Transparent Eye-­Ball: Approaching Lit­ er­a­ture through Dif­fer­ent Ways of Knowing.” Language Arts Journal of Michigan 28, no. 1:13–18. Coleman, A. D. 1976. “The Directorial Mode: Notes T ­ oward a Definition.” Artforum, September, 276–283. “Coronavirus Outbreak: Man Dressed as Mahatma Gandhi Distributes Masks and Sanitisers in Odisha.” 2020. Times of India, April 14. https://­www​.­indiatoday​.­in​/­trending​ -­news​/­story​/­coronavirus​-­outbreak​-­man​-­d ressed​-­a s​-­mahatma​-­gandhi​-­d istributes​ -­masks​-­a nd​-­sanitisers​-­in​-­odisha​-­1666766​-­2020​-­04​-­14. Davis, Richard, ed. 2007. Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Eck, Diana. 1998. Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Gandhi, M.  K. 1896–1948. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 98 vols. Ahmedabad: Publications Division, Government of India. —­—­—. 1910. Hind Swaraj [Indian Home Rule]. Phenix, South Africa: International Printing Press. —­—­—. 2018. An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Translated by Mahadev Desai. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India. Grimaud, Emmanuel. 2005. “How to Make a Still Picture Speak and Walk: The Fabu­ ings Public: Atmospheres of Delous Destiny of a Gandhi Follower.” In Making Th mocracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 778–785. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gupta, Trisha. 2013. “Truth and Theatre.” Open, October 18. https://­openthemagazine​ .­com​/­art​-c­ ulture​/­truth​-­a nd​-­t heatre​/­. Imhalsy, Bernard. 2007. Goodbye to Gandhi? Travels in the New India. Translated by Ritu Khanna. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking. Jain, Kajri. 2007. “The Efficacy of Images: Pictures and Power in Mass Indian Culture.” In Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, edited by Richard Davis, 144–170. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Jayaram, Suresh. 2015. “What You See When You See: Gandhi—­An Aesthetic Retake.” Bangalore Mirror, January  17. https://­bangaloremirror​.­indiatimes​.­com​/o ­ pinion​/­others​ /­What​-y­ ou​-­see​-­when​-­you​-­see​-­Gandhi​-­an​-a­ esthetic​-­retake​/a­ rticleshow​/­45916549​.­cms. Juneja, Monica, and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds. 2022. Motherland: Pushpamala  N.’s ­Woman and Nation. New Delhi: Roli Books. Krishnadas. 1928. Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi: Being an Insider View of the Non Cooperation Movement (1921–22). Madras: S. Ganesan. M., Rahul. 2017. “From Gangappa to Gandhi.” PARI: ­People’s Archive of Rural India, May 2. https://­ruralindiaonline​.­org​/­articles​/­from​-­gangappa​-­to​-­gandhi​/­. Mankekar, Purnima. 2015. Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, William. 2010. “Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 1:1–25. Meyer, Bernie. 2019. “Bernie Meyer: The American Gandhi.” https://­oly​-­wa​.­us​/­berniemeyer​ /­About​.­php. Moffat, Chris. 2016. “Bhagat Singh’s Corpse.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3:644–661. Nanda, B. R. 2002. In Search of Gandhi: Essays and Reflections. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pinney, Christopher. 2018. “Copying and De-­Synchronizing: Performing the Past in Con­temporary Indian Photography.” In Photography in India: From Archives to Con­ temporary Practice, edited by Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah, 103–118. London: Bloomsbury. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2009. “The Mahatma as Muse: An Image Essay on Gandhi in Popu­lar Indian Visual Imagination.” In Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857–1947, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 236–249. Mumbai: Marg Publications. —­—­—. 2020. Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience. New Delhi: Roli Books. Ramnarayan, Akhila. 2016. “Masquerade and Photography: A Creative Compact.” In On Being Gandhi: The Art and Politics of Seeing, edited by Chaya Chandrasekhar



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and Janice Glowski, 66–74. Westerville, OH: The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University. Seelam, Noah. 2011. “Eight-­Year-­Old Satish (L), Dressed as Indian In­de­pen­dence Icon Mahatma Gandhi.” Getty Images. https://­w ww​.­gettyimages​.­com​/­detail​/­news​-­photo​ /­eight​-­year​-­old​-­satish​-­dressed​-­as​-­indian​-­independence​-­icon​-­news​-­photo​/­109324880. Singh, Ravinder. 2016. “Of Gandhi, Godse, and the Missing Files: Nine Hours to Rama (1963).” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 51, no. 30:65–72. Sinha, Ajay. 2011. “Pushpamala N. and the ‘Art’ of Cinephilia in India.” In Transcultural Turbulences: T ­ owards a Multi-­Sited Reading of Image Flows, edited by Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlheumer, 221–248. Heidelberg: Springer. Soman, Deepa. 2012. “Treading Gandhi’s Path, in Looks and Life.” Times of India, October 12. https://­timesofindia​.­indiatimes​.­com​/­city​/­kochi​/­treading​-­gandhis​-­path​-­in​ -­looks​-­a nd​-­life​/­articleshow​/­60900553​.­cms. Szarkowski, John. 1978. Mirrors and Win­dows: American Photography Since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing ­Matters: Dress and Identity in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Par­tic­u­lar History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thapliyal, Mansi. 2012. “Meeting a Modern-­Day Gandhi.” ­Reuters, November 26. http://­ blogs​.­reuters​.­com​/­photographers​-­blog​/­2012​/­11​/­26​/­meeting​-­a​-­modern​-­day​-­gandhi​/­.

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CHAPTER 5

Playing the Yogi THE MAKING OF SWAMI BABA RAMDEV Shehzad Nadeem

At a rally before the 2014 general elections, the Bha­ra­ti­ya Ja­na­ta Party’s (BJP)

Narendra Modi was joined onstage by a bearded yogi in saffron robes. That Modi, now the prime minister of India, has a guru is not terribly surprising; in fact, it serves as yet another way for the far-­right politician to demonstrate his Hindutva bona fides.1 But the grinning, cross-­legged swami at Modi’s side was no run-­of-­ the-­mill godman. He was Baba Ramdev, a purportedly penniless ascetic who presides over Patanjali Ayurved ­Limited, a multibillion-­dollar consumer goods com­pany. Acharya Balkrishna, his longtime associate, owns 98.6 ­percent of the com­pany and has a net worth of $6.1 billion.2 Alongside Balkrishna, Ramdev orchestrates a sprawling yoga empire founded on tele­vi­sion programs and “mass yoga camps,” which draw enthusiasts by the thousands (Limaye 2015; Deka 2016; Crair 2018). Modi earned the swami’s endorsement ­because the prime minister’s brand of Hindu nationalism dovetails with Patanjali’s own svadeśī (literally, “one’s own country”) branding.3 Boasting a line of some 350 products, including shampoo, toothpaste (made from cloves, neem, charcoal, and turmeric), soap (with almonds, saffron, and tea tree oil), ghee, detergent, biscuits, cereals, instant noodles, traditional medicines, and even a floor cleaner containing “holy cow” urine, Patanjali portrays itself as a homespun alternative to videśī (foreign) multinationals, whom it likens to the colonialists of yesteryear. “As East India Com­pany plundered our country for 200  years,” reads one Patanjali advertisement, “likewise ­these multinationals are exploiting our country by selling their harmful and dangerous chemical products. Beware!” (Balakrishnan and Singh 2017; Worth 2018). Baba Ramdev campaigned alongside Modi and takes credit for his “close” friend’s rise to power. “Modi ji” seems ­eager to return the ­favor, as Patanjali has benefited from lopsided land deals and tax discounts around the country (Deka 109

2016). Following his election as prime minister in 2014, Modi elevated an obscure government department into the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy),4 which promotes Indian health remedies and exercises and “traditional” learning. Modi also inaugurated an International Yoga Day in 2015 in an address to the United Nations. Ever since, he has been its chief pop­u­lar­izer, and he regularly presides over what has become an annual media spectacle. Similarly, Ramdev claims that he would have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the field if he ­weren’t “Black” (Deogharia 2015). Birds of a feather, Modi and Ramdev both promise to make India g­ reat again. And yet Ramdev’s popularity is explained by more than the resurgence of economic and religious nationalism; it has also been amplified by a deft use of tropes of the yogi’s timeless wisdom. In his speech, dress, and bearing, Ramdev incarnates almost e­ very available yogic cliché to build his personal and brand identity. First, he poses as the dispassionate ascetic of yoga’s ancient and classical periods (c. 3000 BCE–500 CE). Next, Ramdev and Balkrishna play healers and experts in Ayurveda (traditional Hindu medicine), gleaning life-­giving herbs and minerals from the forest floor. Ramdev also portrays himself as a kind of motivational fitness instructor through dexterous āsanas (bodily manipulations or poses) of haṭha yoga and their con­temporary equivalents. Last, and perhaps most crucially, Ramdev also tries to channel the energy of militant ascetics who contested British and Muslim power in the subcontinent, as depicted in Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s obliquely anticolonial novel Ānandamaṭh ([1882] 2005), the source of the Hindu nationalist slogan Bande Mātaram (Hail ­Mother[land])! Updating the trope of a militant ascetic in a neoliberal universe, Ramdev appears in an advertisement for a biographical serial about himself, Swami Ramdev: Ek Sangharsh (Sanskar TV 2018). He is shown in a dark corporate boardroom where a suited white man tells him that svadeśī products ­w ill not sell in the country. Ramdev’s response is to run past him and heroically leap through the skyscraper’s plate-­glass win­dow, robes trailing like a tangled cape. Ramdev thus constructs a myth of himself as a saffron superhero. In this chapter, I explore how Baba Ramdev impersonates the figure of the renunciant yogi for personal fame and gain. The first section examines how Ramdev reinvents yoga in accordance with modern reformulations of Hinduism and Hindu nationalist ideals. The second offers an account of how he uses essentialist notions of the yogi to construct a self-­mythology for the Hindu masses. The third part considers Patanjali’s commodification of the sanyāsī and Ayurvedic medicine. The final section analyzes the po­liti­cal implications of Ramdev and Patanjali’s messaging. Across ­these sections, I argue that while Ramdev does not impersonate anyone in par­tic­u ­lar, he nonetheless mines the trope of the yogi in general to ­g reat effect and for personal gain. His pseudoscientific 110

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diction, his trailing robes and curling beard, his faraway gaze and saintly self-­ composure, all attest to the power of his per­for­mance. His poses are a form of posturing, both as a cultural ambassador of the religious right and as a brand ambassador of Patanjali. In Ramdev and Patanjali, we are given proof of the fruitful symbiosis between the selling of religion and the religion of selling. Ramdev trades on yogi-­ism to produce a kind of subaltern, Hindutva capitalism.5

Reinventing Yoga While a broad survey of the history of yoga is beyond the purview of this chapter, I ­w ill briefly consider how Baba Ramdev employs the figure of the yogi to shape his multinational brand and cultivate his persona. Indeed, Baba Ramdev deploys the trope of the yogi rather skillfully: the long hair and beard, the distant yet benevolent gaze, the “yellow rags” turned saffron robes (Werner 1977). This figure has many names, each with slightly dif­fer­ent nuances: yogi, keśin, sanyāsī, muni, ”shi, svāmī, guru, parhams, ācārya, and so on. Classically, yogis are renunciants, celibates, forest dwellers, monastics, and hermits who exist at the margins of society (Briggs 1973; Barrow 1995). Ramdev draws upon the yogic corpus to construct a my­t hol­ogy of ancient and “au­t hen­tic” Vedic tradition that is more fantasy than fact (McCartney 2019, 373). His impersonation involves an objectification of yoga—­a conversion of a fluid and historically varied phenomenon into abstract, decontextualized forms that can be put to profit. Where did Ramdev and Balkrishna’s com­pany name “Patanjali” come from? Patanjali is the author of the Mahābhāṣya, an ancient treatise on Sans­k rit grammar and linguistics dating around the second c­ entury BCE. Patanjali is also the name of the compiler of the Yoga sūtra (from around the fourth c­ entury BCE), which has become the go-to manual for anyone who wants to learn about classical forms of yoga. ­There are also two lesser-­k nown Patanjalis who authored Ayurvedic texts around the eighth ­century CE. ­W hether the two earliest Patanjalis ­were actually dif­fer­ent ­people remains unsettled (Bryant 2009), but many ­people conflate them, if not all four Patanjalis. But the mere mention of the name “Patanjali” evokes yoga’s illustrious past and India’s golden age, hence it was a wise marketing strategy to use it. Where did Ramdev’s brand of yoga come from? The short answer is that it was largely a modern invention, drawing on colonial and Indian nationalist deployments of yoga. It is an amalgam of haṭha yoga, Indian wrestling, and Eu­ ro­pean gymnastics (Singleton 2010). For this, Ramdev and many modern yogis are indebted principally to T. Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), who gave it form; nationalist reformers like Swami Vivekananda (1862–1902) and the Brahmo Samaj, who gave it ideology; and ascetic militant groups, or akhāṛās, like the Nadeem

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medieval warrior yogi Anupgiri Gosain (c. 1800), who gave it defiant passion (Pinch 2006). Taken together, they form the background against which Ramdev plies his trade. Briefly, Krishnamacharya ran a distinguished yoga school for young boys at Mysore Palace u ­ nder royal patronage. This is where he developed his distinctive brand of athletic, limber yoga (Sjoman 1996). Claiming to have mastered some 3,000 āsanas, he refined some 700 poses, put them in a sequence, and linked them to deep breathing (Desikachar 2011). A ­silent video from 1938 shows Krishnamacharya demonstrating his craft, that is, āsanas: headstands with legs revolving jointly like a propeller, backbends with his body arched like a tunnel.6 While Krishnamacharya claimed that t­hese exercises conferred a number of health benefits, he was something of an exhibitionist in his per­for­mance of them. For him, the body had a special majesty, a numinous glow, and yoga was meant to coax it out. Though it may not have been his intention, Krishnamacharya (and his disciples) helped develop a domesticated version of haṭha yoga that is now available to ­middle and upper classes around the globe (Singleton and Fraser 2013). In terms of ideology, Hindu reformers have essentially reinvented Hinduism over the last two centuries. They drew heavi­ly on ideas from the classical philosophy of Vedanta, which is itself based on the Upaniṣads, a class of metaphysical texts, the most influential of which w ­ ere composed around 700 and 500 BCE. To be sure, yoga took pride of place in this reimagining, particularly in Vivekananda’s interpretation of Patanjali’s “rāja yoga” (Raychaudhuri 1998; White 2014). Vivekananda portrayed yoga as nationalist, muscular, and quintessentially Indian, and he advised his countrymen: You ­w ill be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the [Bhagavad] Gita. You ­will understand the Gita better with your biceps, your muscles, a l­ ittle stronger. . . . ​You w ­ ill understand the Upanishads better and the glory of the Atman [Self] when your body stands firm upon your feet, and you feel yourselves as men. (Vivekananda 1947, 203) Vivekananda was a disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna (1836–1886), but he also spent much of his early years in the com­pany of the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of Brah­man”), a circle of elite Bengalis that grew into something of a religious and cultural movement. The group was steeped in Western esotericism and theosophy, reform Hinduism, Romantic poetry, Transcendental philosophy, and, importantly, Unitarian Chris­tian­ity (De Michelis 2004). At the time, a growing nationalist movement was contesting self-­serving ste­reo­types about Indians circulated by the British as innately spiritual but beholden to a religion that was de­cadent and grotesque.

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The Brahmo Samaj’s reimagining of yoga incorporated and inverted this criticism, turning religion into a source of pride rather than shame. As Keshub Chunder Sen, a onetime leader of the society, put it: “We Hindus are specially endowed with, and distinguished for, the yoga faculty, which is nothing but this power of spiritual communion and absorption. This faculty, which we have inherited from our forefathers, enables us to annihilate space and time” (De Michelis 2004, 89). Owing to the burgeoning influence of the YMCA and physical culture in a global frame, yoga was portrayed as a scientific path to bliss. Indians ­were counseled to flex their muscles as well as to meditate (Singleton 2010). This simplification and domestication of yoga, in turn, paved the way for swamis who followed. As Chandrima Chakraborty (2011) argues, nationalists’ class-­laden redefinitions of yoga as masculine and pure w ­ ere characteristic of the late colonial period. The idea was to challenge colonial repre­sen­ta­tions of Indians in general as effete and yogis in par­t ic­u ­lar as uncouth. But intentional or not, this also erased e­ arlier and more iconoclastic conceptions of yoga from public memory. Relatedly, William Pinch (2006) and David Lorenzen (1978) argue that some nineteenth-­century nationalists co-­opted ­earlier warrior ascetics and portrayed them as romantic defenders of Hindu tradition. In actuality, ­t hese ascetics ­were mercenaries and rebels active from about the fifteenth ­century ­until the early de­cades of the nineteenth. But their heyday was the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century, when the so-­called Sanyasi rebellion threatened British power in Bengal, which was immortalized in the novel Ānandamaṭh. However, their military organ­izations developed alongside the hegemony of the Mughals and the British, sometimes in collaboration with ­these powers and sometimes in defiance of them (Lorenzen 1978). What is significant for our purposes is that ­t hese ascetics ­were hardly steadfast devotees of nonviolence. The art of vio­lence was “part of a shaktiyoga repertoire that centered on harnessing supernormal forces both within and beyond the ­human body” (Pinch 2006, 10). Nineteenth-­century nationalists like Chatterjee held up ­these ascetics as exemplary figures who could illustrate to con­temporary Indians how patriotism and pacificism need not go hand in hand—an idea Baba Ramdev also embraces. True, his martial rhe­ toric and occasional advocacy of vio­lence sit awkwardly against his public persona as a blissed-­out yogi. But, as we s­ hall see, such contradictions have become part of his iconoclastic brand at Patanjali Ayurved L ­ imited.

Becoming Baba Ramdev The sociologist Max Weber (1964, 328) describes charisma as a “certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men

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and treated as endowed with super­natural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. ­These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” Yogic charisma follows along similar lines, especially in the modern period where legends have been constructed around divine incarnations, miracles, and aphorisms (Isherwood 2001; Jain 2014; Singleton and Goldberg 2014). In the case of hagiographies of yogis, what actually happened often ­matters less than the myth that is constructed by disciples and sympathetic chroniclers (Deslippe 2018). Th ­ ere is a common narrative structure in such accounts: often, the story begins with a child who stands out and who has a special sensitivity and prowess of some kind (Yogananda 1956; Foxen 2017). This is generally followed by a conversion experience and then study with an esteemed teacher (again, almost always male) somewhere remote and challenging. The young yogi’s tutelage by a guru provides him with a linkage to the past (Heehs 2008; White 2014). It establishes his lineage and eventually his authority, generally a­ fter his teacher passes away. Fi­nally, he s­ ettles into his powers and determines to use it for good or ill, for oneself or for ­others. By presenting himself as a renunciant and taking on a new identity, the yogi marks his separation from the broader society and its norms. So too do visual markers such as unkemptness. “The way that renouncers adorn (or ignore) their physical bodies,” writes Hausner, “deliberately sets them apart from h ­ ouse­holders and visibly connects them with one another” (2007, 47). ­There are forerunners of Ramdev, other yogis with connections to the po­ liti­cally power­ful. For example, Dhirendra Brahmachari’s hagiography draws on a familiar trope: he was bit by a spiritual bug early on and left home in his teens to study at an ashram in Varanasi. He became an expert in haṭha yoga and was even invited to train Soviet cosmonauts. Brahmachari taught yoga to Jawaharlal Nehru, and to his d ­ aughter, Indira Gandhi, eventually becoming her confidant. His po­liti­cal influence became apparent when, drawing on his advice, Indira Gandhi dissolved Parliament and declared a state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, earning him the nickname “India’s Rasputin.” He was also known as “the flying swami” b ­ ecause of his jet-­setting lifestyle. Like Ramdev, Brahmachari reportedly received plots of land through his po­liti­cal ties and had a weekly tele­ vi­sion show on yoga (on Doordarshan, the state-­owned tele­v i­sion network) (“Dhirendra Brahmachari” 1994). His similarity to Brahmachari is apparently not lost on Ramdev, who likewise links yoga with benevolent rule: “Jawaharlal Nehru used to practise yoga and therefore his Rajyog was good and he became prime minister. Indira Gandhi also practised yoga and she also had very good Rajyog. Similarly, Modi practised yoga, and the son of a tea-­seller became the prime minister” (“ ‘Nehru, Modi Became PMs’ ” 2019). 114

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Ramdev seems acutely conscious of the requirements of myth building in his own life story (Manoharan and Rakshit 2017).7 Baba Ramdev was born as Ramkishen Yadav on December 25, 1965, to a h ­ umble ­family of farmers in a village in Haryana. Ever the awkward child, he worked in the fields and suffered bouts of illnesses and falls. He nearly drowned in a nearby pond; another fall left a permanent scar on his face. Ramdev also claims to have had some kind of attack that para­lyzed the left side of his face, which seems to be the origin of his signature winking smile. At the time, it was a source of ridicule among schoolchildren. Westernized medicine was of no help in treating his illness. Then one day he came across a book about yoga and the journey began. As a biographer writes: From the very next day, life changed for Ram Kishen. Like a possessed soul, he began practicing the yogic asanas prescribed in the book, a near impossible task for his paralysed body. His rebellious left side did not cooperate at all, the right side writhed in pain and the body bore several bruises often caused by fall b ­ ecause he lost his balance. (Deka 2017) Thus, young Ramkishen took to yoga with alacrity, and it helped strengthen his weak body, something “allopathic doctors did not anticipate.” A local pahalvān, or wrestler, pitched in and helped toughen him up.8 But the squint remained, serving as a symbol of his determination and yoga’s power, or so the legend goes. His biographer admiringly writes of this triumph: “He could walk again. Barring the squint in his left eye, Ramdev conquered a paralytic attack” (Deka 2017). Uninterested in normal studies—­Ramdev chafed at the Indian educational system’s colonial, Macaulayite legacy—he fled home as a teenager and went to a gurukul, a traditional religious school for Hindus. It seems he studied at a number of them, but at one gurukul he met his f­ uture business partner Balkrishna around 1990, and the two became quick and close friends. Together, they met a guru who took Ramdev on as a pupil on the condition that he remain celibate. The three men journeyed to the Hi­ma­la­yas and meditated in caves in search of moksh, or liberation (Deka 2017; Crair 2018). Along the way, Ramdev claims to have had a series of revelations. ­These w ­ ere inspired, he says, by his reading of the ascetic and religious nationalist Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883). Saraswati was an early advocate of Indian self-­governance and is credited with the slogan, “India for Indians.” The writings of Saraswati, a monk from boyhood, ­were suffused with the fervor of Vedantic revivalism, and it was from him that Ramdev got his ideas about devotion to the nation and a penchant for Hindutva sermonizing (Sharma 2015). Ramdev says, “Dayanandji made me realise the value of the trea­sure trove hidden in Vedic education. It’s a progressive approach based on tark (logic), tathya (facts), yukti (argument) and Nadeem

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pramāṇ (evidence). The goal of the British education system was to enslave our mind and curb f­ ree and logical thinking. This is what Gandhiji called Swadeshi talim” (“Saraswati’s Writings” 2017).9 The recovery of Indian wisdom, lost due to colonial oppression, became central to Ramdev’s thinking. The inclusion of Dayanand Saraswati and Gandhi in his life story is also impor­tant in establishing Ramdev’s authority on both spiritual wisdom and Indian nationalism. As he meditated and studied in the Hi­ma­la­yas, Ramdev witnessed scores of sā­dhus lost in meditation and living on alms. “I was puzzled,” he says. “Someone was t­ here for years, lying naked. Someone did not eat for years. But I did not know what they achieved. What was the purpose of gaining knowledge?” (Deka 2017). Instead of freedom, they chose dependence on ­others. This rankled Ramdev and led to this realization: “No personal choice, no personal desires, no wealth, no re­spect or disrespect. My w ­ hole skill, w ­ hole existence, this w ­ hole existence for all” (Deka 2017). Forever changed, Ramdev became a renunciant monk at an ashram near Haridwar in 1995. As legend has it, a shirtless Ramdev pedaled a rented bicycle across Harayana hawking cyavanprāś, a popu­lar herbal supplement, while his friend Balkrishna ran an Ayurvedic pharmacy in Haridwar (Vasudev 2018). Ramdev’s big break came through his yoga lessons. He had already developed a following by giving f­ree lessons in villages. Noticing this, Aastha TV—­a religious TV network that broadcasts throughout India—­added him to their morning programming (Worth 2018). Ramdev’s s­ imple charisma, his homely way of saying ­things, resonated far and wide. Miraculous postures like his rolling stomach āsana wowed audiences and injected an ele­ment of fun into the proceedings. In addition to his tele­v i­sion program, Divya Yoga Mandir (Divine Yoga ­Temple), Ramdev started teaching to larger and larger crowds at yoga “camps” (Limaye 2015). As his celebrity grew, he and Balkrishna established the Patanjali Yogpeeth Trust, which operates health facilities specializing in yoga and Ayurvedic care, and Patanjali Ayurved ­Limited, which manufactures and sells herbal and mineral products. “Baba has come a long way,” writes an admiring guru. “The ­humble salesman has grown into the leader of a $2 billion business, without losing any of the robustness and homespun simplicity that has characterised him from the very start” (Vasudev 2018). Key to Ramdev’s impersonation, then, is his playing a kind of earnest everyman—­a son of the soil who radiates ­simple goodness in a world gone bad.

Hindutva Capitalism Of subaltern caste and class, Ramdev did not let his ­humble background deter him. In fact, Ramdev drew on his modest origins to construct a yoga for the 116

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­ eople. He spoke their language. He offered teachings that ­were straightforward, p energetic, and, ironically, devoid of sanctimonious religious trappings. They ­were digestible in small increments and offered tangible benefits, though, as ever, they promised much more. As Robert Worth writes, “He tapped into a hunger for spirituality and health among India’s growing ­middle class and quickly became a symbol of Hinduism at its most benign, a ready-­made package of rituals and foods that ­were fun, affordable and good for you” (2018). His exercise-­minded focus, moreover, helped fill a void in a country sorely lacking in efficient and affordable public health ser­v ices. As he puts it, “No critical postures. No philosophy or ideology. All yoga practices are based on benefit. Instant benefit” (Worth 2018). What is masterful about Ramdev is how easily he glides between the ste­reo­ types of the disinterested sage and the nationalist ascetic. His lack of an explic­ itly defined ideology, however, was brought into stark relief in 2011 when he made a foray into politics by organ­izing a populist campaign against corruption. ­After a rally gone wrong, Ramdev was caught trying to escape police action at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan disguised in w ­ omen’s clothes (“Ramdev on Being Caught” 2011). It is a testament to his po­liti­cal skill that Ramdev turned potential humiliation into an opportunity to dispense wry wisdom. “It was not a sign of weakness to be in a ­woman’s dress. A ­mother gives birth to a man,” he said (“Ramdev on Being Caught” 2011). Despite such setbacks, Ramdev saw an opening in the growing power of the Hindu right, which, in turn, saw in him a way to pop­u­lar­ ize its divisive message. The issue that established the alliance was that of black money, and the BJP and Ramdev vowed to cleanse the country of it (“PM Should Become a Baba” 2012). When Ramdev says offensive and outrageous ­things, he does not shout so much as suggest, drawing on the sā­dhu’s special gift for saying wise ­things strangely.10 He talks volubly about yoga’s ability to cure cancer, HIV, and homo­ sexuality, for example, and has even proposed beheading ­people who ­won’t chant the nationalist slogan Bhārat Mātā kī jay! (Victory to ­Mother India!) (“Homo­ sexuality Is a Disease” 2013; “Arrest Warrant against Ramdev” 2017; Dahiya 2020). Such comments elicit not opprobrium but a kind of reverence among his followers. Consider this from Sadhguru, a celebrity guru, in Outlook, a popu­lar Indian magazine: “Though his impulsive outbursts on sensitive issues get him into vari­ous soups, he has the ingenuity to turn all that into Patanjali Soup! And ironically, the rest of us w ­ ill prob­ably be left savouring the taste. We cannot all agree with every­thing Baba Ramdev says, but Jai Ho Baba! [Victory to the esteemed gentleman!]” (Vasudev 2018). Or this from a journalist: “As usual, ­there was the question about his views on homo­sexuality. I liked the way he answered (of course I did not take any answer seriously)—­‘Koī hāth ṭeḍhā karke khānā khāye, to maim kyā karūm?’” (What do I do if someone wants to eat with his hands twisted?) (Deka Nadeem

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2017). Cryptic warnings and even provocations to vio­lence seem to take on an air of levity and insubstantiality in the media, as Ramdev is rarely held to account, at least not directly, even by critical observers. For how can a renunciant be biased? ­After all, he has given up every­thing, even the very desire for t­ hings. ­There seems to be a yogic pre­ce­dent for every­thing he does. Ramdev, critically, draws upon kar­ma yoga, the notion in the Bhagavad-­gītā and elsewhere that a yogi need not renounce the world entirely. Instead, he can live in and even kill in that world so long as his intentions are pure and he is unconcerned with the fruits of his actions (Gandhi 2009). In fact, Ramdev goes further by criticizing permanent renunciants as being selfish. He says that he is a sā­dhu but adds that the idea of attaining one’s personal moksh and then blithely living on the generosity of ­others repels him. As Balkrishna said proudly of ninety-­one devotees who recently received dīkshā, or initiation, from Ramdev: “They ­w ill be new-­age swamis into productive activity. They ­won’t go into a cave and dis­appear from the world” (Mahurkar 2018). In keeping with this supposedly self-­effacing ethos, the found­ers say that their successor at Patanjali ­w ill also be a sanyāsī, or renunciant. In this vein, Ramdev says he wants to improve India through his teachings, his charity work, and not least, Patanjali’s ever-­expanding product line. “I d ­ on’t go around with the baggage [of having a ­family]. I have created brands. I want to make 1,000 such brands which ­w ill make India the world’s biggest economy by 2050,” he said. “If I had c­ hildren, they would have staked claim for Patanjali. [I would have told them] this Patanjali is not your ­father’s property, it belongs to the country” (“ ‘Na Biwi, Na Bache’ ” 2018). Ramdev’s supposed impartiality and far-­sightedness—he and Balkrishna always seem to be gazing benevolently like deities on labels and in ads—is what gives Patanjali its authenticity. Its products harness the yogi’s hard-­won knowledge and spiritual authority as well as his supposed basic goodness and selfless dedication to the nation. Multinational companies loot the motherland, Ramdev says, while Indian companies are forced to the margins. He wants to reverse this situation. Showing a talent for comic flair, he once said at a press conference, “I ­will make the MNCs [multinational corporations] do śirshāsanas [headstands]. . . . ​Ab tak Colgate kā to gate khul gayā, Nestle kā to pañchī uḍnevālā hai, Pantene kā to pant gīlā honevālā hai; aur do sāl mem, Unilever kā lever kharāb ho jāyega [The ‘gate’ in Colgate w ­ ill shut. The ­little Nestlé bird ­w ill fly away. Pantene ­will wet its pants, and the lever of Unilever w ­ ill break down]” (Deka 2016). Ramdev claims that he means t­hese companies no harm, but his nativism and nationalist posturing have become central to Patanjali’s brand identity. Patanjali, Ramdev says, plunges its profits back into research and charity. It is “a ser­vice for humanity, for the nation” (Worth 2018).

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Incidentally, Patanjali’s anti-­MNC push came alongside an RSS-­led campaign against a foreign direct investment bill, which it says w ­ ill jeopardize small shops and producers. “Though we got po­liti­cal freedom 70  years back, economic freedom is still a dream,” a newspaper advertisement for Patanjali reads (Sharma 2016). It continues: “The way East India Com­pany enslaved and looted us, multinational companies are still d ­ oing the same by selling soap, shampoo, toothpaste, cream, powder and similar daily items at exorbitant price” (Sharma 2016). Of Patanjali’s commercials with the same theme, a spokesperson says, “We telecast ­t hese ads during all shows which are not foreign, vulgar and violent” (“Nestlé India” 2016). In such ways is criticism of multinational corporations appropriated and leveraged into nationalist branding.

Cleaning and the Culture Wars For Ramdev, ­t here is always something plaguing India, and he is obsessed with the idea of cleansing the country. This brings us to the ­matter of cow urine, which Patanjali gathers by the ton. “Cow urine (gomutra ark) is the biggest natu­ral detoxicant. It not only kills toxins within the body but is beneficial for treating diseases ranging from obesity to cancer to kidney and liver ailments,” says Balkrishna (Singh 2017). Cow urine is a featured ingredient in Patanjali’s Gonyle, a cleaner that “purifies your h ­ ouse, kills all bacteria and is devoid of any chemicals.” Balkrishna says that the demand for Gonyle “is massive ­because yeh chemical mukt hai aur jadibooti [sic] yukt hai [it is ­free from chemicals and is loaded with herbs]. It’s cheaper than the phenyl you get in the market. Cow urine as disinfectant has been part of our culture and tradition” (Singh 2017). The advertising for the product is revealing (“Baba Ramdev’s Ad” 2017). Hovering in the top left corner of one ad are the numinous robed busts of Ramdev and Balkrishna—­t he instantly recognizable f­ aces of Patanjali. Beneath them is a sparkling, kite-­encircled ­bottle of Gonyle, which bears an illustration of a cow. The banner text declares: “STOP PUNISHING your HANDS with CHEMICAL based PHENYL.” This is followed by a mission-­driven product description: “On the occasion of Holy Makar Sankranti, join the movement to save the cow, our holy m ­ other, by embracing GONYLE, b ­ ecause mere sloganeering would not suffice to serve this mission. Let’s take a small initiative to f­ ree our motherland from the stigma of cow slaughtering.” A b ­ ubble below commands consumers to “Adopt Gonyle and prohibit the cows from being taken to slaughter ­houses.” And fi­nally, in a white, clean sweep left by a mop, the text tells of the product’s ingredients: “Made from holy Cow urine, Eucalyptus oil, Lemon grass, and anti-­ bacterial herbs.”

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The imagery is amateurish, which is also its strength. It lacks the polish and the overthought, focus-­grouped marketing of multinationals. As the designer Itu Chaudhuri recently argued, Patanjali’s “dismal” packaging actually helps sell its homespun offerings: “It casts Patanjali in a ‘rural’ persona, too artless to access design. This chain of meanings links to purity and an untouched-­by-­progress quality that accounts for the ‘true’ flavour of its ghee and the efficacy of its toothpaste” (Deka 2016). This point is made even more pointedly in a tele­v i­sion ad for Gonyle. A ­ fter describing a series of dirt-­a nd-­stain scenarios that are specifically Indian—­ multicolored Holi stains, grease rings from a gas canister u ­ nder the kitchen sink—­a sari-­clad ­woman says it’s not just difficult to clean deśī (­here, Indian) stains with a videśī (foreign) product, it’s impossible. ­After a mop is shown wiping a stained white marble floor clean, a ponytailed homemaker says brightly (and ominously): “Deś ko bhī aisī svadeśī safāī kī zarūrat hai [The country also needs to be cleansed in this same svadeśī or indigenous way].” The commercial closes with the visages of Baba Ramdev and Balkrishna side by side. The message is so overt it hardly needs interpreting. First is the idea that Indian stains are singular, so much so that foreign products cannot begin to clean them. “It is impossible,” says the sari-­clad actor, who emphasizes the uniqueness of India against the videśī world outside. Second, only Patanjali’s svadeśī products can deal with ­t hese stains. In a clear gesture ­toward Indian exceptionalism and Patanjali’s brand exceptionalism, we are shown before-­a nd-­a fter scenarios demonstrating the unique efficacy of the Ayurvedic concoction. But it is the last line that stands out like a provocation: the country needs to be cleansed in a like fashion. Ramdev’s links to the far right help put this message in context. In recent years, vigilante mobs called “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors) have hunted supposed cow “smugglers” and slaughterers, most of whom just happen to be Muslims and Dalits. Between May 2015 and December 2018, forty-­four ­people w ­ ere killed and 280 injured (­Human Rights Watch 2019). Rather than condemning the vio­lence, Ramdev defended the hard-­liners, who believe that laws to protect cows are not being fully enforced. He claimed that “a few” gau rakshaks might go overboard, but 90 ­percent are “genuine” p ­ eople. “No one speaks about cow smugglers,” he said. “Why are cow slaughterers given encouragement? It should never happen” (“Few ‘Gau Rakshaks’ Go Overboard” 2018). Playing to his base, Ramdev also called on Prime Minister Modi, whom he calls a rāshtra bhakt (devotee of the nation) and gau bhakt (devotee of the cow), to “enact a law to ban cow slaughter in the country” (“Few ‘Gau Rakshaks’ Go Overboard” 2018). In such a way, assaults on marginalized communities are written off as justifiable excesses in a quest to sanctify the nation.

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It is worth emphasizing ­here that ­there is a vague yogic pre­ce­dent that Ramdev draws upon to justify Patanjali’s messaging: haṭha yoga practices geared ­toward purifying the body (White 2011). While meditation was intended to ­settle the mind, the body remained in a state of disease. Medieval yogis practiced all manner of postural contrivances (headstands, spinal twists, e­ tc.) and grueling purification practices to cleanse their bodies—­like thrusting a stalk of plantain, turmeric, or cane down their esophagus and drawing it out slowly—to bring the body into a state of equilibrium.11 Purgation was a necessary means to enlightenment (if not a sufficient one) (Koestler 1960). Put simply, Ramdev’s impersonation takes such obsessions about purity and overlays them with nationalism. Moreover, Patanjali links the h ­ uman body to the nation’s polity. Thus, Ramdev tries to create a my­thol­ogy that “consumption of herbal (Patanjali products) ­will lead India resurrect its golden past” (Manoharan and Rakshit 2017, 150).

Conclusion: Playing the Yogi The history of yoga is as littered with examples of selfless compassion as it is by miracle-­working and deceit (Lorenzen and Muñoz 2011). Additionally, almost every­t hing we know about yogis comes to us through the veil of legend and hagiography (Callewaert and Snell 1994), and ­t here are yawning gaps in the historical rec­ord. Yogis have been admired and reviled in equal mea­sure. Nonetheless, we do know a bit about how yoga was practiced and how it has changed. Briefly, in the classical period it was primarily ascetical and premised on renunciation, meditation, and forest solitude (Samuel 2008). In the medieval period, the body assumed a new prominence as a vehicle of divinization. Some yogis also sought worldly power and used their skills to make a living. They haunted society at the margins as beasts and saints. The modern period marked a populist turn as yoga became a nationalist symbol and, paradoxically, a globalized health pursuit. All of ­t hese traces have formed the palimpsest that is yoga, and they run through the figure of Swami Baba Ramdev. The term impersonation is defined in the Introduction to this volume as “the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic per­for­ mance that is perceived as not one’s own.” In this regard, it is hard to know what to make of Swami Baba Ramdev—­a renunciant who has no prob­lem using renunciation for rather un-­yogic ends. Ramdev borrows and reframes āsanas from the history of yoga, as though giving new life to old r­ ecipes in cookbooks. He pressures high-­ranking officials to sign cow protection pledges. And he pays his employees poorly, exploiting their goodwill and l­abor. Ramdev tells his workers that their ­labor is a form of sevā, or ser­vice. “Penance in individual life, prosperity

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for ­others,” he says (Crair 2018; Worth 2018). Ramdev confidently strode onto the public stage in his ­gently heeled khaṛāūm (wooden sandals) through a mix of luck, opportunism, and drive. In a sense, he has earned the yogi’s faraway gaze, infectious laugh, and blissed-­out demeanor. To think that t­ hese qualities came of their own is to misunderstand the nature of his charisma and to fall for the myth. As with any convincing per­for­mance, Ramdev’s impersonation took effort and time. In his flexible deployment of yogic clichés, he is a man of the neoliberal moment in the truest sense. He moves from āsana to āsana, from product to product, and from press conference to press conference with dizzying ease. Ramdev now says he wants to stay out of politics, which is ironic considering he recently waded unbidden into a dispute over refugees and called for their summary deportation (“Illegal Immigrants” 2018). He has also authorized Patanjali’s move into security ser­v ices with a mandate to “develop military instinct in each and e­ very citizen of the country” (Kazmin 2017). Most recently, Patanjali started marketing an Ayurvedic product called “Coronil” that it claims can “cure” COVID-19 (on the basis of dubious in-­house studies). The Ministry of AYUSH was forced to come out against Coronil ­after a public backlash against this brazen attempt to profit off the pandemic. As a result, Patanjali is no longer allowed to market the product as a cure for COVID-19 (Dahiya 2020). It can, however, sell the supplement pack (whose main ingredient is the popu­lar herb aśvagandhā) as an “immunity booster” (“Patanjali to Sell Coronil” 2020). Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Ramdev says he never claimed that the product was a cure for the virus. Rather, it merely cured all ­t hose who have taken it. It is in such sophistry that figures like Ramdev dwell and revel. What is obvious is that yogis are not neutral actors, no ­matter how much they profess disinterest in worldly affairs, and in Ramdev we may have a wolf in sheep’s clothes.

Notes 1. Literally, “Hinduness,” but often connoting Hindu chauvinism and Hindu-­centric ideologies. 2. The remainder appears to be owned by Sarwan and Sunita Poddar, residents of Scotland and early investors in Patanjali. The ­couple also bought ­Little Cumbrae—an island of about 900 acres, for two million pounds—­a nd gifted it to Ramdev in 2009 (Joseph 2011). 3. The diacritics used in this chapter are according to the ALA-­LC Romanization ­tables for Hindi-­Urdu and Sans­k rit, and so vary according to which language is implied. Please note that ­t here is a discrepancy in the treatment of nasalized vowels in the two t­ ables, for example, parhams (Hindi), and Gheraṇḍasaṃhitā (Sans­k rit). ­There is also a discrepancy in the treatment of sibilants in the two ­t ables, for example, ”shi (Hindi), and Mahābhāṣya (Sans­k rit). 4. Āyush, a Hindi word derived from Sans­k rit, means “life,” with implications of a long life at that.

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5. Also see Chacko (2018) on “Hindutva capitalism.” 6. See National Museum of Asian Art, “T. Krishnamacharya Asanas,” https://­a sia​.­si​ .­edu​/­exhibition​/­t​-­k rishnamacharya​-­asanas​/­. 7. ­Those desirous of a more fanciful account can consult Swami Ramdev: The Untold Story (2018), a hagiographic serial streaming globally on Netflix. It was originally released as Swami Ramdev: Ek Sangharsh on Discovery Jeet. 8. The swami returned to this experience just last year, when he routed an Olympic medal–­w inning Ukrainian wrestler 12–0 in a televised bout. 9. Tālīm (education), ironically, is derived from Arabic. 10. At the Sadbhawana Sammelanin in Rohtak in 2017—an RSS-­ organized rally—­ Ramdev said, “If he ­wasn’t bound by the law, he could behead lakhs of ­people refusing to chant ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ ” (“Arrest Warrant against Ramdev” 2017). 11. The seventeenth-­century text Gheraṇḍasaṃhitā (Vasu 1895, 6) states that “By this pro­ cess all the phlegm, bile, and other impurities are expelled” and “heart disease is surely cured.”

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Dahiya, Himanshi. 2020. “Cancer, HIV, COVID: Patanjali’s Long List of Murky, Unproven Cures.” The Quint, June  30. https://­w ww​.­t hequint​.­com​/­news​/­webqoof​ /­patanjali​-­ramdev​-­coronil​-a­ nd​-­t he​-­long​-­list​-­exaggerated​-­unproven​-­cures. Deka, Kaushik. 2016. “Power Yogi: How Baba Ramdev Became India’s Swadeshi FMCG Baron.” India ­Today, July 13. https://­w ww​.­indiatoday​.­in​/­magazine​/­cover​-­story​/­story​ /­20160725​-­baba​-­ramdev​-­patanjali​-­yoga​-­829230–2016–07–13. —­—­—. 2017. “The Truth I Learnt about Ramdev and Patanjali.” Daily O, April 29. https://­ www​.d ­ ailyo​.­in​/v­ ariety​/b ­ aba​-r­ amdev​-­phenomenon​-­yoga​-­patanjali​/­story​/1­ ​/1­ 6926​.­html. De Michelis, Elizabeth. 2004. A History of Modern Yoga. London: Continuum. Deogharia, Jaideep. 2015. “Ramdev Feels He Has Been Denied a Nobel Prize B ­ ecause of His Complexion.” Times of India, November 7. https://­timesofindia​.­indiatimes​.­com​ /­i ndia ​ /­B aba​ -­R amdev​ -­feels​ -­h e​ -­h as​ -­b een​ -­d enied​ -­a​ -­Nobel​ -­prize​ -­b ecause​ -­o f​ -­h is​ -­complexion​/­articleshow​/­49704561​.­cms. Desikachar, Kausthub. 2011. The Yoga of the Yogi: The Legacy of T. Krishnamacharya. New York: Macmillan. Deslippe, Phillip. 2018. “Mythical Posturing: Hagiography, History, and Scholarly Judgment in Recent Works on Modern Yoga and Hinduism in Amer­i­ca.” Nova Religio 21, no. 3:103–109. “Dhirendra Brahmachari, Yoga Master, 70.” 1994. New York Times, June 10. https://­www​ .­nytimes​.­com​/­1994​/­06​/­10​/­obituaries​/­dhirendra​-­brahmachari​-­yoga​-­master​-­70​.­html. “Few ‘Gau Rakshaks’ Go Overboard, Malign ‘90% Genuine’ P ­ eople: Baba Ramdev.” 2018. NDTV, August 12. https://­w ww​.­ndtv​.­com​/­india​-n ­ ews​/­few​-­gau​-­rakshaks​-­go​-­overboard​ -­malign​-9­ 0​-­genuine​-­people​-­baba​-­ramdev​-­1899373. Foxen, Anya P. 2017. Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gandhi, Shreena Niketa Divyakant. 2009. “Translating, Practicing and Commodifying Yoga in the U.S.” PhD dissertation, University of Florida. Hausner, Sandra. 2007. Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Hi­ma­la­yas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heehs, Peter. 2008. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. New York: Columbia University Press. “Homo­sexuality Is a Disease, Yoga Can Cure It: Ramdev.” 2013. Deccan Chronicle, December 12. https://­w ww​.­deccanchronicle​.­com​/­131211​/­news​-­current​-­a ffairs​/­article​ /­homosexuality​-­disease​-­yoga​-­can​-­cure​-­it​-­ramdev. ­Human Rights Watch. 2019. Violent Cow Protection in India. New York: ­Human Rights Watch. “Illegal Immigrants ­Will Create 10 Kashmir-­Like Prob­lems for India, Says Ramdev.” 2018. Hindustan Times, August  10. https://­w ww​.­h industantimes​.­com​/­i ndia​-­news​ /­i llegal​-­i mmigrants​-­w ill​-­create​-­10 ​-­k ashmir​-­l ike​-­problems​-­for​-­i ndia​-­says​-­ramdev​ /­story​-­CRiPTNmKwk7W5ctBI2ARjL ​.­html. Isherwood, Christopher. 2001. My Guru and His Disciple. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jain, Andrea. 2014. Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joseph, Jozy. 2011. “NRI C ­ ouple Holds Big Stake in Baba Ramdev’s Empire.” Times of ­ RI​-c­ ouple​-­holds​-­big​-s­ take​ India, June 9. https://­timesofindia​.­indiatimes​.­com​/­india​/N -­in​-B ­ aba​-­Ramdevs​-­empire​/a­ rticleshow​/­8782945​.­cms.

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Kazmin, Amy. 2017. “Indian Guru Baba Ramdev Expands into Private Security.” Financial Times, July 12. https://­w ww​.­ft​.­com​/­content​/­c33ea410–66f9–11e7–8526–7b3 8dcaef614. Koestler, Arthur. 1960. The Lotus and the Robot. New York: MacMillan. Limaye, Yogita. 2015. “The Yoga Guru Turned Com­pany Boss.” BBC News, December 21. https://­w ww​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​/ ­business​-­35097567. Lorenzen, David N. 1978. “Warrior Ascetics in Indian History.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 98, no. 1:61–75. Lorenzen, David N., and Adrián Muñoz. 2011. Yogi Heroes and Poets: Histories and Legends of the Naths. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mahurkar, Uday. 2018. “How Baba Ramdev Is Grooming His Army of Sanyasis.” Daily O, April 11. https://­w ww​.­dailyo​.­in​/­variety​/­baba​-­ramdev​-­celibacy​-­patanjali​-­yogpeeth​ -­acharya​-­balkrishna​-­swadeshi​-­yoga​/­story​/­1​/­23411​.­html. Manoharan, Bupesh, and Krishanu Rakshit. 2017. “Patanjali Ayurved: The Guru and the Myth-­Making.” Latin American Advances in Consumer Research 4:150. McCartney, Patrick. 2019. “Stretching into the Shadows: Unlikely Alliances, Strategic Syncretism, and De-­Post-­Colonizing Yogaland’s ‘Yogatopia(s).’ ” Asian Ethnology 78, no. 2:373–402. “ ‘Na Biwi, Na Bache’: Ramdev Attributes His Happiness to Bachelorhood.” 2018. Outlook, April  8. https://­w ww​.­outlookindia​.­com​/­website​/­story​/­na​-­biwi​-­na​-­bache​-­ramdev​ -­attributes​-­his​-­happiness​-­to​-­bachelorhood​/­310611. “ ‘Nehru, Modi Became PMs as They Practiced Yoga’: Baba Ramdev.” 2019. NDTV, February 20. https://­w ww​.­ndtv​.­com​/­india​-­news​/ ­baba​-­ramdev​-­says​-­jawaharlal​-­nehru​ -­narendra​-­modi​-­became​-­pm​-­as​-­t hey​-­practiced​-­yoga​-­1996125. “Nestlé India C ­ ounters Baba Ramdev’s Charges, Reaffirms ‘Indianness.’ ” 2016. Livemint, November  8. https://­w ww​.­l ivemint​.­com​/­C ompanies​/­6Rj0mFV3Uyjv5EhRWD2srJ​ /­Nestl​-­India​-­counters​-­Baba​-­Ramdevs​-­charges​-­reaffirms​-­Indi​.­html. “Patanjali to Sell Coronil as ‘Immunity Booster,’ Not ‘Cure for COVID-19.’ ” 2020. The Hindu, July 1. https://­w ww​.­t hehindu​.­com​/­news​/­national​/­patanjali​-­can​-­sell​-­its​-­d rug​ -­but​-­not​-­ascureto​-­covid​-­19​-­says​-­union​-­health​-­ministry​/­article31962529​.­ece. Pinch, William. 2006. Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “PM Should Become a Baba Like Us, Says Baba Ramdev.” 2012. India ­Today, August 4. https://­w ww​.­indiatoday​.­in​/­india​/­north​/­story​/­baba​-­ramdev​-­a mbedkar​-­stadium​-­fast​ -­parliament​-­113214​-­2012​- ­08​-­14. “Ramdev on Being Caught Dressed as a ­Woman.” 2011. NDTV, June 6. https://­w ww​.­ndtv​ .­com​/­india​-­news​/­ramdev​-­on​-­being​-­caught​-­dressed​-­as​-­a​-­woman​-­457723. Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 1998. “Swami Vivekananda’s Construction of Hinduism.” In Swami Vivekananda and the Modernization of Hinduism, edited by William Radice, 1–16. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Samuel, Geoffrey. 2008. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth ­Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanskar TV. 2018. “Swami Ramdev Ji—­Ek Sangharsh | Discovery Jeet | Special Promo—2.” YouTube, January 27. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v ​= S­ FsplN4VPsQ. “Saraswati’s Writings Inspired Ramdev, Quit School, Fled Home to Join Gurukul.” 2017. Deccan Chronicle, April  30. https://­w ww​.­deccanchronicle​.­com​/­nation​/­in​-­other​-­news​

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CHAPTER 6

The Freedom to Dance PERFORMANCE ­ ­ AND IMPERSONATION IN LAGAN Aniruddha Dutta “That dreamland to which you, my dear mother, sent me, there they put ghuṅur (anklets) on my feet. . . . Your Papai danced all night as the fairy of their dreams. The days when my dance could not please them . . . they ripped my feet with sharpened razors . . . yet I did not stop dancing. . . . They tasted my body all night long. Not one, but a thousand vultures. They poured their poisonous saliva on my body. . . . This deadly disease is a gift from them. . . . HIV! . . . now all my days, all my nights are over. Now I will go to another land of dreams. . . . Mā, will you see my dance, my launḍā dance?” —Excerpt from T”tīẏa kaṇṭha (Third Voice) [translated by author]

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n October 10, 2007, a play named T”tīẏa kaṇṭha was staged at Berhampore, the headquarters of the district of Murshidabad in West Bengal, eastern India. Written by Seema Sarkar, a local theatre activist and radio anchor, the play was produced by Madhya Banglar Sangram (The Strug­gle of Mid-­Bengal), a community-­based organ­ization of transgender and gender-­variant ­people of the region. Sangram mostly works with kotis (also spelled kothis) and hijṛās, communities that consist of a spectrum of feminine-­identified ­people assigned male at birth, including ­those who describe themselves as feminine males, as w ­ omen, 1 as a separate gender, or as a combination of ­t hese subject positions. While the playwright was not from the community herself, all the performers ­were koti and/or trans-­identified. As suggested by the quoted excerpt, the play is a tragedy centered on the protagonist Papai. Raised as a boy but visibly effeminate, Papai ­faces derision and stigma within her neighborhood in a small town in West Bengal. Unable to bear the social shame, her ­mother connives with an agent, who takes Papai to the neighboring state of Bihar, where ­t here is an established cultural tradition of employing launḍās or cross-­dressed feminine 127

boys to dance during wedding ceremonies. Papai financially uplifts her f­ amily through her earnings, but she is also expected to flirt and do sex work with male audience members and is subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse, ultimately contracting HIV/AIDS. The play is both a tragic melodrama and a cautionary tale. Written and performed at a time when launḍā nāc (launḍā dance) was becoming an increasingly popu­lar livelihood choice for koti-­hijṛā ­people in Murshidabad, it was clearly meant to warn community members about the dangers of this occupation. Ironically enough, Kanchana, the transgender and koti-­identified member of Sangram who performed the role of Papai, eventually went on to become a launḍā dancer herself.2 Six years l­ ater, in the summer of 2013, she dropped into my ­hotel room in Berhampore during one of my fieldwork visits to the area. She had just returned from her first trip to the state of Uttar Pradesh, where she had performed in launḍā nāc or lagan, as the practice is also known. She was elated about her time ­t here: “­There is a lot of khātir-­sammān [ac­cep­tance and re­spect] for launḍās ­t here!” She went on, “I called up Seema-­di [the playwright] and told her . . . ​[that] a lot of the play needs to be changed! No one knifes you or rips you with razors!” She concluded, “Only 2 ­percent of what ­people say about lagan is true, the rest is false.” This narrative symptomatizes larger contradictions between activists’ and performers’ discourses around lagan or launḍā nāc—­a performative practice where feminine boys or trans ­people known as launḍās or laganvālīs, many of whom are mi­grants from Bengal, dance in socially designated female attire at weddings and socioreligious festivals in parts of northern India such as eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar (Dasgupta 2013; Morcom 2013). Among nongovernmental and community-­based organ­izations (NGOs and CBOs) that work with LGBT ­people, launḍā nāc is commonly seen as a dangerous and last-­ditch livelihood option where the poorest and most vulnerable sections of trans communities face exploitation, sexual abuse, and exposure to sexually transmitted infections. A 2007 report produced by the Kolkata-­based community organ­ization PLUS (­People Like Us) sums up this stance: The laundas . . . ​spice up the entertainment barometer at the marriages in the Hindi heartland . . . ​[which have] a fair rustic dose of merrymaking, drinking, m ­ usic and dance. ­Here young effeminate boys dance in marriage pro­cessions and ceremonies, dressed in w ­ omen’s clothing. Laundas (young boys) used to be hired by poor families that could not afford more expensive ­women dancers. Gradually launda naach became very popu­lar . . . ​ especially in feudal areas of Bihar and UP (Uttar Pradesh). The dancers mainly belong to . . . ​poor families mainly from West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh. . . . ​As the night pro­g ress [sic] the songs become risqué, com128

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plemented by vulgar and obscene body movements . . . ​d runken men . . . ​ hurl abuse at the dancers. (Lahiri and Kar 2007, 6–7) Launḍā nāc is thus associated with rustic vulgarity, feudalism, and patriarchy, which are seen as characteristic of the “Hindi heartland.” This fits within a larger discourse on the putative backwardness of rural and small-­town UP and Bihar relative to the rest of India. Feminine-­attired per­for­mance by male-­ assigned ­people in cultural genres such as launḍā nāc, which may involve both non-­trans female impersonators and gender-­variant performers, is seen as particularly symptomatic of such regional backwardness (Cohen 2008, 38). For middle-­class progressives, such genres evoke the patriarchal restrictions on female performers in traditional arenas of per­for­mance, while they are also derided by dominant castes for their association with the licentiousness and homoeroticism that putatively characterize “low” cultural forms related to nondominant castes (Dost 2017, 107–111). LGBT NGOs add a specific aspect to this discourse by highlighting the sexualized victimhood of transgender and same sex–­desiring performers, which is instrumentalized to gain funding for community advocacy and HIV-­prevention ser­v ices.3 In contrast to elite commentators, performers like Kanchana provide a dif­ fer­ent win­dow into the world of launḍā nāc or lagan. In our conversations, Kanchana and her peers at Murshidabad did not shy away from describing some of the challenges they faced during lagan—­including lecherous and occasionally aggressive men, harsh living and working conditions, and fierce competition with both other kotis and cisgender female dancers. Yet they also unhesitatingly condemned the simplistic portrayal of lagan in NGO discourse, underlining the re­spect and economic in­de­pen­dence such work provided. Indeed, during an NGO program in Kolkata in August 2011, some kotis staged a play on lagan where Bihar was described as a “svādhīn deś”—­free land or land of freedom—­ quite in contrast to the ste­reo­t yped repre­sen­ta­tion of the region’s backwardness. Meanwhile at Berhampore, Kanchana’s peers Priyanka and Guriya described how they missed the “fun” they had in UP and Bihar when they returned home. Such rejection of victimhood narratives by lagan dancers might seem to be yet another case of the re­sis­tance to NGO-­and m ­ iddle class–­led programs of governance and empowerment, paralleling the case of sex workers who reject rescue operations by anti-­trafficking groups and rural Indian ­women who refuse to participate in feminist governance proj­ects (Soderlund 2005; Roy 2017). Indian liberal media and queer activism create metrocentric teleologies of pro­gress that position metropolitan queer communities as the vanguard for their disempowered rural or small-­town brethren to follow (Dutta 2017), paralleling transnational discourses of queer developmentalism that construct linear teleologies of sexual modernization, and position Euro-­A merican socie­t ies and LGBT subjects as Dutta

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ideals to which ­others must catch up (Mason 2018). In that context, the reclamation of putatively backward regions and violent livelihood options by lagan dancers suggests the limitations of elite pro­gress narratives and top-­down models of empowerment. Further, the narratives of laganvālīs go beyond just a rejection of elite-­led empowerment, and suggest varied ways of exerting agency and claiming space that do not follow linear teleologies or metrocentric geographies of pro­g ress. Rather than idealizing the “freedom” and “fun” of lagan, performers like Priyanka assert that the challenging working conditions of lagan can be gradually overcome by becoming more pākki—­a koti-­hijṛā usage that literally denotes ripeness, and connotes maturity or wisdom in the ways of the world. In this context, being pākki entails becoming more informed about the region, culture, and language, and more ­adept at navigating the performative practices of lagan. In this essay, I explore how lagan dancers undergo varied trajectories of “ripening” or maturation that not only undo elite understandings of backwardness and victimhood, but also illuminate the individually and contextually specific ways in which they negotiate and assert their agency within the structural forms of vio­lence and exploitation that frame their occupation. I build on previous studies that provide complex repre­sen­ta­tions of launḍā dancers beyond narrow tropes of gendered and sexualized victimhood (Dasgupta 2013; Morcom 2013).4 But I also seek to go beyond generalized repre­sen­ta­tions of transgender agency through a diversified understanding of per­for­mance in lagan. Rohit Dasgupta primarily sees kotis as choosing launḍā nāc due to economic compulsion and the lack of other spaces for expressing femininity (2013, 443–447), while Anna Morcom stresses the general attraction of kotis ­toward dance as a means of feminine self-­realization (2013, 100–102). While ­t hese are impor­tant motivations for many dancers, the koti-­hijṛā spectrum evinces a diversity of subject positions, including ­people who remain in male attire in everyday life or are married to ­women (Dutta and Roy 2014, 325). Such gendered diversity is manifested in varied negotiations with the feminized performative practices of lagan. As I argue, lagan dancers become pākki or a­ dept in their agential negotiation with the exploitative practices of lagan by cultivating and performing varied gendered personas that differ in subtle or broad ways from their gendered subjectivities and expressions in quotidian contexts. The concept of “impersonation,” particularly in some of its nuanced scholarly articulations, provides a productive framework for analyzing such agential per­for­mance, but also necessitates certain qualifications. The dictionary definition of impersonation—­“an act of pretending to be another person for the purpose of entertainment or fraud”—­assumes a clear dichotomy between real and fictive identities (Oxford Living Dictionaries n.d.). Much recent scholarship on impersonation, including this volume, seeks to “unsettle the binary between impersonation and per130

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sonation, and fictive and au­then­tic identity” (Mankekar 2015, 189). Following Judith Butler’s deconstructive critique of gender, impersonation may be said to reveal the performative nature of all identities, throwing the stable referentiality of an originary identity (and its authenticity relative to the impersonation) into question (Mankekar 2015, 189). And yet the very framing of any act as “impersonation” has to presume the reference point of a social (even if not essential or ontological) identity in relation to which such acts may be distinguished as impersonation. In the case of the actors of South Asian per­for­mance genres such as Parsi theatre who are termed “female impersonators” in the lit­er­a­ture, their social male identity, including multiple heterosexual marriages for actors like Bal Gandharva, serves as such a reference point—­even when scholars like Kathryn Hansen show how impersonation trou­bles their putative heterosexual maleness, and how their assumed personas help define cisgender womanhood rather than being merely imitative (Hansen 2001, 70–72). While “female impersonator” may be a useful descriptor for performers whose primary social identity remains heteromasculine outside per­for­mance spaces, even a nuanced sense of female impersonation could be a potentially violent imputation for trans and gender nonconforming ­people by reinforcing their social assignment as male, given that trans feminine ­people have often been delegitimized and even criminalized on the accusation of emulating or impersonating femaleness (Serano 2016, 161–193). Unlike the aforementioned “female impersonators,” koti and hijṛā laganvālīs do not take on gendered personas that are clearly distinct from their social identity or personal subjectivity, given that they are often visibly feminine-­ expressing, and as Morcom notes, may be socially perceived as being like ­women (2013, 198). While the social or personal identities of some kotis do overlap with masculinity, and male-­attired kotis may describe dressing up for lagan as meẏe sājā (dressing as ­women), their quotidian male pre­sen­ta­tion and distinction from womanhood do not imply an identification with mainstream cisgender maleness. The intra-­community “languages” or codes used by kotis and hijṛās distinguish male-­attired kotis, who are described by vari­ous regionally varied terms such as kaṛi kotis or kaṛā-­cātlā kotis, from men, called pārikh, panti, ṭonnā, and so on (Reddy 2005, 75; Dutta and Roy 2014, 325).5 While even relatively masculine-­ presenting koti dancers cannot be understood through the implicit male/female binary of “female impersonation” that would elide their nonbinary positioning within koti-­hijṛā languages, the feminized per­for­mances of lagan are also not simply expressions of a preexisting or repressed femininity. Rather than just rooted in stable essences, gender must be continually (re)constituted as an embodied social fact through iterative per­ for­mances (Butler 1999; Morcom 2013, 96). In that regard, lagan per­for­mances involve—­indeed necessitate—­contextual renegotiations and transformations of Dutta

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the dancers’ gender expressions in individually varied ways, which may be understood as “impersonation” in the sense of the situational cultivation and intensification of specific personas that are neither rigidly distinct from, nor simply continuous with, their gender outside lagan. As I seek to demonstrate through interviews and ethnographic interactions with lagan dancers, their varied trajectories of becoming pākki (ripe) involve mastering situational per­ for­mances of gender, class, and caste so as to minimize exploitation and vio­lence while maximizing economic returns and personal satisfaction.6 Through an overview of the context and systemic practices of lagan followed by an analy­sis of personal narratives, the following sections seek to show how cultivating situated modes of per­for­mance and impersonation may be crucial to realizing the contradictory freedoms of lagan.

Lagan or Launḍā Nāc: Issues of Naming Launḍā nāc—­literally, “boy dance”—is a vaguely defined category that conflates several per­for­mance genres, and hence it might be useful to disambiguate my usage before ­going on. In colloquial Bhojpuri and Hindi, launḍā literally means a boy or young male; however, “in everyday life, it is considered a derogatory term, suggesting a man who is effeminate, vulgar, immature and from an inferior class or caste” (Dost 2017, 106). Launḍā nāc has been applied as a pejorative label to theatrical traditions of UP and Bihar such as nāc or bidesiyā, which involve acting, singing, and dancing, and are performed in Bhojpuri, mostly by Dalit (oppressed caste) ­people (Dost 2017, 107–108). Like several other theatrical genres, ­here female roles are performed by male-­assigned p ­ eople who may or may not be gender-­variant and often live socially as married men (Hansen 2001; Morcom 2013). Nevertheless, ­there may be homoerotic dimensions, including risqué jokes, in the interactions between male-­assigned actors performing female roles and male audience members (Dost 2017, 108). The labeling of this genre as launḍā nāc derives from the dominant-­caste derision of its putative lowly vulgarity, and posits the performers as insufficiently masculine hijṛās or “eunuchs,” irrespective of their self-­identification (Dost 2017, 111). However, launḍā nāc may also be used to describe public dancing by male-­a ssigned persons in female attire during wedding ceremonies, which is particularly prevalent in the Ballia district of eastern UP and western districts of Bihar (Morcom 2013, 174). Relative to nāc and bidesiyā, the involvement of transgender or gender-­variant performers in this nontheatrical form of launḍā nāc is more explicit and public: many if not most dancers are from koti and hijṛā communities, including many mi­g rants from West Bengal who travel to the region during the wedding seasons between April and June in the summer, and 132

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December and February in the winter (Lahiri and Kar 2007, 6). Gender-­variant ­people local to UP or Bihar find it harder to participate in such launḍā nāc, both ­because they might consider it low status relative to theatrical genres like nauṭaṅkī, and b ­ ecause of their proximity to their families and concerns about disgracing ­family honor (Morcom 2013, 180). It is this genre, rather than nāc or bidesiyā, that I am concerned with. Among mi­grant launḍā dancers, this form of launḍā nāc is also commonly referred to as lagan, which connotes the auspicious time range within which wedding rituals may be conducted (Lahiri and Kar 2007, 6). Given the disparaging connotations of launḍā, koti and hijṛā dancers of my acquaintance typically call themselves laganvālīs (lagan performers), although they are often called launḍās in the per­for­mance context and sometimes also refer to themselves as such, particularly in humorous or ironic ways. Henceforth, I use lagan and laganvālī to denote the per­for­mance practice and performers, respectively, both to avoid confusion with other connotations of launḍā nāc and in accordance with my interlocutors’ usages.

The Per­for­mance Context of Lagan: Challenges and Lures Lagan is a complexly structured practice involving several layers of agents, middlemen, and group leaders through which laganvālīs are recruited and or­ ga­nized into groups. Laganvālīs typically work u ­ nder the aegis of a leader variably known as the master, mālik, baiṇḍvālā, or pārṭīvālā—­a man who organizes a troupe or band of dancers and musicians and arranges for contracts with ­house­holds that sponsor the per­for­mances. First-­t ime performers are usually recruited through agents located in West Bengal, many of whom are se­nior or retired laganvālīs who now work as recruiters and middlemen. Th ­ ese agents spot kotis in their locales and connect them with masters in Bihar or UP, and in return receive payment from the masters and sometimes from dancers as well. For instance, Kanchana, Priyanka, and Guriya in Berhampore, Murshidabad, w ­ ere contacted by Sraboni, a hijṛā community member in the region who had worked for several years as a laganvālī; she took them to Ballia, where she arranged contracts for them with vari­ous pārṭīvālās. While ­going to lagan was a relatively new practice for the kotis at Murshidabad that only began in the 2000s, other districts of West Bengal such as Nadia, North 24 Parganas, and Kolkata evidence longer histories of migration for lagan. In Nadia, Shyamoli-­mā (mother-­ Shyamoli) and Dilip-­dā (dā: elder b ­ rother) are well-­k nown laganvālīs from the 1990s who subsequently became agents; Shyamoli-­mā passed away in 2007, while Dilip-­dā is still working. Shyamoli lived in feminine attire in her daily life and never married, while Dilip only cross-­dressed during lagan and subsequently Dutta

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became a married ­house­holder; he is comfortable with male appellations like dā, while conceding his femininity and premarital history of same-­sex relationships—­ which suggests the gender diversity within koti and laganvālī communities. While agents like Sraboni, Shyamoli, or Dilip serve as crucial entry points into the lagan network for new recruits, more experienced laganvālīs typically prefer to contact masters/pārṭīvālās and negotiate their contracts by themselves, as g­ oing through middlemen might entail giving a portion of their earnings to their recruiter in addition to the master. Thus, a­ fter Kanchana and Priyanka had made their own contacts in Ballia, they forsook Sraboni’s assistance. Although payment systems are changing and variable, the contracts that I learned about during my fieldwork period (2007–2018) have been typically of two kinds. One is the seasonal contract or ṭhekā, which binds the laganvālī to one par ­t ic­u ­lar band or troupe for the entire wedding season, with the total payment ranging roughly between 15,000 and 30,000 rupees (about US$200–400) depending on the length of the contract, the experience of the laganvālī, and so on. The second system—­often preferred by more experienced laganvālīs in West Bengal—is the per-­night system (sometimes referred to as night-­basis), where fees are paid to performers for individual per­for­mances that often stretch overnight, rather than for the entire season. Payments can range anywhere between Rs. 500 and Rs. 6,000 per night, again depending on a variety of f­ actors such as the performer’s experience and se­niority, how far they fulfill feminine beauty norms, and even specific attributes such as skin tone and hair length. Apart from t­ hese contractual payments, ­there is also the chuṭ—­spontaneous contributions made by male audience members during dance per­for­mances, often in the form of cash thrown at the performers as they dance—as well as sex work on the side. The money received as chuṭ is usually divided between the pārṭīvālā and the dancer as per a previously agreed-­upon ratio, typically ādhiyā or 50:50, but also sometimes only 25 ­percent for the dancer. Negotiating contracts is a tough and competitive business. This was brought home to me during a par­tic­u­lar interaction with laganvālīs and a pārṭīvālā or master from Bihar in 2012. On October 22 of that year, I was returning from a fieldwork trip to Berhampore and was on a train to Kolkata with Bindiya, a hijṛā community member who had followed a variety of professions including lagan and sex work before joining the hijṛā profession of badhāī (blessing newborn ­children in middle-­class ­house­holds for money and gifts). Two young kotis in male attire, whom I recognized from previous events or­ga­nized by the CBO Sangram, boarded the train with two men, who turned out to be masters. During the ensuing conversation, it came out that Muzzafar and Abha, the two kotis, ­were planning to go for lagan ­after facing police trou­ble while ­doing sex work in female attire at Berhampore, and ­were trying to negotiate a contract with one of

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the masters. They turned to Bindiya for guidance as a se­nior hijṛā with experience of lagan, and the following conversation ensued: BINDIYA: Take them on night-­basis at 1,250 rupees for each per night, total 2,500 per night. PĀRṬĪVĀLĀ: And what about the chuṭ—­ādhiyā [half]? BINDIYA: No, for chuṭ you can take 75 ­percent as usually, the share is ādhiyā when dancers are taken on a ṭhekā [seasonal contract] . . . ​for night-­basis, 75–25 is standard. PĀRṬĪVĀLĀ [­after mulling over the deal]: It ­won’t do! BINDIYA: So as per your judgment, how much would you pay each of them? PĀRṬĪVĀLĀ [indicating Muzzafar, who is fairer than Abha]: Rs. 1,000 per night for this one, and [indicating Abha] Rs. 500 for that one. ABHA [visibly stung but calm, smiles]: O Mā [­mother], listen to his claptrap! BINDIYA: That w ­ on’t do! . . . ​[­after hurried consultation with Muzzafar and Abha] Fine, pay her [Muzzafar] 1,200 and her [Abha] 800! [Pārṭīvālā looks unconvinced.] BINDIYA: Okay, you think it over, but ­later, a­ fter y­ ou’ve de­cided the contract together, finalize it on stamped court paper and make every­one sign it! This conversation demonstrated to me the explicit valuation and hierarchization of performers as per gendered and colorist beauty ideals such as fairness, as well as the seriousness of monetary agreements as demonstrated by the reference to stamped contracts. In Murshidabad and Nadia, I heard several anecdotes about newbies who had not signed explicit agreements and ­were l­ater cheated of their payments or of their share of chuṭ money by masters or other laganvālīs. In that context, skill and experience in choosing pārṭīvālās and agents and negotiating contracts is considered a key aspect of becoming pākki or ­adept at lagan. During a community gathering in August 2011 at Ranaghat, Nadia, where several laganvālīs ­were pre­sent, Manorama, a se­nior laganvālī, lectured younger kotis on the necessity of arriving at transparent contracts and boasted of her experienced skill in ­doing so, aided by her intimate knowledge of vari­ous masters and agents. She contrasted the recruiting practices of the late Shyamoli-­mā with ­those of Dilip. Shyamoli-­mā had been strict and yet ultimately helpful and kind; her pro­cess for selecting laganvālīs was compared to the practice of kane dekhā—­ when prospective brides are inspected for their beauty and domestic skills by the groom’s ­family. Yet, once Shyamoli-­mā selected someone, she would help them by lending them sātrā (feminine attire) and personally grooming them; moreover, her monetary demands ­were always transparently laid out from the outset (typically about 20 ­percent of the performer’s earnings). Dilip, in contrast,

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was disparaged as a gānḍu (roughly, asshole) who was not transparent in his dealings and often demanded a greater share when he saw that a performer had earned well. Like Bindiya’s help with lagan negotiations, this session underscored the importance of forging contacts with trustworthy se­nior laganvālīs and respectfully deferring to them as sources of valuable insider knowledge. One par­tic­u­lar form of pākkipan (way of being pākki) advised by Bindiya was to start on the ṭhekā or seasonal contract and then proceed to night-­basis contracts a­ fter gaining more experience: “It is better to go on ṭhekā the first time as one can stay with the master and learn every­thing, what kind of dances to do in the bride’s ­house, what to do in the groom’s h ­ ouse . . . ​but you have to go wherever and do what­ever they tell you to!” Hence, more experienced laganvālīs in Nadia and Murshidabad typically prefer the more flexible night-­basis contracts; while they are usually hired for a certain minimum number of nights by the master, they can opt out of par­tic­u­lar per­ for­mances or come back early without jeopardizing their entire payment. However, securing decent contracts is only one of the challenges on the way to becoming pākki or ripened laganvālīs. For many new performers, living conditions and sexual vio­lence pose greater immediate threats, and drive some away from f­ uture involvement in lagan. Perhaps the most common complaint that I heard from laganvālīs was their initial difficulty with their living arrangements and diet. Pooja, a young koti from Nadia who first went for lagan in 2013, described how the food they ­were given in the ­houses of the masters, where they w ­ ere accommodated, was almost inedible. Priyanka from Murshidabad, who began working as a laganvālī in June 2013, narrated: “We w ­ ere put up in a shed beside the ­house with the ­cattle; the first night, I was just given plain rice with only a raw onion and some green chilies to eat!” Unable to subsist on this diet, she and her companions planned to run away and go back home, but only she and another troupe member ­were able to escape; the ­others ­were detained by the master ­u ntil the season was over. Other kotis at Nadia described their difficulties with having to adjust to open defecation in fields, given the absence of toilets in the ­houses of most masters. Perhaps an even greater difficulty is posed by the demanding workplace conditions of lagan, including the threat of sexual vio­lence. A typical wedding ceremony begins in the morning and continues till late night, and laganvālīs are expected to perform for most of that time. In an interview in January 2015, Priyanka described how they are expected to arrive all dressed up at the groom’s ­house by 10:00 in the morning, a­ fter which they dance in the courtyard till lunchtime. A ­ fter lunch, they are allowed to rest till about 3:00 p.m., a­ fter which they have to dance again as the groom’s pro­cession to the bride’s h ­ ouse, or parchāvan, is being prepared. They then dance with the pro­cession as it makes its way to the bride’s h ­ ouse, which could be several miles away. Then they dance

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at the entrance to the bride’s h ­ ouse during the dvār pūjā or dvār barāt, when the bride’s ­family receives and honors the groom and his entourage. This might go on for almost two hours in the eve­ning. And then at night t­ here is a mahfil or gathering as the wedding takes place, when they must dance for at least three more hours. All this adds up to about nine or more hours of continuous dancing; if they curtail the per­for­mance due to exhaustion, their pay might be reduced. At vari­ous points during this demanding routine, men from the wedding party or the neighborhood flirt with and sometimes accost or assault dancers. Pooja’s experience was especially stark, as she told me in June 2013: The men would pull and shove us around . . . ​they harassed us most during the dvār pūjā. Some would try to kiss us and bite our lips, they would rub our makeup off our cheeks; we would look like we’d been raped. Sometimes I felt like taking every­t hing off and showing that I too had a penis! Once, someone groped me and inserted his fin­ger into my anus even as I was trying to keep dancing. . . . ​I cried out in pain! Nor is such abuse necessarily confined to the time of the per­for­mance itself. Priyanka described how during one eve­ning which she had off, she went out wearing a new sari (the common draped garment worn by South Asian ­women), when a group of men chased her, demanding sex. She ran and fell into muddy farmland but thankfully was able to escape into a h ­ ouse, where the f­amily protected her and escorted her back. In July 2013, Kanchana told me how she was accosted by a gang of men while defecating in a mango grove; apparently, groups of men often waited in early morning hours to catch laganvālīs who came out to defecate in the open—­once she even saw a f­ ather and his son in the same group. Even when the sex was consensual, Kanchana and Priyanka noted that most men refused to wear condoms. However, the tone in which ­t hese stories ­were narrated was not necessarily of victimhood—­t hough some, like Pooja, did evince trauma and stayed away from lagan. Priyanka, on the other hand, demonstrated a sense of accomplishment at becoming more seasoned at lagan, and underlined the diversity of her experiences: Many p ­ eople have wrong ideas about lagan. One has both good and bad experiences. At one place, ­people threatened us with stones when we ­didn’t want to do yet another dance. In other places, they ­were so decent [bha­ dra] that if any young men disturbed us, the w ­ hole ­family would stop them and rise in our defense. In some places, they gave terrible smelly food while elsewhere the food was excellent!

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Kanchana was even more unambiguously positive in her assessment, stressing the re­spect and appreciation she received during lagan in eastern UP. Indeed, while NGOs and CBOs have often contrasted the perils of lagan with the respectability and safety of work in the development sector (particularly HIV-­prevention proj­ects), both Priyanka and Kanchana have chosen long-­term involvement in lagan over NGO work. Part of this might be explained by the economic lure of lagan to gender-­variant ­people from oppressed class/caste backgrounds. Priyanka is from a working-­class Bahujan (OBC or “other backward caste”) ­family and has a high school education. Even though her ­family was somewhat tolerant of her effeminacy, she started facing pressure to become an earning member once she entered her early twenties, in accordance with her familial role as a “son.” Kanchana is from a wealthier Muslim ­family and is college educated, but has faced familial rejection since taking up a visibly feminine public pre­sen­ta­tion, thus compelling her to become eco­nom­ically in­ de­pen­dent. For both of them, HIV-­project salaries, which in the early 2010s ranged between Rs. 1,500 (about US$20) per month for lower posts to about Rs. 5,000 (about US$70) for higher ones, just did not cut it. Even as a newbie lagan dancer, Priyanka’s earnings of about Rs. 500 per night in her first trip, and Rs. 800 per night in her second, outstripped her previous meager salary of Rs. 5,000 per month as an outreach worker in Sangram’s proj­ect. In August 2011, I heard an exchange between a laganvālī and an outreach worker at a proj­ect office in Kolkata; while the outreach worker emphasized the risk of sexual assault and HIV infection in lagan, the laganvālī said that in fact, t­ here was much more “śānti” or peace in d ­ oing lagan than in NGO work, which carried the high pressure of reaching monthly targets of condom distribution and client outreach while promising significantly less money.

Becoming Pākki: Varied Trajectories of Per­for­mance and Impersonation For laganvālīs, the initial shock of the harsh living and working conditions of lagan can be overcome by becoming more pākki at navigating the profession and the language and cultural mores of the region. As Bindiya emphasized, “to be able to go for lagan, you have to be pākki!” In her 2015 interview, Priyanka elaborated: We ­were not pākki at first . . . ​we c­ ouldn’t protest properly when we w ­ ere given bad food . . . ​now I know how to demand better treatment! . . . ​ Gradually I came to know more p ­ eople in the area and began to understand their language, Bhojpuri, which is like a mix of Bengali and Hindi. 138

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­ arlier when I would visit ­houses to perform, if boys poked me or played E pranks like pouring w ­ ater on me, I ­couldn’t protest properly, I would give gālīs [insults] which they could not understand! . . . ​Now we still face vio­ lence sometimes, but it happens much less ­because we have become pākki! While becoming pākki involves, at a minimum, the acquisition of linguistic and cultural competencies, the precise trajectory or mode of becoming pākki diverges subtly or sharply for dif­fer­ent individuals. This is particularly evidenced in their negotiation with the feminized per­for­mance of lagan and the specific gendered personas that laganvālīs cultivate or strategically adopt to minimize vio­lence and maximize their gains. Such situational personas presented during lagan may or may not accord with their gendered selfhood and pre­sen­ta­tion in nonper­for­mance contexts. Take, for instance, the case of Mona from Ranaghat in Nadia. In her daily life, Mona goes by her male name and drives a ṭoṭo (small, battery-­operated three-­ wheeler share taxi typically driven by working-­class men). However, Mona is also an active participant in the local koti community, where she is called by her feminine name, and has occasionally moonlighted as a laganvālī in female attire. In June 2011, during a gathering at the office of the local CBO Swikriti, the discussion turned to lagan and how launḍās sometimes put sindūr or vermilion in the parting of their hair, the typical mark of Hindu married ­women. One attendee opined on the inauspiciousness of launḍās wearing sindūr: “Boys should not wear sindūr . . . ​­whether we are launḍās or kotis or what­ever, ultimately we are male [chele]!” Mona countered, “No, actually we do it to minimize bilā-­bili [trou­ble, harassment] . . . ​­t here is less harassment if one wears sindūr!” She proceeded to describe how s­ he’d averted or minimized vio­lence in such ways. The wearing of sindūr by other­wise male-­attired laganvālīs like Mona marks the assumption of a specific feminine persona that carries the conventional social signifiers of married virtue. While the social position and status of a married ­woman is other­wise quite unavailable to kotis like Mona, in the context of eastern UP, Morcom notes how many kotis or launḍās are “kept” by their masters or other power­ful local men and enter into quasi-­marital, long-­term relationships with them, which seems to be permissible in the Ballia area as long as the men also maintain a social marriage with a cisgender ­woman (Morcom 2013, 181). ­These men may maintain separate ­house­holds and often exploit the earnings of launḍā dancers (Morcom 2013, 181). In the case cited by Mona, the strategic use of sindūr marks one as a potential “kept” companion of masters or other local men, and thus less liable to harassment. Of course, such a relationship might not even actually exist for the par­tic­u­lar laganvālī who puts on sindūr; thus, the strategic usage of sindūr by Mona and her peers marks a cunning form of impersonation that subversively appropriates the exploitative framework of such relationships, Dutta

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and more broadly, the institution of marriage itself—­even as the success of such impersonation rests on patriarchal assumptions about marital bonds. Other forms of gendered per­for­mance may be more continuous with the performers’ gendered selfhood in contexts beyond lagan, even as they strategically emphasize certain aspects of the performer’s identity or expression. Take the case of Kanchana from Murshidabad. Unlike kotis like Mona who seem comfortable remaining in male attire in their everyday life, Kanchana, for the entire time that I’ve known her, has manifested a strong sense of dysphoria or incongruence between her feminine selfhood and her embodiment, culminating in her eventual hormonal and surgical transition. Soon ­after arriving at Berhampore as a college student and escaping familial surveillance, Kanchana began publicly dressing in feminine attire despite facing much stigma, derision, and abuse, and became well known in the town for her sharp and vocal modes of protest. This might explain why the violent context of lagan did not appear to be such a shock to her. In 2009, about four years before she opted to work as a lagan dancer, Kanchana told me, “I ­don’t know why kotis love to dance so much . . . ​if we can dance, we want nothing ­else!” Lagan permitted greater expression of her already public femininity and offered her a space where she was f­ ree to dance. Even so, Kanchana did strategically adapt her persona to the context of lagan—­in terms not only of gender but also of class and caste. In the summer of 2013 a­ fter her first lagan trip, she began describing her experience to me thus: “I had so much fun t­ here, ­there are such handsome young men t­ here!” But the very next moment, she mentioned how she cleverly escaped being gang raped by flirting with one of the better-­looking men in the group and leading him on, causing him to break with the o ­ thers and defusing the situation. She mentioned how through such flirtation she managed to get a lot of chuṭ (spontaneous contributions made during the dances), even though she got blisters on her feet from having to walk and dance so much. She boasted how she once outperformed a cis female dancer—­women w ­ ere apparently being increasingly hired alongside kotis for lagan—­by showcasing her shapely stomach through her dance moves even as the other ­woman showed off her bigger breasts, such that the male audience preferred Kanchana over the ­woman. Regarding vio­ lence, she said that men would not ­really bother you ­unless you did bhel (flamboyantly expressed femininity through gestures or expressions). But she actually did more bhel so as to find male partners, particularly if they offered money. She even led on certain local men, only to reject them ­later by skillfully diverting them t­ oward other kotis. All this suggests a strategic utilization of her flirtatious and seductive capabilities, playing up her femininity so as to avert situations of vio­lence (her skillful h ­ andling of the gang rape situation) while

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Figure 6.1. ​Kanchana strikes a dance pose in lagan attire, 2021. Photo by the author.

maximizing her economic gains (luring clients for sex work through bhel). However, she also used her relatively higher education level, and particularly her knowledge of En­glish, as a marker of her own class and cultural capital to impress the local populace: “­Every night I would visit a cyber café ­t here, where I specifically spoke in En­glish . . . ​t hey liked me all the more ­because I’m city-­ bred [śohure] and English-­speaking . . . ​most kotis who go ­there are very rustic!” She used this appreciation as a leverage point to cultivate alliances with power­ ful dominant-­caste men of the area, who helped her extricate herself from tricky situations. Kanchana’s case is less one of strategic impersonation like the kotis

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who wear sindūr, and more the skillful per­for­mance of a seductive and flirtatious hyperfemininity as well as of a cultivated and urbane class/caste identity that flow from her preexisting subject positions, but also mark a selective and situational intensification of her subjective capacities. While markedly feminine from childhood, Priyanka’s subjective trajectory evinces a greater degree of role switching relative to Kanchana’s. During a workshop on gender and sexuality or­ga­nized by Sangram in July 2015, Priyanka ref lected on her gender/sexual identity thus: “Based on the situation, I am sometimes koti, sometimes hijṛā . . . ​at home I am still seen as a son . . . ​in bed, I think of myself as a ­woman.” Priyanka was often more hesitant than Kanchana to dress publicly in feminine attire: her first extended foray into living in feminine attire was during her lagan trips; back home, she would revert to “male” clothes. In a conversation in January 2014, she told me, “Now my ­house ­here is more pākki [aware, mature] . . . ​t hey know that I go to Bihar-­UP, that I wear saris . . . ​if I want, I can come back home in sātrā [feminine attire], but I ­don’t . . . ​what is the need?” Relative to Kanchana’s brash and confident hyperfemininity, Priyanka has cultivated a more muted and sometimes strategically pliant femininity during lagan, which is perhaps also informed by her more working-­class and less educationally privileged location. When I broached the topic of vio­lence in lagan during our aforementioned conversation, she said, “­There is no prob­lem if one remains bha­dra [decent, genteel] oneself.” In her January 2015 interview, she elaborated further on why her experiences of vio­lence had decreased: “We have now become pākki . . . ​we understand the situation much better . . . ​ if some guy talks to you badly, it’s best to reply nicely; I say, see, B ­ rother, we are like your younger brethren, we have come ­here to feed ourselves . . . ​then they understand, and d ­ on’t say anything. If you go have sex with one of them, then five more guys might come; they ­w ill say that since you did it with that guy now you must do it with us too . . . ​but if you ­don’t go with anyone, nothing ­w ill happen. As long as I am working I dance and smile and laugh, but during breaks . . . ​ I come back to the [master’s] car and rest quietly . . . ​if someone comes, I say, see, ­Brother, lagan has been g­ oing on for two to three days continuously, I am exhausted and not feeling well . . . ​if I say it like that, they go away!” While as of 2015 Priyanka still wore male-­assigned clothes in familial contexts, she had also gained sufficient ac­cep­tance in her f­amily to be able to grow out her hair, which helped her earnings: “­There, the one who has longer hair has higher value . . . ​based on my hair, I now get between Rs. 2,000 and 2,500 [about US$25–35] per night. The masters ­t here give you a lot of re­spect, but the more beautiful one is, the more one’s value!” Just as her vulnerability to vio­lence went down, so too her earnings went up with her increasing hair length, from

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Figure 6.2. ​Priyanka decked out in typical lagan attire and makeup, 2021. Photo by the author.

the initial Rs. 500 that she received during her first trip in 2013 to qua­dru­ple that amount in 2015. While this was not impersonation in the sense of performing a subject position that is entirely external to her personal, social, or familial identities, it did involve the cultivation and intensification of some of the gender roles that she had hitherto switched between. Fi­nally, Bindiya articulates a form of pākkipan that combines masculinity and femininity in a way not apparent in the narratives above. Bindiya has a fascinating history of occupying variously gendered subject positions. She grew

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up in a Dalit, single-­mother ­house­hold and could not complete her schooling. She was visibly effeminate in her childhood, but following reprimands and beatings from her m ­ other, she grew up to be a “very handsome young man,” one whom many kotis in Kolkata fell for. Having partnered with vari­ous such kotis, she gradually transitioned sartorially and behaviorally to being a koti herself, and eventually got castrated and penectomized and joined a hijṛā group. On the train in October 2012, while instructing Muzzafar and Abha regarding how to become pākki at lagan, she said, “Look at me, for example . . . ​if men raise a gun to me or fight me, I can fight back exactly as they do . . . ​with men, I am extremely masculine! But then, the kind of femininity I have, all the men ­will come ­running to me if I go to lagan!” Her narrative, while articulated in rather binary terms, suggests an idealized form of pākkipan—­being ripe and wise in the ways of lagan and of the world—­which is manifested through a pliability that can fit into any required role, rather than a linear path ­toward realizing a singular gendered persona. Yet Bindiya has also transitioned anatomically, which is not seen as a constraint for masculine or feminine self-­expression. Her idealized model of being pākki thus combines linear and nonlinear trajectories of subject formation in a way that confounds any binary or mutually exclusive framework of gendered per­for­mance or impersonation, even as it has to at least partially cater to the ideals of feminine embodiment on which lagan rests, just like all other narratives of becoming pākki above.

Conclusion The 2012 documentary Dui Dhuranir Golpo: In-­Between Days features two transgender protagonists who work in a community-­based organ­ization in Kolkata, one of whom wants to go to Bihar for lagan ­after not ­doing well in her high school exams (Biswas 2012). Her peers dissuade her, citing sexual vio­lence and the risk of HIV infection, and she takes up outreach work at an HIV proj­ect instead. At a screening of the documentary or­ga­nized by Sangram in December 2015, Priyanka spoke up against this script of victimhood and the (mis)repre­sen­ta­tion of lagan: “What the film says about the amount of vio­lence you face at lagan, that is not true. . . . ​I have gone to dance many times . . . ​nothing like this has happened to me! Many kotis fear to go ­there. I tell them, t­ here is nothing to fear so much!” This quote marks how Priyanka has come full circle from being a new recruit who initially ran away from the harsh living conditions of lagan to someone who now encourages other newbies to overcome their fears of lagan despite elite activist discourses. However, Priyanka and her peers know well that concerns about abuse or exploitation are not unfounded; the idea is rather that kotis may be able to overcome or bypass ­these hurdles as they become progressively more pākki at 144

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lagan. This is not a narrative of linear pro­gress, as ­t here are vari­ous versions or trajectories of becoming pākki—­Priyanka’s story, Kanchana’s story, Mona’s story, and so on—­none of which are in­def­initely flexible, but rather, are all constrained in some way by the structural inequalities that undergird lagan, and indeed all professions in a patriarchal, cap­i­tal­ist, casteist, and queer-­transphobic world. Indeed, during her interview, Priyanka herself conceded the foundational limitations of her narrative of becoming pākki—­“at first, they always make the newbies do more work for less money!” Becoming pākki—­ripening and maturing—­thus presumes a prior condition when one is not so, when one is thus inevitably vulnerable to being exploited and abused. Hence the varied narratives of pākkipan, despite all their plea­sure and pride at mastering the gendered per­for­mances of lagan, must also concede and even presume the possibility of vio­lence and exploitation even as they seek to minimize such experiences. Just like the narrative of unilateral victimhood and metrocentric teleologies of top-­down empowerment and pro­gress, this too cannot serve as a totalizing narrative about lagan or launḍā nāc. What it can do is open up more space for varied repre­sen­ta­tions of gendered agency, while we remember that ­there w ­ ill always be ­people of marginalized genders who “fail” to become a­ dept at the performative genre of lagan and hopefully get the chance to go on other, dif­fer­ent paths.

Acknowledgments I am im­mensely grateful to my trans, koti, and hijṛā interlocutors and friends whose generosity and insights made this essay pos­si­ble.

Notes 1. Hijṛās are associated with certain kinship structures and professional practices, while kotis consist of a broader range of male-­assigned persons who may or may not join hijṛā groups. See Reddy (2005) and Dutta and Roy (2014). 2. I have retained the real given or self-­chosen names for some of my interlocutors with permission, while using pseudonyms for ­others to preserve confidentiality; I have not, however, indicated which names are real or which are not. 3. The PLUS report, for instance, was funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and was used to seek funding for HIV prevention among launḍās; on this issue, see Morcom (2013, 199–200). 4. Also see Claire Pamment’s chapter, “Mediatizing ‘Fake’ Khwaja Siras: The Limits of Impersonation,” and Shilpa Parthan’s chapter, “ ‘We Are Better than the ­Women’: Understanding the Popularity of Female Artists in Kerala,” in this volume. Writing in Bengali, Niloy Basu (2020) also provides layered portraits of lagan dancers, though still emphasizing their vulnerability and victimhood.

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5. Most words in the intra-­community “languages” or argots, known as ulṭi in West Bengal and fārsī (no connection to Persian) in parts of northern and southern India, do not correspond to standard Bengali or Hindi words and are not found in dictionaries. Except for some words like koti, which have acquired standardized Bengali spellings in NGO and activist lit­er­a­tures, I have spelled ­t hese words according to how they are pronounced by my interlocutors. While laganvālīs from West Bengal navigate a range of languages including Hindi and Bhojpuri, the quoted dialogue is mostly in Bengali interspersed with Hindi, Bhojpuri, and ulṭi/fārsī words. I have altered and customized my usage of diacritics accordingly. 6. The fieldwork undergirding this chapter is part of a larger ethnographic proj­ect on koti-­hijṛā communities conducted between 2007 and 2018  in West Bengal. The chapter makes use of material about lagan collected tangentially during this proj­ect.

Works Cited Basu, Niloy. 2020. Launda Dancer: Onyo Hijrer Bhinno Bhuban. Kolkata: Anushtup. Biswas, Sankhajit. 2012. Dui Dhuranir Golpo: In-­Between Days, Documentary. Kolkata: Moromiya Pictures. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cohen, Lawrence. 2008. “Science, Politics, and Dancing Boys: Propositions and Accounts.” Parallax 14, no. 3:35–47. Dasgupta, Rohit. 2013. “Launda Dancers: The Dancing Boys of India.” Asian Affairs 44, no. 3:442–448. Dost, Jainendra Kumar. 2017. “Naach, Launda Naach or Bidesiya: Politics of (Re)Naming.” Per­for­mance Research 22, no. 5:106–112. Dutta, A­ni­rud­d ha. 2017. “Undoing the Metronormative: Urban-­Rural Exchange within LGBT Communities in Eastern India.” In Queer Potli: Memories, Imaginations and Re-­Imaginations of Urban Queer Spaces in India, edited by Pawan Dhall, 72–86. Mumbai: Queer Ink. Dutta, A­n i­r ud­d ha, and Raina Roy. 2014. “Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 3:320–337. Hansen, Kathryn. 2001. “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 24, no. 1:59–73. Lahiri, Agniva, and Sarika Kar. 2007. Dancing Boys: Traditional Prostitution of Young Males in India. Kolkata: PLUS. Mankekar, Purnima. 2015. Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mason, Corinne L., ed. 2018. Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies. London: Routledge. Morcom, Anna. 2013. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion. New York: Oxford University Press. Oxford Living Dictionaries. n.d. “Definition of Impersonation in En­g lish.” https://­en​ .­oxforddictionaries​.c­ om​/­definition​/­impersonation.

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Reddy, Gayatri. 2005. With Re­spect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Srila. 2017. “Enacting/Disrupting the ­Will to Empower: Feminist Governance of ‘Child Marriage’ in Eastern India.” Signs: Journal of ­Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 4:867–891. Sarkar, Seema. 2007. “T”tīẏa kaṇṭha.” Padakshep 1:20–27. Serano, Julia. 2016. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual ­Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. New York: Seal Press. Soderlund, Gretchen. 2005. “­Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhe­toric of Abolition.” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3:64–87.

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CHAPTER 7

Mediatizing “Fake” Khwaja Siras THE LIMITS OF IMPERSONATION Claire Pamment

In October 2017, while the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill was

being debated in the Senate of Pakistan, the cisgender male journalist and talk show host Junaid Saleem derisively laughs while introducing into the comic infotainment Hasb-­e-­Haal (According to the Situation) tele­vi­sion studio his so-­ called khwaja sira friends (Dunya News 2017). Khwaja sira is a Mughal-­era term, revived in popu­lar and official parlance to designate hijra/zenana (koti)/transfeminine communities, since Supreme Court hearings of 2009 regarding ­human rights violations against ­these groups (Khan 2019).1 A group of six well-­known cis male comedians, garishly decked out in worn-­out wigs and outdated feminine attire, impersonate khwaja sira ­people through raucous comic banter, song, and dance. Speaking of pro­gress in khwaja sira rights and citing news of a hijra judge in India (Joyita Mondal), the host sharply admonishes Pakistani khwaja sira counter­parts through the studio impersonations: “You have made a joke of yourselves . . . ​you have ­limited yourself to only dancing and singing and begging.”2 Blaming khwaja sira ­people themselves for their social discrimination, Saleem issues a step-­by-­step plan directing their social integration and advancement: seriousness, education, and (“proper”) jobs. Saleem continues to launch condemnation upon “khwaja siras who are not real khwaja siras [but who] . . . ​enter the community so they can dance and beg.” He then directs this notion of a spurious identity—­what I refer to ­here as the “fake” khwaja sira—­ upon the khwaja sira-trans activists working with the Senate committee in drafting the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill: “­those who ­were representing [khwaja sira] had nothing to do with khwaja siras. They ­were not even khwaja siras . . . ​they had ­children. They ­were khwaja siras for the NGOs and funding.” One of the comedians (still impersonating a khwaja sira person) goes on to “confirm” the khwaja sira-­trans activists as male imposters: “The black

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sheep that have entered our community should be expelled. They are not sheep, they are rams!”3 This episode of Hasb- ­e-­Haal is symptomatic of public anx­i­eties around khwaja sira-­transgender rights in Pakistan. A­ni­rud­d ha Dutta critiques parallel movements in India that “construct and assimilate ‘sexual minority’ groups into legitimate citizenship through claims upon both cultural nationhood and transnational discourses such as LGBT and ­human rights, corresponding to an aspirationally cosmopolitan ­middle class society” (2012, 113).4 Hasb-­e-­ Haal’s construction of the “fake” khwaja sira through its mishmash of registers exposes a repre­sen­ta­tional crisis between competing but converging cultural nationhood and transnational discourses. The cultural association of khwaja sira with per­for­mance and alms collection is labeled as “begging” and denigrated as “backward” to progressive milestones seen transnationally (in comparison to the hijra judge in India), unintelligible to productive national citizenship (seriousness, education, and jobs).5 By contrast, ­those engaged in civil society, with jobs and access to transnational transgender discourse, are accused of being men (“not khwaja sira,” “they had c­ hildren,” and “they are rams”), positioned as outside cultural and national imaginaries. Televisual mediators use the tropes of “au­then­tic” eunuch/celibacy to negotiate homosexual panic (homo­ sexuality being criminal ­under the extant colonial-­era anti-­sodomy laws)—on the rise with transnational LGBTQI+ interventions around the rights movement. In other words, both ­t hose engaged in per­for­mance and alms collection (“who enter the community so they can dance and beg”) and ­t hose with access to transnational transgender discourse are envisioned as khwaja sira impersonators, or “fake” khwaja siras, cast out of the pale of religio-­national Pakistani ethics. This chapter explores the construction of “fake” khwaja sira as a regulatory mode of public visibility across comic tele­v i­sion, crime shows, and straight journalism that exploded around the 2009 hearings and the 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, and their rebuttals and redeployments by internally diverse khwaja sira communities as they define their own realness. Early scholarship has tended to highlight the centrality of emasculation to hijra definitions of realness or authenticity as critical to izzat (re­spect) within-group hierarchies (Nanda 1999). More recent scholarship has placed emphasis on the contextual nature of hijra identities (Reddy 2005), including the regulatory frameworks introduced by national and transnational rights-­based and HIV-­ AIDS categories that have sometimes worked to (re)inscribe ­limited tropes of authenticity (Dutta 2013; Hossain 2017). Pakistani media constructions of the “fake” khwaja sira, while often reifying genital definitions of authenticity, orchestrate a complex b ­ attle of national and transnational epistemologies that

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violently collude to make abject guru–­chela (teacher–­student) kinship, “begging,” per­for­mance, and (homo)sexuality.

Abject Repre­sen­ta­tions The repre­sen­ta­tional conflict zone of national and transnational discourses that attempt to define khwaja sira bodies and doings might be seen through what Gayatri Spivak describes of the subaltern ­woman, wherein “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-­construction and object-­formation, the figure of the ­woman dis­appears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling . . . ​caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism and development” (1999, 304). The “violent shuttling” of khwaja sira bodies into a “real”/“fake” dichotomy is likewise caught up in culturalism and development, both compounded by (cis) heteropatriarchy. In policing the bound­aries of rightful khwaja sira citizens, it is significant that Hasb-­e-­Haal can only declare which bodies do not ­matter. The episode’s disciplinary logic, with its broad condemnation of “fake” khwaja siras, reveals its qualification of “realness”—­a kin to what Judith Butler (1993, 388) defines in Bodies That ­Matter as a “phantasmatic pursuit”—as working to elide the existence of khwaja sira ­people in public space. In their impersonations, the self-­designated arbitrators of “real” khwaja siras enact the discourse that khwaja sira ­people, like ­these comedians, are somehow “fake” khwaja siras, bahurupiyas, or naqliyas, that is, men impersonating “real” khwaja sira ­people.6 This, in turn, constructs abject whipping posts in the rights movement, with real precarity for ­those whose lives are in question. In this matrix, in which “the subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak 1999), khwaja sira ­people cannot represent themselves—or so we are told. Bubbli Malik, a khwaja sira and trans rights activist, former head of a college canteen, CEO of the NGO Wajood (Existence), and herself working with the Senate committee on the Transgender Persons Bill, whose authenticity was directly u ­ nder attack by Hasb-­e-­Haal, offered a power­ful rebuke. In a YouTube video message to the program’s host Junaid Saleem (Mussadiq 2017), Malik redeploys the discourse of impersonation to shame the jokers, attacking the host’s shallow discursive regimes to assert her own interior and experiential sense of being, thus redefining realness: “Between your language and the real­ ity of my existence—­how dif­fer­ent they are!” Among other indictments, Malik reverses the gaze to essentialize the host’s gender identity: “I have heard that the category to which you belong to rapes and kidnaps ­women.” She continues, “Who are you to tell me who I am? What if I say I do not accept you as a male and you ­w ill not be able to prove yourself? What is manliness? Manliness is a virtue of the Prophets . . . ​who respected humanity.” Reeling off names of Islamic role 150

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models, Malik configures her own gender identity in religious terms, while si­ mul­ta­neously critiquing Saleem’s gender per­for­mance: “Manliness is not to wear a suit or have degrees.” In this taunt, Malik transfers the abjection to Saleem and the comedians, as exemplifying inauthentic be­hav­ior: bad drag, a sham, poor impersonation. Turning the discourse of impersonation back upon itself, Malik’s critique parallels the performative theorizations of Butler: “­there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be mea­sured; t­ here would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction” (1990, 141). The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act that passed into law in May  2018 gave transgender p ­ eople (­whether “intersex or khunsa,” “eunuch,” “transgender man, transgender ­woman or khwaja sira, or any person whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from the social norms and cultural expectations based on the sex they w ­ ere assigned at the time of their birth”) the right to self-­identification (National Assembly of Pakistan 2018)—­a definition formed through trans, feminist, and khwaja sira activist interventions against the practices of regulatory gatekeeping (Pamment 2019a, 148–149; Shroff 2020). Still, accusations of “fake” khwaja sira continued to be levied by the media. H ­ ere, I examine the mediatizations of “fake” khwaja sira as working performatively to frame illegitimate ele­ments in the liberal rights movement, making abject aspects of khwaja sira identity to construct ideal khwaja sira subjects, a “regulatory fiction” that entails significant vio­lence in determining which bodies do not ­matter and which do. Similar to critiques of homonormativity or homonationalism in Euro-­American contexts (Duggan 2002; Puar 2006, 2007), the pitfalls of normative inclusion invariably entail rejection of other abject identities in the pro­ cess of staking out proper subject status. As Julia Kristeva puts forward, as neither subject nor object, “the abject has only one quality of the object—­that of being opposed to I . . . ​I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same notion through which I claim to establish myself” (1982, 1–3). Khwaja sira ­people engaged in dance, “begging,” sex work, and a guru leadership that was portrayed as guardian to immoral and oppressive pursuits, have been per­sis­tently defined as “not real khwaja sira” or “bad” transgender subjects in legislature and media. Even the more inclusive gender spectrum of the Transgender Persons Act states, “Whoever employs, compels or uses any transgender person for begging s­hall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to six months or with fine which may extend to fifty thousand rupees or with both” (National Assembly of Pakistan 2018; Redding 2019). The orbit of this anti-­begging clause is as yet unclear, potentially extending to alms collection of dheenga, the repertoire of badhai (often prayers and blessings, singing, dancing, and comic repertoire performed on weddings and births in heteronormative households)—­a staple in the economy of many deras (khwaja Pamment

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sira ­house­holds) and guru–­chela kinship. Vaibhav Saria has analyzed the 2016 version of the Indian Transgender Bill, which also contained explicit provisions against “begging.” While the 2019 Indian Act has removed direct references to begging, by retaining the clause against “forced or bonded ­labor,” Saria’s critique of the limits of the ­legal recognition of hijra ­people as transgender continues to be pertinent, whereby the so-­called “recognition of hijras and their form of life ended up rendering them more vulnerable to the punitive powers of the state while offering and promoting a heterosexual form of life and productivity in exchange” (2019, 143). Similar to other neoliberal rights movements globally, which have been critiqued for reinforcing existing social hierarchies (Spade 2015), t­ hose who fail to conform to the establishment’s version of a socially assimilated transgender subject, through heteronormative forms of kinship and “respectable” jobs, are positioned as even more abject.

Definitions of “Realness” within Khwaja Sira Communities Faris Khan (2019) argues the naming of khwaja sira to be polysemous and open to interpretation. ­Those adopting this identification have often described themselves in spiritually interiorized terms, as feminine-­gendered souls, in bodies that have been assigned male at birth (Pamment 2019b). The nomenclature is often used by transfeminine individuals who are affiliated in structured communities of gurus–­chelas, with a distinct culture and rituals. Similar to how Dutta and Raina Roy (2014, 330) speak of a koti–­hijra spectrum, I use the language of a khwaja sira spectrum to reference the hierarchically stratified, distinct, but overlapping identities and communities/lineages, spanning persons who locate themselves in hijra and/or zenana-­pan (-ness), who may or may not undertake gender confirmation surgery or nirban. During my fieldwork in Pakistan’s Punjab province extending back to 2008, I observed that t­here was fluidity across this spectrum even prior to the Supreme Court rulings cited above (Pamment 2010), with many individuals identifying as members of both hijra and zenana-­pan, and sharing in kinship relationships, per­for­mance fora, and rituals. Despite the heterogeneous composition of khwaja sira persons as a group, conflicts among members have occurred, with some accusing o ­ thers of being naqli (“fake,” artificial, not real) khwaja siras or bahurupiyas (impersonators). Vari­ous scholars have discussed hijra assertions of an encroaching counterfeit identity, extending back to Serena Nanda, with her seminal ethnography based on fieldwork in south-­central India (1990). ­Here, Nanda cites one in­for­mant who says: “­These other p ­ eople, who imitate us, they are real men, with wives and ­children. They come to join us only for the purpose of making a living” (1999, 11–12). Nanda concludes from such statements that “emasculation distinguishes 152

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real hijras from the fakes” (1999, 11–12). A subsequent generation of scholars have critiqued this idealization of emasculation (Cohen 1995; Agrawal 1997; Hall 1997; Reddy 2005). Through fieldwork in Varanasi in the early 1990s, Lawrence Cohen notes that although “asli (real)/naqli (fake)” was a common but shifting trope among hijra communities, “the distinction between asli and nakli [naqli] third gender was mobile, often tied more to a hijra’s commitment to her hijra guru and ­sisters than to the presence of an operated or intersexed body” (2005, 276). In considering the insult offered by the term “berupia” (bahurupiya), Gayatri Reddy, in her work among hijra communities in Hyderabad, concurring with Cohen’s conclusion that “all thirdness is not alike” (Cohen 1995, 277, as cited in Reddy 2005, 206), highlights what she calls “the contextual nature of ‘au­then­ tic’ third sex-­identity” (2005, 73). Reddy (2005, 206) complicates notions of authenticity by encouraging us to see a multiplicity of differences beyond the narrow frame of genitals, ones extending to class, caste, region, generation, occupation, kinship, religion, education, and sexuality. More recent scholarship has begun to explore how rights movements and the HIV/AIDS industries have reinscribed and perpetuated such tropes of authenticity. Adnan Hossain, for example, discusses recent movements by the state and civil society in Bangladesh, where notions of hijra authenticity have become tied to “innate genital difference as a form of handicap [as] the basis of ­legal recognition of the hijra as a third gender” (2017, 1428). For Dutta, drawing on fieldwork from eastern India, state-­based and funding categories “MSM” (“men who have sex with men”) and “transgender” have often forced a clear distinction between koti and hijra, “reinforcing intracommunity tensions while eliding overlaps and fluidity” (2013, 509). Dutta asserts that this renders illegible “vari­ous expressions of lower class/caste gender/sexual variance” (2013, 509), and “perpetuate[s] violent hierarchies of legitimacy between more and less legible (or ‘genuine’) subject positions, determining their relative access to citizenship and associated rights” (2013, 496). Similarly, the concept of “fake” khwaja siras, energized in the period of rights in Pakistan (2009–­pre­sent), works to perpetuate violent hierarchies of legitimacy both within public space and within internally diverse khwaja sira-­ trans communities that have increased precarity, particularly around guru–­chela (teacher–­student) kinship, “begging,” per­for­mance, and (homo)sexuality.

The Supreme Court’s “Real” and “Fake” Khwaja Sira Who and what constitutes a “real” khwaja sira has been deeply vexed in public discourse since the uptake of rights for ­these marginalized communities by the Supreme Court of Pakistan (Redding 2019). The first Supreme Court hearing, in 2009, came on the heels of a public protest in Rawalpindi (the capital’s twin-­city), Pamment

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led by guru Almas Bobby, a seasoned performer and activist. Bobby has a legacy of protest that extends back to the 1990s, advocating for rights in education, health, welfare, a transparent ­legal system, and a protective policing system with class and gender equity (Pamment 2010). In 2009, a­ fter the arrest of several hijra dancers and repeated police vio­lence, Bobby issued a passionate embodied plea outside of the Taxila police station, lashing out at the unjust policing of hijra bodies, supported by over a hundred clapping, dancing, and singing hijra protesters (Pamment 2019a, 2019b). This mediatized spectacle caught the attention of the jurist Mohammad Aslam Khaki, who filed a landmark Supreme Court petition within weeks of the protest against the h ­ uman rights violations inflicted upon what he referred to as Pakistan’s “most oppressed section of life” (Supreme Court 2009a). According to his petition, ­these violations included the denial of inheritance, education, and employment. But the petition went on to state that hijras’ “rights to re­spect have also been ­violated in that they are forced to dance and also for begging by the ‘Gurus,’ ” and further: “Their right for movement is also restricted as they are enslaved by the Gurus” (Supreme Court 2009a). Considering the moral tone of t­hese ­legal deliberations, Vanja Hamzić summarizes: “ ‘Fundamental rights’ go in hand with their ‘fundamental obligations’ [whereby] state protection is guaranteed only to moral citizens” (2016, 150–151). The state’s politics of respectability, morality, and normative citizenship sought a khwaja sira subject f­ree of dance, “begging,” and guru–­chela kinship—­invalidating the very ele­ments that had spurned the initial protests (Pamment 2019a). ­These mechanisms find parallels with Saria’s analy­sis of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill (2014) from India, where hijra and trans persons became the site of l­egal and state intervention without being consulted, “confirm[ing] the biopo­liti­cal aspirations of the state ­towards cleaving the hijra and transgender body and population to surveillance and abandonment” (2019, 138). Such biopo­liti­cal regulations carry traces of British colonial criminalization regimes, which particularly struck out at hijra per­ for­mance, and sought that ­these communities should “die out” through cultural and physical elimination (Hinchy 2019). Without the repre­sen­ta­tion of the protes­ ters themselves, Pakistan’s elite lawmakers spoke for the community’s rights, advancing an argument on rights based on social inclusion implicitly premised on exclusion, apparently designed to expunge ele­ments from the community that the court deemed undesirable. Official descriptors of the community ­were uninformed and in constant flux; they ­were first denoted as “hijras” in Urdu police reports, then as “she males,” “eunuchs,” “unix” (a class of ­people suffering “gender disorder”), “disabled,” and “­middle sex,” in English-­language Supreme Court rulings (Redding 2015).7 By the time that Almas Bobby, one of the initial protesters, was invited into ­t hese ­legal conversations in November  2009, the court had already defined the community through reductive discourses of negation, condemning “fake unix”: 154

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It is informed that in the name of unix some male and female who other­ wise have no gender disorder in their bodies have ­adopted this status and commit crimes on account of which a bad name is brought to unix. This aspect is to be checked by the police of the area where such like p ­ eople are operating. (Supreme Court 2009b) The Supreme Court thus casts “fake unix” as an illegitimate subject of citizenship rights, reminding us of what Kristeva says of the abject: “ejected beyond the scope of the pos­si­ble, the tolerable, the thinkable . . . ​it cannot be assimilated” (1982, 1). Th ­ ese “fake unix,” like the hijras of Bangladesh’s l­egal code, are defined as being without a “gender disorder,” as per the Supreme Court’s biological essentialist understanding of gender. The Supreme Court also pathologizes ­those who deviate from “unix normativity,” associating them with criminal activity; they are abject beings, to be rejected, excluded, and feared. Through mechanisms of police surveillance and medical tests for the “right” hormones, the court suggested, they would be able to protect “real” unix from “fake” unix, thereby removing their “bad name” and restoring their status of respectability. Although it is plausible that the Supreme Court garnered information about “fake” khwaja siras from guru elders themselves (Khan 2019, 1157), this is unclear given the tenuous links the petitioner had with the community. While protests by community members against medical testing in 2010–2011 successfully struck down the proposals, Khaki continued to assert his notion of “fake” khwaja siras and advocate medical testing. In my 2014 interview with Khaki, he explained that he had been working on the petition even before Bobby’s 2009 protest and without any sustained contact with the community, except for one interlocutor. ­Here is how Khaki describes that encounter using masculine pronouns: “one eunuch who used to come to me in my office . . . ​a nd I used to interview him about his parents, background, and how the gurus treat him.” Khaki goes on to dismiss this individual as a “fake eunuch,” since he had witnessed “him” in the market and found that “he was fully a man, normally dressed!” Undermining the gender fluidity of the khwaja sira spectrum, Khaki suggests that the individual is an impersonator, and offers a lurid explication of in/authenticity: “Eunuchs are deprived of their families, and of marrying and having a son . . . ​ so they have a special situation, so they should be given the special rights . . . ​ a psychological eunuch simply wants to enjoy the com­pany of males, they like to dress up like w ­ omen, wear makeup, dance, perform, and even sexually, they want to be raped.” Khaki’s condemnation of the “psychological eunuch” or “fake” khwaja sira bundles together homo­sexuality, cross-­dressing, and par­tic­u ­lar styles of dance and per­for­mance, repeating tropes from the colonial archive, where per­for­ mance is seen as a visual sign of “deviance”: “dancing in public of eunuchs in Pamment

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female clothing afterwards leads to sodomy, therefore it should be prohibited” (Simson 1866, quoted in Hinchy 2014, 281). Khaki appears to pay no heed to his khwaja sira/hijra/trans in­for­mants, nor does he pay attention to Bobby’s activism, the khwaja sira protests against medical tests, or the anonymous “normally dressed,” “fully a man” in­for­mant. Despite its essentializing assumptions, the Supreme Court never enacted punitive regulations, but, as Faris Khan describes, took an “ambiguous stance [which] contradicted its centripetal impulse and left ‘khwaja sira’ open to ­future possibilities” (2019, 1157). While Khan celebrates the liberatory possibilities of ambiguity in ­t hese legalistic maneuvers, as Adnan Hossain relates, ambiguity also “may work to generate cultural confusion, obscure sources of power inequalities and naturalize social marginalization of the hijra” (2020, 407). The court’s open-­ended construction of the “fake” khwaja sira spilled out of the court and into the media, which have hounded khwaja siras on the streets—­effects far from liberatory.

Criminal TV Khwaja Sira: Before Protection of Rights Debates over “real” and “fake” khwaja siras have led to highly sensationalist tele­ vi­sion spectacles that have cast khwaja sira persons as abject. What­ever may have been ambiguous in public utterances during the 2009 Supreme Court hearings has been brought into sharp relief by t­ hese mediatized enactments. Urdu tele­vi­sion crime shows have taken to the streets and police stations at night, condemning what they label as “fake” khwaja siras and bahurupiyas, or gay men. Often featuring cis w ­ omen reporters, ­t hese programs send “real” cis ­women to expose “fake” khwaja siras. The first and perhaps most brutal of such programs was an episode of Khufia (Hidden), which aired on the Pakistani news channel Abb Takk on December 15, 2013. In this episode, the cis female host forcibly interrogates khwaja sira ­people, accosting them on the streets and barging into their homes. She demands that they admit to being gay men, sex workers, and agents of disease, while allowing the police to beat and arrest them (Zem TV 2013).8 Although this program, like ­others, received complaints for being unethical, immoral, illegal, and for performing vigilante journalism (beenasarwar 2013; PEMRA 2013), the trend has continued. Perhaps due to such critiques, coupled with the rise of self-­representations of khwaja sira and trans p ­ eople in the media (talk shows, fashion shows, m ­ usic videos, TV news programs, and so forth), more recent programs have taken a slightly dif­fer­ent approach than e­ arlier prototypes. Instead of condemning all khwaja sira ­people, they claim to be ­doing a ser­v ice to “real” khwaja siras through the exposure of “fake” khwaja siras—­strategies endorsed by the Supreme Court statements of 2009—­igniting inter-/intra-communal tensions. With the mise-­en-­scène of the dark and dangerous 156

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streets at night, and narratives that often land khwaja sira persons in police stations, they perform a literal cleaning up of the streets, u ­ nder the pretext of safeguarding public hygiene and morality. Such maneuvers, as Dutta writes of rights discourses in India, are “or­ga­n ised around the liberal demo­cratic ideal of formal equality and the modern interiorised and privatised conception of gender/sexual identity [which] interact with and reinscribe social and intra-­ community hierarchies based on ‘traditional’ ideas of decency and respectability” (2012, 114). ­These programs work to generate fear, and also fascination, as audiences are promised a view “­behind the scenes” of the “fake” khwaja sira. In one such program, Awaam ki Awaaz (Voice of the ­People), which aired on Samaa TV on December 20, 2016, the producers go so far as to create a khwaja sira impersonator out of one of their own male staff members (Samaa TV 2016). The female host announces her intention: “to find out who are real and who are fake we made a bahurupiya khwaja sira.” The producers take pains to show the male actor in the studio dressing room, as he applies a wig and makeup, and issues the hijra clap (Pamment 2019a), which the program implies are the very sartorial acts of a “fake” khwaja sira. The host tells how so-­called khwaja siras “come from dif­fer­ent villages and tell their parents they are d ­ oing jobs, but they put on makeup and beg . . . ​let us expose them! ­We’ll take our khwaja sira to khwaja siras on the streets and see how they react.” The impersonating khwaja sira then partakes in a televised ruse to police khwaja sira be­hav­ior on the streets, which is undramatic and uneventful. When the impersonating khwaja sira fi­nally locates a solitary khwaja sira on the street, he asks her about men impersonating khwaja sira, but she only corrects him, offering an inclusive definition of khwaja sira identity that is internally sourced: “No, it’s not like that. They may be gents but their nature is like this—­sometimes at an early age, sometimes ­later.” An episode of Pukaar (The Call), a crime show that aired on Neo News on August 24, 2017, is more explicit in its neoliberal/moral agenda of clearing the streets of “fake” khwaja siras (Neo TV 2017). The show’s cis female reporter aggressively announces, “We are g­ oing to show you the p ­ eople who, ­under the cover of ­music, are indulging in immoral activities.” Like the Supreme Court, she makes it clear that this is to protect the rights of ­t hose who are “genuine” against t­ hose who “use the name of an oppressed class to do their shamelessness.” In a Muzaffarabad police station, the host interrogates a lineup of khwaja sira “beggars” and dancers arrested for allegedly “teasing ­women.” The “real” ­woman host then asserts her cis authority over them, calling them “fake” khwaja siras and “fake” ­women who have trespassed into w ­ omen’s space. The host repeatedly urges them to confess to being male. One of them threatens to reach for her clothes as if being made to undress, protesting against this encroachment upon Pamment

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her private space: “What kind of society is this that wants us to strip?!” The khwaja sira ­under interrogation says that the host can verify their identity from “their leader” Almas Bobby, who, as mentioned above, led the initial protests in Rawalpindi. Instead, their medical reports flash on the screen, showing their dead (birth) names, along with graphic details from their medical examinations, as the camera zooms in on the words “testes” and “penis”—­so-­called evidence that they are men “pretending to be khwaja siras.” One of the group passionately pleads: “I am from the lineage of khwaja sira. Yes, we are male, but our soul is female. We dance. This is our art.” The host ignores them and proceeds to ask another how much they earn per engagement. Hearing their reply, she chastises them for the meager amount: “That’s it?! For such l­ ittle money you have destroyed your manhood?” To another she asserts, “Allah has made you a man. ­Don’t you know how superior a man is?” For the host, the “fake” khwaja sira is a debased male who threatens cis heteronormativity and the gender binary. The host then goes on to the topic of reform, asking one of the arrested individuals: “Do you promise to give up all of this if you get an office job?,” suggesting that khwaja siras ­will gain social legibility and dignity if they give up dancing and “begging.” Like the 2009 petition for rights, khwaja sira are ­here only deemed worthy citizens if they imbibe neoliberal ideals and pursue “respectable” jobs. The program does not end t­ here, however. Next, the host fi­nally takes up the prompt to verify their identities in an interview with Almas Bobby. The host is clearly looking for (and expecting) support from Bobby when she asks her to condemn “fake” khwaja siras, but Bobby responds with silence. Fi­nally, Bobby talks: “­There is nothing in the constitution of Pakistan that says a man is not allowed to dress like a ­woman.” The host then charges, “That means you are protecting them!” Bobby agrees that she is protecting them. The host’s determination to set inter-/intra-communal conflicts into motion by invoking the discourse of “real”/“fake” khwaja siras, with its moral and classist moorings, is clear as the host continues to condemn the entire khwaja sira community, including Bobby: “Look how they are protecting t­ hese ­people. Why are they asking for rights? For this?” The host thus implicates all khwaja sira ­people as criminals and bad representatives of the rights movement. Less than two months ­later, Bobby offered a dif­fer­ent stance, now feeding into fears about “fake” khwaja siras, in a segment on Channel 7 News (Power TV Talk Shows 2017), apparently to assert her own respectability. Bobby responds to the reporter’s description of rising vio­lence against khwaja sira ­people (twenty-­ four murdered and 121 tortured that year) by dismissing t­hese statistics and offering anecdotes extending back to 1978. She describes murders not of khwaja sira ­people, but of men “made up” as khwaja siras, “evidenced” by the fact that their dead bodies ­were found with male genitals. She suggests that ­these individuals ­were responsible for their own murders, since they ­were “friends” 158

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with their murderers (suggesting their sexual engagements), who ­were gamblers, drunkards, and dacoits. Bobby plays into mediatized criminal tropes, making ­t hese (dead) bodies abject and declaring her own exceptionalism: “­Those on the roads are not khwaja siras but dacoits. . . . ​‘We’ real khwaja siras offer healing, lock our doors at night, and keep our deras clean.” Thus, Bobby and the channel absolve the public of any responsibility or guilt over the deaths and vio­lence to khwaja sira ­people, rendering their lives immaterial and legitimizing systemic vio­lence against abject “fake” khwaja siras. Bobby’s contradictory positions on khwaja sira authenticity speak to shifting regimes of legibility within the rights movement, a multiplicity of khwaja sira subjectivities, and Bobby’s own attempt to uphold her izzat si­mul­ta­neously in the community and in the media.9 When other khwaja siras identify her as their leader in a police lineup at Muzaffarabad police station, she acts in their defense, displaying the authority of a guru, but in the pro­cess is herself denigrated by the media host. She earns izzat from the media only when she cooperates in denouncing abject bodies, elevating her status through an image of khwaja sira domesticity and asexuality. In my own interview with Bobby in 2014 (three years before the Pukaar episode), she expressed deep disillusionment about the state of khwaja sira rights as negotiated by NGOs working through transnational LGBTQI+ and HIV/AIDS proj­ects: “Listen to me, so they have made khwaja siras look so bad by saying that they have AIDS. . . . ​We know every­t hing. They are earning money in the name of AIDS. . . . ​We khwaja siras are sitting at home, and t­ hose who are men [her emphasis] are attending seminars in foreign countries.” While Bobby was central in protests that w ­ ere foundational to the 2009 Supreme Court hearing, she has been isolated/has remained aloof from the NGOs and responds with rage at the transnational organ­izations and paradigms that she suggests have left (“real”) khwaja siras ­behind, by declaring the high-­flying, seminar-­attending khwaja siras working in t­ hese networks as “fake.” Stitching herself back into the narrative, apparently to maintain high media visibility, she feeds the broader social anx­i­eties around “fake” khwaja siras and promotes an image of khwaja sira domesticity and respectability. While Bobby, in her tele­v i­sion appearances, may be lashing out at the inequities of NGO funding, she plays into national narratives, directing accusations of homo­sexuality and criminality onto hypervisible khwaja sira ­people “on the streets.”

Straight News and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act The passing of the historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act on May 18, 2018, officially put an end to ­legal debates about “real”/“fake” khwaja Pamment

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siras by allowing for increased open-­endedness in gender categorizations—­ fulfilling what Faris Khan has described as the “­ f uture possibilities” of ambiguity (2019, 1157). Against the mediatized crime hunts against bahurupiyas or “fake” khwaja siras, the passage of the bill was seen as miraculous, despite the many years of activism that went into its making. Khwaja sira, feminist and trans activists explain that they actually amended an e­ arlier January 2017 version of the bill, which had proposed making rights contingent on the decisions of a gatekeeping “gender-­recognition” committee. As one of the activists, Mehlab Jameel, articulates, the 2017 bill offered “a very reductionist genitalia-­focused definition of ‘transgender,’ which could only be certified through a medical board. Our first and most contentious objective was to make this definition as ambiguous and generalized as pos­si­ble” (2018). The activists who created the bill carefully negotiated and worked closely with myriad stakeholders, including khwaja sira ­people in deras, trans activists, the Council of Islamic Ideology, parliamentarians, and juridical authorities. The passage of the act reiterates that transgender p ­ eople should have equal access to fundamental rights of the Pakistani constitution, without discrimination, as based on an individual’s determination of their gender. Yet, even ­after it was passed, it continued to generate explosive media debates around who is a “real” and who is a “fake” khwaja sira—­debates that begin to further imbricate khwaja sira activists in the po­liti­cal capital of Islamabad and neighboring Rawalpindi, reinforcing inter-/intracommunity divisions. In the lead-up to national elections in 2018, on June 4, the cis male journalist Mubasher Lucman, on his talk show Kha­ra Sach (The Real Truth) on Samaa TV, announced that Pakistan Tehreek-­e-­Insaf-­Gulalai (PTI-­G), a controversial party formed by Ayesha Gulalai in opposition to Imran Khan’s majoritarian Pakistan Tehreek-­e-­Insaf (PTI) party, had issued party tickets to four khwaja sira candidates to contest the national elections (Samaa TV 2018). Lucman strongly denounced the candidates as “imposters” and “bahurupiyas.” In an attempt to prove his point, he disclosed that one of the khwaja sira candidates, Nadeem Kashish (contesting from Islamabad), allegedly had a son: “Obviously the claim of being khwaja sira is a lie.” While ­t here are no criteria of chastity/virility as a qualifier of trans identity in the Transgender Act, Lucman plays on fears of duplicitous identities in an attempt to disqualify Nadeem and the other khwaja siras from the po­liti­cal arena. Striving to eliminate any opposition to the dominant PTI, he casts PTI-­Gulalai as inherently corrupt (a party that forges fraudulent identities), and questions the authenticity of the electoral pro­cess itself: “If this is happening, and t­hese kinds of ­people are contesting elections without being disqualified . . . ​when they are lying about which category they are in . . . ​male/female/transgender . . . ​t hen how can the election go on course?” Fear and derision work together h ­ ere u ­ nder the premise of safeguarding gendered categories that are supposedly foundational to the 160

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po­liti­cal system. In a Facebook video message to the journalist, Nadeem Kashish asks ­whether Lucman was sleeping when the transgender act was passed (2018a). Like Bubbli Malik’s aforementioned attack on Hasb-­e-­Haal, Kashish probes the real­ity of the journalist’s gender—­“How are you a man?”—­along with questioning the authenticity of his news reporting: “I understand that you get your PTI paycheck. If we are fake, please show me who is real!” More controversial was a special Eid program on Bol Channel’s Debate Headquarters on June 17, 2018, in which cis male actor and anchor Hamza Ali Abbasi interviewed khwaja sira guru Almas Bobby and her chela Sneha, a dancer (Abbasi 2018). When their discussion of pro­gress ­toward khwaja sira rights turns to the issuance of identity cards, Bobby lambastes the government, claiming it is issuing cards to any man who dresses up and claims to be a khwaja sira. She gives the example of a “man” who had been employed by the National College of Arts in Rawalpindi to head their canteen, noting “he” was earning so much money ­because “he” was posing as a khwaja sira—­referencing, but not naming, Bubbli Malik. Invoking the abject imagery of crime tele­v i­sion, Abbasi connects this with (so-­called) men dressing up as khwaja siras on the street and then links such ­people to child kidnapping rings—­a ste­reo­type propagated in British colonial anti-­hijra legislation (Hinchy 2019). Abbasi then delivers a passionate appeal to the chief justice for medical tests so that “real” khwaja siras are “not left ­behind.” Together, Abassi and Bobby reproach “fake” khwaja siras on the streets, in tele­v i­sion programs, in canteens, in elections, and fi­nally in NGOs. Bobby implies that khwaja siras who work through NGOs are in fact “gay men” who are taking protection u ­ nder the “khwaja sira umbrella,” and ­going places—­ “Maldives, Sri Lanka, Amer­i­ca”—­linked to international networks, “while we are sitting back ­here.” While the program lashes out at both “street khwaja siras” and “NGO khwaja siras” as “fake,” the program takes a strange twist at the end. Abbasi pleads that formal recognition should be given to khwaja sira dancers and Bobby gestures her support. With the presence of her chela Sneha, the dancer, on the program, Bobby is able to re­orient the derision that the media often throws at khwaja sira performers in its constructions of the “fake.” ­These are the khwaja sira ­people whom Bobby suggests are being “left b ­ ehind,” and as we have seen, have often received backlash (sometimes even from her). Bobby’s apparent resort to a genitalia-­based definition of khwaja sira through such a pointed redress of activists engaged in the NGO cir­cuits and the Transgender Persons Act roused a vigorous response from khwaja sira communities of vari­ous backgrounds far beyond Islamabad-­Rawalpindi. In a torrent of social media videos addressed largely to Bobby—­rather than the cis male host Abbasi—­they remind her of the diversity of identities within the khwaja sira community. In turn, a few weeks a­ fter being misrepresented on Debate Headquarters, activist Bubbli Malik again addressed the issue of the Pamment

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“fake” khwaja sira in an interview on Café News on the mainstream state channel, Pakistan Tele­v i­sion (PTV News 2018). Accompanied by young trans activist, model, and writer Zara Changezi, also of the NGO Wajood, they together speak of local and transnational gender terms. Malik moves beyond the discourse of impersonation by translating the new act and its transgender terminology into distinct Sufi hermeneutics that span hijra/khwaja sira lineages and social interactions (Pamment 2019b). She explains the WHO definition of transgender through the lexicon of a physical real­ity (zahir) that is discrepant from the inner self (batin) and the soul (ruh). This interior-­sourced spiritual identity transcends the divisions between “real” and “fake,” offering an “out” from material discourses of the body, and a translocalization of terms that is enabling of multiple bodily realities. The host proceeds to ste­reo­types that society holds of the community as Changezi in English-­Urdu tells of her own educational background (having recently completed a culinary course for Marriot International) and asks that society recognize individuals for their skills and competencies and not their gender identity. While ­there is a narrative of reform (education and “proper” jobs), Changezi is careful not to frame abject ele­ments in the khwaja sira community, and confronts the camera: “Begging is something we, I mean our community, do when other doors are closed upon us.” Malik and Changezi offer a final plea for solidarities within the khwaja sira community and to the media to adopt more ethical practices of repre­sen­ta­tion. ­These requests ­were firmly snubbed when Bobby ­later appeared on Hum News (Our Channel) on September 1, 2018, to express her voice against the rights movement, harshly censuring the same PTV program (Kashish 2018b). Using tropes of the male comedians, she offers her own parody of the educated NGO khwaja sira activist, preening ­toward the camera, flicking her hair, and speaking in En­ glish. Offering a list of “transgender firsts” often celebrated by the media—­the first transgender model, the first transgender ­lawyer, and so on. Amidst hierarchies of class and education, she goes on to assert, “As boys, they have not faced prob­lems in schools, then they enter . . . ​[our space].” The camera then dramatically cuts to Changezi from the PTV program, talking about her childhood. Clearly, the ­battles between Bobby and defenders of the NGO sector provide fodder for the media. The very next day, Bol channel ran a satirical news item, Halka Mat Le (­Don’t Take It Lightly), turning Bobby’s critique of “firsts” into a parody item: “­Here is the first khwaja sira to open a bank account.” A male comedian in lipstick and wearing a dupatta (long scarf) offers a crass impersonation of Bubbli Malik, dancing on screen in order to put money in her new bank account (Iqbal 2018). Although Bol satirizes Malik, it does so by using the image of a khwaja sira dancer cum beggar, one that has repeatedly appeared in crime shows and comedy shows, and was invoked in the 2009 Supreme Court hearings. As such, while the circle of slander of “real” and “fake” seemed to narrow 162

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its compass to the competing agendas of specific Islamabad-­Rawalpindi khwaja sira po­liti­cal stakeholders, the media used t­ hese inter-community conflicts to throw opprobrium on a spectrum of khwaja sira ­people, with wide repercussions. ­These mediatized stagings of the “fake” khwaja sira have affective power in everyday policing of gender identities. Shortly ­a fter t­hese programs, on September 11, 2018, a group of khwaja sira ­people on the streets in the elite area of Clifton ­were taken into police custody ­under Section 7 of the 1958 Vagrancy Act, which gives police the power to “arrest and search any person who appears to him to be a vagrant” without an order from a magistrate and without a warrant (Khan 2018). The station h ­ ouse officer is reported to have said that t­ here w ­ ere “decent families living in the area” and that they would continue a crackdown, “especially against ­t hose who claim to be [my emphasis] transgender and are involved in street crimes like snatching mobiles and money” (Khan 2018). Reports of increased policing of khwaja sira “beggars,” and an accelerated media drive against the “enslavement” and “bonded ­labor” of guru–­chela kinship arrangements, continue to expose the fragile limits of transgender citizenship. In explicit l­egal territory, t­ hese formulations of “real” and “fake” began to be revived in and around the Shariat Court through a series of petitions that claim the Transgender Persons Act to be unIslamic (2020–). This ongoing case, accompanied by a related call in the national assembly by the Jamaat-­e-­Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious party, is against the act’s recognition of transgender ­people’s self-­perceived gender identity. The petitions being heard in the Shariat Court assert that the act sanctions “gays and lesbians,” can legalize homo­sexuality, gives rights to w ­ omen to claim Islamic inheritance as men, and allows men to infiltrate female-­only spaces of mosques, polling booths, and bathrooms and to violate female modesty—­suggesting them to be “fake” transgender ­people. A small number of khwaja sira-­trans ­people have supported t­ hese petitions, including Almas Bobby and the aforementioned Nadeem Kashish, whose own identity was ­earlier u ­ nder attack for being “fake” khwaja sira around the 2018 national elections. Kashish, when becoming an official party in the Shariat case in 2021, launched videos with her organ­ization, Saffar, to state that the act was giving no benefit to “real” khwaja sira ­people. While she points to the uneven distribution of resources in the hierarchies of NGO developmentalism, her critique follows the same mediatized tropes, in an appeal to a narrowly conceived religio-­moral nationalism. She asserts the act gives protections to “fake” khwaja siras: beggars, sex workers, and criminal guru mafias (Trans News 2021a, 2021b) and promotes homo­sexuality, enabling “fake” khwaja siras to avail transgender rights provisions, at the behest of “foreign agencies” (ibid., 2021c) that are against the Islamic nation state. In a fraught climate, exasperated by violent tropes of legitimacy, developmentalist hierarchies, and the uneven distribution Pamment

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of resources and protections, the grammars of “real” and “fake” continue to violently coalesce around dancing, (homo)sexuality, and “begging,” and make precarity for the entire spectrum of khwaja sira-trans persons.

Conclusion Motivated by homosexual panic and classist respectability politics, the media’s constructions of the “fake” khwaja sira, which exploded with the passage of transgender protection legislation, have reinforced bound­a ries around legitimate transgender citizenship. While the tropes of abjection have been applied to a range of bodies, from ­t hose of khwaja sira “beggars” to NGO activists, the idea of the “fake” khwaja sira persists, and in the public’s eye, invariably clusters around per­for­mance, sexuality, “begging,” and guru–­chela kinship. Even when the media has engaged directly with khwaja sira ­people themselves in their investigations, it has often used strategies of coercion, rendering khwaja sira ­people victims of criminalization. Even for a relatively privileged khwaja sira with media capital like Bobby, on the rare occasions when she challenged ­these tropes of abjection, she was shamed by the media as a perpetrator of criminality. In sum, the media’s l­ imited regimes of repre­sen­ta­tion around the “fake” khwaja sira have perpetuated violent inter-/intra-community conflicts. The b ­ attles described in this chapter point to competing claims to cultural nationhood and transnational discourses. What they show is that the most privileged voices and discourses invariably converge to exclude “Other” khwaja sira ­people, who often ­can’t represent themselves in the pre­sent media matrix—­those engaged in “begging,” dancing, sex work—­and who are especially hurt by the vio­lence of the “fake” khwaja sira. Despite the promises of transgender protections, male comics are still impersonating khwaja sira ­people in the media, while the police and courts continue to label transgender subjects as “fake,” evidencing the power­f ul hold of the discourse of impersonation in ­t hese contexts.

Notes 1. Khwaja sira (also spelled khwaja sara) is a Persian designation, literally “lord of the palace,” and such p ­ eople sometimes held considerable influence at court. As Nicholas Abbott (2020) shows in his analy­sis of vernacular sources from the early colonial period, while khwaja sira ­people ­were often masculine presenting, their gender, social, and economic status in court life w ­ ere in flux. For an overview of naming practices and policies regarding the

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revival of this term in Pakistan, see Faris Khan (2019) and Shahnaz Khan (2016). B ­ ecause I draw primarily on con­temporary media sources, I do not include diacritics for khwaja sira, hijra, koti, and other South Asian words. 2. All translations from Urdu are by the author. 3. I am indebted to the online activism and discussions within khwaja sira, trans feminist, and queer activist networks, which have deeply informed this chapter. I am particularly grateful to Anaya Rahimi, Mehlab Jameel, Jannat Ali, Aisha Mughal, Bindiya Rana, and ­Qasim Iqbal. 4. Also see Dutta’s chapter, “The Freedom to Dance: Per­for­mance and Impersonation in Lagan,” in this volume. 5. For more on hijra per­for­mance tropes in Pakistan, see Pamment (2010). Similar to Vaibhav Saria (2019) in their study of anti-­begging legislation in India, I question the glossing of khwaja sira practices of seeking alms (­whether through badhai or dhinga) as “begging.” 6. Naqli, from the root naql (copy), means “artificial” or not “real.” Bahurupiya and naqliya denote professional performers (often cis men) who practice impersonation, and in some regions and times have converged with the bhand (often cis male) comics (Pamment 2017), such as ­those who appear at the start of the chapter. In the colonial period such groups w ­ ere likely precarious ­under both parts of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA)—­part 1 criminalized many itinerant per­for­mance groups of nondominant castes, and part 2 entailed anti-­hijra legislation (Hinchy 2019). At least one rec­ord tells of a bhand arrested by police for appearing to be a “eunuch,” for he danced and sang in female attire (Hobart 1882). Pasha M. Khan (2021) finds literary reference to bahurupiya in the nineteenth-­century Urdu Qissah-­i Agar o Gul (Tale of Agar and Gul)—­here bahurupiya is used to deride Prince Agar’s gender-­fluid “transmasculine” transformations and return the character t­ oward gender normativity. Hijra uses of bahuru­piya have been noted in Indian contexts, particularly in Reddy’s Hyderabad ethnography, as a slur to deride “the most ‘deviant’ individuals in the hijra cartography of sexual identity” (2005, 54). Further research on the par­tic­u­lar performance-­based nature of the insult, evoking lineages of itinerant performers who historically w ­ ere likely criminalized u ­ nder the orbit of both sections of CTA legislation, may further illuminate the “contextual nature of hijra authenticity” in navigating colonial criminal regimes and their legacies of continued social stigma. 7. “Unix” is often used interchangeably with “eunuch” in the Supreme Court discourse throughout 2009. “Unix,” as Redding notes, appears to have been a typing m ­ istake by the court clerk, but interestingly relates to the term “unisex” and the computer operating system UNIX (2015, 286). 8. Several of the videos cited in this chapter have been removed from the internet. Transcripts of ­t hese referenced videos, however, are in the possession of the author. 9. In December 2018 ­t here was debate in social media that some donor agencies ­were attempting to deny funding to organ­izations that involved individuals from guru–­chela lineages.

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PEMRA. 2013. “TV Channel: Abbtakk.” Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority. http://­58​.­65​.1­ 82​.­183​/c­ omplaints​/­channelwise1​.­php​?c­ h​=­Abbtakk&t​=­27&m​=­December​ &yy​=­2013. Power TV Talk Shows. 2017. “Almas Boby Revealed Shocking Truth about Khawaja Sara.” YouTube, October 12. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v ​= ­02WWs3c​-­A ls. PTV News. 2018. “Cafe News 01 07 2018.” YouTube, July 1. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.c­ om​ /­watch​?v­ ​= ­0n533WyCAnY&feature​= ­share. Puar, Jasbir. 2006. “Mapping US Homonormativities.” Gender, Place and Culture 13, no. 1:67–88. —­—­—. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Redding, Jeffrey  A. 2015. “From ‘She-­Males’ to ‘Unix’: Transgender Rights and the Productive Paradoxes of Pakistani Policing.” In Regimes of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia, edited by Daniela Berti and Devika Bordia, 258–289. Delhi: Oxford University Press. —­—­—. 2019. “The Pakistan Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018 and Its Impact on the Law of Gender in Pakistan.” Australian Journal of Asian Law 20, no. 1:1–11 Reddy, Gayatri. 2005. With Re­spect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Samaa TV. 2016. “Transgender Exclusive| Full Episode.” YouTube, December 20. https://­ www​.­youtube​.­com​/w ­ atch​?­v​= ­ORKEOQ6y4kc. —­—­—. 2018. “Kha­ra Sach | Mubashir Lucman.” Samaa, June 4. https://­w ww​.­samaa​.­t v​ /­v ideos​/­k hara​-­sach​/­2018​/­0 6​/­k hara​-­sach​-­%e2%80%ac​-­mubashir​-­lucman​-­samaa​-­t v​ -­%e2%80%ac​- ­04​-­june​-­2018​/­. Saria, Vaibhav. 2019. “Begging for Change: Hijras, Law and Nationalism.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, no. 1:133–157. Shroff, Sara. 2020. “Operationalizing the ‘New’ Pakistani Transgender Citizen: L ­ egal Gendered Grammars and Trans Frames of Feeling.” In Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective, edited by Ahonaa Roy, 260–282. New York: Routledge. Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Vio­lence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: ­Toward a History of the Vanis­hing Pre­sent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Supreme Court of Pakistan. 2009a. Constitutional Petition No. 43 of 2009. February 6. —­—­—. 2009b. Constitutional Petition No. 43 of 2009. November 20. Trans News. 2021a. “Exclusive Interview Arzoo Malik.” Facebook, May 11. https://­w ww​ .­facebook​.­com​/­Transnewspk​/­v ideos​/­507177333792407. —­ —­ —. 2021b. “Transgender Bill.” Facebook, May  5. https://­w ww​.­facebook​.c­ om​ /­Transnewspk ​/­v ideos​/­308610964225431, —­—­—. 2021c. “Prove That a Man is a Man . . .” Facebook, December 24. https://­www​.­facebook​ .­com​/­Transnewspk ​/­v ideos​/­499382051384915. Zem TV. 2013. Khufia. December 15. http://­w ww​.­zemtv​.­com​/­2013​/­12​/­15​/­k hufia​-­sarkon​ -­par​-­larkiyon​-­k​-­roop​-­mai​-­larkon​-­k​-k­ hare​-­hone​-­ka​-­maqsad​-­15th​-­december​-­2013​/­.

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CHAPTER 8

“We Are Better than the Women” UNDERSTANDING THE POPULARITY OF FEMALE ARTISTS IN KERALA Shilpa Parthan

In December 2012, Asianet, one of Kerala’s well-­known satellite TV channels,

aired two back-­to-­back episodes titled “Daavaniyut’utta Po’t’t’ichchirikal’ ” on Nammal’ Tammil (Nair 2012a, 2012b), a primetime talk show in Ma­la­ya­lam.1 The talk show consisted of a host moderating often heated conversations and debates about trending social issues among a panel of “experts,” or public figures, and a small group of audience members seated opposite them. This episode featured a panel of well-­k nown cis male and cis female comedians—­actors who performed humorous roles in films, TV serials, and in high-­profile stage shows. Seated opposite them, along with many female audience members, was a group of female artists—­performers perceived as men who take up acting roles as ­women in live comic stage per­for­mances all over Kerala, and more recently in “comedy skits” on TV.2 They are also known as “female dupes” when they appear in roles that mimic the appearance of well-­k nown actresses and female public figures. They tend to address themselves as female artists, an En­glish term, as opposed to the Ma­la­ya­lam phrase for “­those who perform as w ­ omen,” streevesham che’yyunnavar. As they do in their per­for­mances, the female artists appeared on the talk show in full costume: as well-­adorned, desirable ­women, wearing shimmering saris, dresses, and jewelry, many of them donning wigs of long flowing hair. On display h ­ ere was their capacity to appear and perform, in their words, “just like ­women,” a skill that made way for their huge popularity on tele­ vi­sion and consequent public controversy. This controversy also fueled the exchanges in the show. The episode launched into heated debate when a ­woman in the audience openly accused the performers of misrepresenting womanhood. Another young ­woman in the audience echoed this vociferously, saying that unlike the female comedians who ­were part of the panel, the female artists “maul” the figure of a 169

­ oman, expressing only t­ hose parts that are “vulgar.” The female artists reacted w with equal vigor, saying that it was ­people like them who had performed on stages for de­cades, whereas w ­ omen w ­ ere hesitant to perform for fear of societal censure. One of the panelists, Thesni Khan, a well-­established female comedian, countered this by arguing that the female artists can only go as far as stage shows and cannot replace ­those like her (in films) who do character comedy as opposed to grotesquery (komaal’ittaram). Well-­established male comedians in the field need ­people like her, she asserted, and w ­ ill never wish to act opposite the female artists. The host fueled this sense of rivalry, asking the female artists why they continue to play w ­ omen even when t­ here w ­ ere t­ oday enough ­women in the field. One of them responded: See, I have been performing for sixteen years. TV is recent, and we have only recently begun appearing on TV. Other­wise, we would be in the ­temple festival grounds [poora par’amp]. . . . ​For all t­ hese years, all of us, like all of you [points to the panel] have been performing on stages all across Kerala. If the audiences d ­ on’t like us, how do they accept us like this?3 Other female artists then pitched in, speaking about the extreme poverty that they had grown up in, and how, as young boys with skills in dance and theatre, performing in such roles afforded them a secure livelihood compared to manual ­labor. One of them, addressing a particularly critical young w ­ oman, said, “­Sister, you may have grown up [wealthy] eating noodles, but we grew up eating cheenippuzhukk.”4 In response to this witty assertion of having gained a footing as artists despite extreme poverty, ­t here was resounding applause and laughter by the female artists. One of the w ­ omen in the audience then asked, “You say you wanted to do such roles, and you also say that you do them b ­ ecause you w ­ ere forced to by circumstance. Which one is it?” The female artists responded by asserting that being recognized by the public was a crucial part of their identity and that, though they may have been compelled by poverty, their per­for­mance ­careers are a m ­ atter of pride for them. This attempt by the ­others—­both the panelists and the audience members—to find out ­whether t­ here is any “inherent” drive in the female artists that compels them to perform as w ­ omen was repeated several times in the show. At one point one of the cis female comedians on the panel asked, “Now you are not on stage, but sitting h ­ ere in your costume. Why are you still sitting like w ­ omen and d ­ oing all this [makes exaggerated feminine gestures]? Why does this ­brother keep adjusting his skirt? C ­ an’t you all sit like men?” Throughout, the performers responded by drawing on certain legitimizing narratives: their hard work and capacity to do “serious” acting, and the history of men performing as ­women. They also spoke of the incapacity of ­women to perform many of the roles they do, such as sensuous roles like cabaret dancers, 170

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in male-­dominated public spaces like poora par’ampukal’, as opposed to the presumably safer spaces of tele­v i­sion studios and other enclosed stage setups. Performers like the female artists have been widely studied ­under the category of “female impersonators” in vari­ous contexts. In order to understand the female artists and unpack the charged dynamics that played out during the talk show, I draw upon a set of studies of gender-­guising practices in South Asia (Hansen 1998, 1999, 2001; Morcom 2013; Kamath 2019). They historicize shifting “female impersonation” practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a crucial means by which patriarchal modernity was fashioned by a nationalist elite across regional contexts; Anna Morcom (2013) and Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (2019) also trace the afterlives of this era. Kathryn Hansen’s foundational work (1998, 1999, 2001) refuted the understanding that male impersonators simply replaced ­women who did not wish to perform in public. Hansen explores the thriving practice of “female impersonation” in colonial urban theatre in Parsi, Marathi, and Gujarati cultures. She demonstrates that men playing the roles of ­women ­were actively considered more competent than cis ­women performers in incorporating emergent “discourses of bourgeois respectability, civic order and moral reform” (2001, 61) through minute aesthetic refinements of the female form that signified virtue, pathos, and respectability. For Hansen, “female impersonation” entailed “the patriarchal control of not only the material female body but its visual manifestations” (Hansen 1998, 1999). Morcom (2013) argues that the relegation of certain dance cultures—­perceived-­as-­male dancers of the feminine Launda Nach, w ­ omen who practiced dance forms like Lavani and Tamasha as hereditary occupations, and courtesans—­into the realm of the “illicit” complemented the constitution of “classical” dance forms suited to emergent nationalist-­bourgeois culture and cis femininity. Kamath (2019) brings the much-­needed lens of caste to her study of how the impersonation of Krishna’s (female) consort, Satyabhama, by the South Indian male brahmin prac­ti­tion­ers of Kuchipudi became central to Kuchipudi’s status as a “classical” dance form. Kamath argues that “[b]y virtue of their gender and caste status the . . . ​hereditary brahmin male community was able to sidestep the anti-­nautch politics of colonial India and emerge as the symbol of the Telugu arts scene” (2019, 37). Notably, Kamath does not use “female impersonation,” but rather opts to use the broader term “impersonation” to connote the donning of a gendered guise, or vesham, in staged per­for­mance, though the prac­ti­tion­ers who w ­ ere her interlocutors did use the term (2019, 6). ­These studies add nuance to the concept of gender that is invoked when practices of “female impersonation” are historicized only as men replacing the role of ­women in social contexts where the presence of the female body in public per­for­mance is considered taboo. They establish that even when per­for­mance styles are categorized as gender guising/impersonation, they always already Parthan

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involve an invocation of mutually constitutive norms of class, caste, and humanness. Similar to well-­k nown studies in Euro-­American contexts (Butler [1993] 2011a; Newton 1972), t­ hese works see “female impersonators” not only as producing and reifying idealized (caste-­and class-­inflected) molds of femininity through their per­for­mances, but also as having the effect of performatively—­ and therefore unstably—­reifying their masculine selves by performing femininity as exterior to their selfhood. In line with ­these works, I argue that a perspective of “female impersonation” as a ­matter of monolithic male privilege (i.e., as men replacing ­women), and the continued uncritical use of the term “female impersonator” to classify all performers of femininity who are perceived as male, fail to adequately explain the contestations of legitimacy and the multiple logics of subjectification that emerge in the case of the female artists. I draw on in-­depth interviews with eight of the most popu­lar female artists, conducted in 2017; media analyses of their per­for­ mances in comedy real­ity shows; and observations of a female artist’s live per­for­ mance in a poora par’amp. Each of the female artists I spoke to had dif­fer­ent ways of articulating their gender and professional identities, indicating complex relationships between self-­identification and performing as w ­ omen. As we ­shall see, their narratives of self consistently undermine any attempt at naming that seeks to locate and fix the self that performs, and the other that is performed. In this study, I deploy a queer-­of-­color analytic that brings concepts from a diverse body of lit­er­a­ture on queer theory and the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, region, and class (Spillers 1987; Cohen 1997; Ferguson 2004; Ramberg 2014; Arondekar and Patel 2016; Gopinath 2018) to bear upon a regional genealogy of feminine per­for­mance in Kerala. My aim is to denaturalize both the ways in which femininity is understood to belong to bodies perceived as female, and how it is predominantly studied as produced within imaginaries of the nation in the context of South Asia. I work with a perspective of femininity in the public sphere as a repre­sen­ta­tional repertoire wielded by diverse groups of subjects (Ochoa 2014), and locate the female artists as marginalized stakeholders in the pro­cess of producing, reproducing, and thereby rendering unstable the hegemonic figure of ideal Malayali femininity in regional public culture. The female artists and other classes of performers labeled as “female impersonators” must, therefore, be considered along with more widely studied heteronormative figures of “profane” femininity in South Asia such as the (cis female) sex worker, devadasi (­women dedicated to gods and goddesses), and the tawaif (courtesans in South Asian Islamic cultures), and their sacralized, classical counter­parts, the Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, and Mohiniattam dancers, being part of similar discourses and dynamics of power, respectability, and virtuosity. In the following sections, I begin by contextualizing the art of the female artists. I trace a genealogy of the often conflicting, regionally constituted 172

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traditions of female repre­sen­ta­tion and per­for­mance that the female artists draw upon. On the one hand, they perform as actors within the comedy skit, a subaltern form rooted in satire, parody, and mimicry (Mimikri5) characterized by humorous and derisive repre­sen­ta­tions of w ­ omen, especially elite w ­ omen. On the other hand, they draw from the highly aesthetic repre­sen­ta­tions of femininity that characterize feminine per­for­mances in “high-­culture” forms such as Mohiniattam dance and the more popu­lar forms of cinema and TV serials—­ where the trope of the “ideal Malayali lady” (malayaal’i manka) is prominent. In the next section, I explore how the female artists’ diverse and divergent narratives of self, as well as the commonalities in their life histories, further complicate attempts within Kerala’s public culture—as we see in the talk show—to fit them into the mold of “men replacing ­women.” I argue that the claim that many female artists make—­“We are better than the w ­ omen”—­must be read as more than just a statement of male privilege. Rather, I propose that female artists queer Kerala’s public culture and image of the malayaal’i manka, thereby inviting the mixed consequences of being spectacular bodies read as nonnormatively gendered. Centering both regional context and my interlocutors’ narratives, I offer a queer-­ of-­color analy­sis of the opening excerpt of the talk show to tease out the dynamics of caste, class, gender, and regionalism that contribute to the precarity of the female artists and are erased by the “men-replacing-women” narrative. In the concluding section, I take up the question of what is at stake in naming the performers in question, noting how the dif­fer­ent narratives of their popu­lar audiences, the developmentalist state, and even some kinds of scholarly analy­ sis all seek to interpellate them in ways that undermine their self-­determination. Given t­ hese tendencies, I explain my own rationale for arriving at the italicized term female artists.

A Genealogy of the Comedy Real­ity Show: Humor and Feminine Per­for­mance in Kerala To begin with, one needs to locate the female artists within traditions of per­for­ mance and a public culture that is regionally defined. For this study, I provisionally conflate the subnational region with the state (the Indian equivalent of “province”) and argue for seeing it as a distinct mode of subjectification for understanding public culture, regimes of control, and possibilities of agency. Studies about queer and/or feminine figures and subjectivities and ­t hose on artistic per­for­mances tend to speak to the national imaginary, or the supranational regional category of South Asia, leading to a sort of “methodological nationalism” where the nation becomes the center of all discourse (Misra and Niranjana 2005; Routray 2008; Bose and Varughese 2015; Arondekar and Patel 2016; Gopinath 2018). For my Parthan

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study, however, a regional perspective is necessary to locate the comedy real­ity show as a hybrid media artifact closely tied to subaltern histories of humor in Kerala, and to understand how it utilizes repre­sen­ta­tions of femininity to channel satire and its implicit anx­i­eties about perceived social breakdown. Within this per­for­mance space, the female artists, I argue, have produced a paradigm shift by combining elite and subaltern cultural modes of enacting femininity, resulting in the kind of tension and controversy evident in the talk show excerpt at the beginning. The comedy real­ity show usually features small teams of comedians who competitively pre­sent “comedy skits” in themed rounds. The artists are almost exclusively cis men from nondominant-­caste and/or minority backgrounds and are experienced performers who often form troupes or samitis that perform in stage shows. The yearlong competition has a cis female anchor, a panel of celebrity judges, and emotionally fraught elimination rounds (Teresa 2015a). It is telecast as one-­hour episodes during prime time. While unquestionably a product of the post-1990s period of liberalization and diversification of mass media in Kerala, and India in general, the comedy real­ity show retains the actors, aesthetics, and scripts used in comic stage per­for­mances that are a long-­standing component of religious festivals in Kerala, often hosted in t­ emple or church-­owned grounds.6 As entertainment forms that emerged once t­ emple grounds became accessible to Dalit, working-­class populations due to the ­Temple Entry Acts of the 1930s and 1940s (Teresa 2015b, 80), ­t hese kinds of popu­lar per­for­mance cultures in Kerala have received ­little academic attention in South Asia studies. The advent of the per­for­mance form known as Mimikri in the 1980s was the culmination of a paradigm shift that opened up the mainstream production of humor to subaltern groups: it was largely taken up by cis men from nondominant-­ caste or minority working-­class backgrounds and allowed them to engage in social critique by imitating the sounds of politicians and other power­f ul figures in Kerala’s public sphere (Rowena 2002; Ansari 2005; Kumar 2005; Teresa 2015b; Parameswaran 2017). The institutionalization and professionalization of Mimikri as an art form led to more elaborate per­for­mance setups like the “comedy skit” with a theatrical plot rather than just the imitation of sounds. The comedy skit, enacted by a group of comedians, is usually a humorous portrayal of a social issue, with Mimikri, song, and dance woven into the script. They tend to be set in working-­class, nonurban milieux, where urban elites and foreigners appear as comic ­Others—­caricatures that are inevitably demeaned by “local” protagonists. Within the context of a growing economy supported by a massive diaspora in the 1980s and 1990s, the comedy skit was taken beyond the confines of the poora par’amp by professionalized Mimikri artists through per­ for­mances that w ­ ere televised or sold as cassette recordings (Kumar 2005; Parameswaran 2017).7 As Malayalis gained access to satellite tele­v i­sion with the 174

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rise of private broadcasting corporations, the real­ity show became a highly popu­ lar form of entertainment in the early 2000s. By the late 2000s, the comedy real­ity show had become a staple feature of most Ma­la­ya­lam TV channels. The satirical tropes that comedy skits employ invariably relate to the exceptionalism that dominates Kerala’s identity in public discourse and even academic studies. Both nationally and internationally, Kerala has long been touted as a “development model” and a successful instance of demo­cratic reform and planned development (Franke and Chasin 1994; Heller 1999), producing the self-­image of a cosmopolitan and socialist demo­cratic state. This tendency has been widely critiqued as obscuring the par­t ic­u ­lar ways in which the “Kerala Model” continues to foster status quoism in terms of caste, class, and gender hierarchies (Anitha et al. 2008; Christy 2017; Thomas 2018). A ­ fter India opened up its economy in the 1990s, this image of Kerala was tainted with anxiety about social decline, consumerism, and po­liti­cal corruption (Lukose 2009; Sreekumar 2009). In this context, satire is seen as the enlightened means by which an empowered and educated civil society exercises its right to criticize ­t hose in power (Teresa 2015b), and is also used to channel the ironies of rampant social ills in “God’s own country,” Kerala’s tourism tag­line. Popu­lar humor is also a site where norms of caste, gender, and class are reified by subjecting marginalized figures to ridicule, such as ­women who exceed the bounds of modernization set for them (Rowena 2002; Jayakumari and Sukumar 2006). The plots of comedy skits consistently channel masculinist paranoia about social breakdown entailed by shifting gender relations in a liberalized milieu. This par­tic­u­lar kind of satire was mainly accomplished through repre­sen­ta­tions of femininity that ­were initially enacted by cis male troupe members minimally disguised as w ­ omen, where the combination of male and female gender cues on the same body would itself be a source of misogynistic and queerphobic humor. It was in comedy real­ity shows, rather than in older formats featuring comedy skits, that female artists began to take on ­these roles, and they ­were spectacularly distinct from more established repre­sen­ta­tions of femininity in comic contexts. Elaborately dressed and made up, they appear as desirable or ideal-­t ype w ­ omen who bear markers of wealth and (Hindu) dominant castes, playing the roles of female relatives to male protagonists or coming in as appealing or even erotic dancers during dance interludes. Their appearance boosted the popularity of comedy real­ity shows and led to the presence of female artists in movies and talk shows. Rather than body humor, their role is to channel beauty (bhangi) within a humorous setup. As wives, m ­ others, and female members of the regional public (naat’t’ukaar) in the skit, they are often ridiculed, derided, or lectured for neglecting f­ amily values, modesty, and so on, for the entertainment and edification of viewers. Be it as the malayaal’i manka or her failed foils, the shrew and the erotic dancer, the performers draw their aesthetic both from more popu­lar Parthan

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forms like cinema and TV serials and from a history of feminine dance and per­for­mance through which the ideal of the malayaal’i manka was forged in the public sphere.8 The repre­sen­ta­t ion of Malayali femininity in per­for­mance has a complex history that is also tied to the narrative of Kerala’s progressivism. Devika Jaya­ kumari writes about the emergence of the “aesthetic w ­ oman” in the early t­ wentieth ­century—­this modern embodiment of femininity blurred the conventional binary of veshya and kulina (Jayakumari 2007, 281–282), where the former was the courtesan, skilled in the arts, and the latter was the w ­ oman whose sole purpose was to respectably perpetuate the lineage (kulam). Practice of the arts was traditionally denied to the kulina, but in the patriarchal forging of the reformed, progressive modern ­woman within vari­ous dominant-­caste communities in Kerala, a ­woman came to be redefined as someone who could “aestheticise her body, but within strict limits” (286). This would be accomplished through education—­the modern ­woman could practice the arts, but only for the purpose of being a suitable companion to her modern, reformed husband. Importantly, this figure of the “aesthetic w ­ oman” has historically been s­ haped by the hegemony of a par­tic­u ­lar Hindu dominant-­caste group, the Nairs (Sreekumar 2009), and finds its way into popu­lar culture as the malayaal’i manka. This forging of the modern w ­ oman was also reflected in Mohiniattam, a dance form that, through its institutionalization, was carefully expunged of its erotic ele­ments and taught as high art to middle-­class, dominant-­caste girls (Krishna 2016). Seeing Mohiniattam as a “bodily text,” K. R. Kavya Krishna (2016) shows how the disciplining of femininity in per­for­mance arts becomes part of a larger social proj­ect of producing modern femininity, one that balances dominant-­caste and class notions of tradition with the demands of modernization. Although beyond the scope of this chapter, the crafting of a “respectable,” dominant-­caste, and middle-­class femininity extends beyond Mohiniattam to other “classical” Indian dance forms (Meduri 1988; Soneji 2012a, 2012b; Putcha 2013). Kathryn Hansen (2001), in exploring Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi urban theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shows how older forms of burlesque “female impersonation” w ­ ere replaced by a more bourgeois, dominant-­caste aesthetic of “female impersonation.” This new aesthetic entailed minute attention to fashion and appearance, where a “reworking of the surface was conjoined to a new focus on the interiority of character” (Hansen 2001, 66). In the female artists’ per­for­mances in comedy skits, we see that both traditions coexist in the same per­for­mance space: one conveying modernized respectability embodied by the dominant-­caste cis w ­ oman in forms like Mohiniattam, and the other conveying less “tasteful” and therefore more transgressive acts of bodily humor and eroticism, embodied by nondominant-­caste cis male performers in 176

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Mimikri. Consequently, female artists set the stage for the blurring of norms of caste, class, and gender that characterize public per­for­mance in Kerala. It is this genealogy, rather than the simplistic narrative of men replacing ­women, that helps make sense of both the accusations of “grotesquery” that the female artists face in the talk show episode, and their competing claims of being better suited to the demands of the stage than ­t hose perceived as w ­ omen. In the context of Kerala, I argue that the figures of the female artists, as much as the hyper-­heterosexualized figures of the veshya and the kulina, are impor­ tant links in a genealogy of feminine per­for­mance that examines the constitution of femininity as a practice—­a disciplining of the body rather than an essential identity—­t hat is open to refinement and subversion. Rather than seeing the female artists as simply channeling a preestablished mode of spectacular femininity, they must ­here be seen in continuum with the Mohiniattam dancer and the “aesthetic ­woman” of Kerala’s subnationalist proj­ects of reform. The Mohiniattam dancer and the female artist are both bodies on which cultural meaning has been sutured to movement, producing conformity to, as well as deviance from, ideals of femininity (Noland 2009). In d ­ oing so, I draw on Morcom (2013), who, in the context of Launda Nach in the northern regions of India, argues that performers of femininity who are not perceived as female, and histories of their marginalization, are an impor­tant part of the history of dance in India.9 I now turn to examining how ­t hese contradictory per­for­mance paradigms are made sense of in the performers’ narratives of self, and how dif­fer­ent performers articulate their commitment to their artistry in potently ambiguous ways. As we ­shall see, ­t hese ambiguities produce irresolvable tensions between the female artists’ narratives of self and discourses that seek to render them intelligible.

Queering the Claim “We Are Better than the ­Women” In 2017, I interviewed eight female artists popu­lar on tele­vi­sion at the time. ­There ­were several commonalities to their life histories. All of them ­were assigned male at birth, and came from nondominant-­caste, working-­class backgrounds. They grew up in rural or peri-­urban areas, with many of them starting their per­for­ mance ­careers through local shows in their hometowns and ­later traveling to cities for stage and tele­v i­sion work. Most of them ­stopped their education at school level, due to poverty or the poor treatment they faced as feminine individuals, or both. They began performing in less formal spaces in their own milieux and ­were l­ ater recruited by troupes (samitis) of comedy and per­for­mance artists who would travel across Kerala for stage shows. For most of them, the Parthan

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ability to dance well without classical training is central to their narratives as skilled professionals. “We are better than the ­women,” all eight asserted, a strong and respectable legitimating claim for their other­w ise “suspect” professions. To explain this claim, they drew upon common narratives that defined the proper role of Malayali ­women in the public sphere and asserted their skills as better artists. I asked each of my interlocutors about why w ­ omen w ­ ere unable to establish themselves in the field, and the words of one of my interlocutors, Anil,10 echoed the opinions of the o ­ thers: I can change quickly near the stage, even my blouse. I ­don’t mind who sees. Devi [a popu­lar cis female comedian] or someone like that ­can’t do it. Cabaret cannot be done by w ­ omen on stage, though it is w ­ omen who did it in films. All t­ hese girls are very good, from good families, and they c­ an’t do it. Sanoj explained how, as men, they ­were “low-­risk” options for any samiti—­ they could avoid aspersions of immorality and the heavy burden of ensuring a ­woman’s safety and privacy as they traveled to perform on stages across Kerala. As Hansen (2001) argues in her study of Bal Gandharva and other early twentieth-­century impersonators in South Asia, it is also evident that the ideal of beauty (bhangi) and male fantasies of both the kulina and the veshya are more easily mapped onto bodies perceived as male. Speaking about “sexy” roles, Anitha, who identifies as a trans w ­ oman, asserted that “when a ­woman does it, it becomes obscene. When [­t hose perceived as] men dress up, it becomes a ­matter of appreciation [aasvaadanam].” For Bijesh, a “perfect” cabaret dancer ­will not wear leggings u ­ nder her skimpy costume, something w ­ omen d ­ oing the same interlude in a comedy skit might be compelled to do for the sake of modesty. Are the female artists, then, just another manifestation of “the patriarchal control of not only the material female body but its visual manifestations” (Hansen 1998, 1999)? As the debate between cis female comedians and the female artists in the beginning also evinces, ­t here is indeed a power­f ul patriarchal narrative that marks the poora par’amp stage as inappropriate for ­women, one where bodies perceived as male must represent femininity instead. The televised comedy real­ity show is evidently also a site where gendered norms of propriety are enforced. However, although some of my interlocutors’ assertions invoke the idea that their value derives solely from replacing ­women as perceived-­as-­male bodies, their narratives of self also reveal the more ambiguous and complex role that performing as w ­ omen has upon the lived experiences and subjectivities of the performers. They indicate the intersecting roles that gender, caste, and class play in 178

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the female artists’ ideas of virtuosity and authenticity as professionals and as subjects in general. Anil’s statement about replacing ­women from “good families” (a reference to the kulina figure) indicates the caste and class dynamics at play. In the context of t­hese comedy shows, nondominant-­caste, perceived-­as-­male female artists take the place of not just any w ­ omen, but cis w ­ omen from dominant-­ caste and class backgrounds who have gained access to more “respectable” professional spaces such as cinema and TV serials. The proscription around dominant-­caste ­women’s presence in the poora par’amp arises not just from gender hierarchy, but also from anx­i­eties around dominant-­caste w ­ omen sharing 11 a space open to criminalized nondominant-­caste men. In addition, the diverse narratives of self of the female artists further complicate the idea that they are all men replacing w ­ omen. At forty-­two, Anil was one of the first female artists to establish a c­ areer. Anil is from a lower-­middle-­class ­family, his ­father a musician. Anil very vociferously asserts that he is a heterosexual cis man, referring to his status as a married man and a ­father of two c­ hildren. During our interview, Anil took g­ reat pains to assert that his onstage expertise is a reflection of artistic skill and dedication, and nothing more. He sees himself as a professional, a class apart from ­t hose who followed him into the field as female performers, precisely ­because of his capacity to take on and discard femininity at ­w ill. Anil prefers stage shows to TV shows ­because they pay better, and ­there is greater demand for him in the former format. “I am in this for the money,” he asserts, and hopes to move into playing only “serious” male roles once his ­children are older. Anitha, in many ways, is diametrically opposed to Anil in her views. She is a thirty-­year-­old trans w ­ oman, and she sees her c­ areer as a reward for the lifelong suffering she went through as a transgender person and her staunch determination to gain respectability. During our interview, Anitha tended to describe her ­career in less material terms than Anil. For Anitha, her per­for­mances have fi­nally allowed her to be recognized on her own terms in her own naat’ (country or region)—­as a Malayali w ­ oman. She defines her profession not in terms of earning, but as a space for her to legitimately express the artistry and womanhood that ­were inherent to her from childhood. Sanoj, a thirty-­t hree-­year-­old, is very ambiguous about his identity—in our conversation, he staunchly refused the label of transgender, repeatedly referred to himself as possessing “a w ­ oman’s heart,” and took as much pride in his ability to mingle with the men—playing football, smoking, and calling them “e’t’aa, pot’aa, al’iyaa”—as in his natu­ral skills in dancing and presenting as a beautiful ­woman.12 At the same time, Sanoj lamented his inability to marry w ­ omen, saying that he is “neither one nor the other.” It is clear from this that each of my interlocutors had very diverse means of self-­identification, and this initially produced difficulties in setting up interviews Parthan

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with them. While some of them had to be convinced that our interactions would not be based on the presumption of transfemininity, o ­ thers reacted negatively to being addressed as actors who “perform” as ­women, seeing it as an offensive questioning of their transgender identity or their identity as w ­ omen. For t­ hose like Anitha, the opportunity to enact and be appreciated for their femininity helped them to publicly declare their identities, or more discreetly gain fulfillment from an opportunity to express their femininity before an appreciative audience without social censure. For o ­ thers, aspersions of transfemininity became yet another means by which they became criminalized, as working-­ class, nondominant-­caste men—­t heir artistry and l­abor rendered disreputable, and their sexuality pathologized. In this light, it is clear that the performers are variously vying for legitimacy to wield the repre­sen­ta­t ional trope of the Malayali ­woman. In ­doing so, they actively compete with performers perceived as w ­ omen on vari­ous grounds, as opposed to making up for their absence (Hansen 1998; Kamath 2019). In my interlocutors’ narratives of negotiating poverty and ridicule to reach where they are ­today, the invocation of the claim that “we are better than the ­women” variously indicated the legitimization of their gender identities, artistry, courage, determination, and financial in­de­pen­dence—in sum, the claim facilitated their access to the same dominant-­class/caste per­for­mance spaces and lifestyles as tele­v i­sion celebrities. Calling for non-­Eurocentric frameworks of gender and sexuality theory to study female per­for­mance in Asia, Arya Madhavan (2017) proposes “erasure” as a more nuanced term to understand the phenomenon of perceived-­as-­men actors playing ­women in per­for­mance. Instead of presuming the “absence” of ­women, erasure presumes a contextualized and multifaceted history to the systematic exclusion of perceived-­as-­female bodies from the stage. I therefore find it more useful to think of the female artists as a case of erasure of the perceived-­as-­female body, but also argue for the need to consider the erasure of the female body as just one perspective of what is at work. What we see in the talk show debate at the beginning of this essay is not the absence or even the erasure of w ­ omen; indeed, cis female comedians evidently enjoy higher status and respectability, sitting on the “expert panel” on the show and wielding moral authority over the female artists. Whereas the female artists’ claim that the poora par’amp is no place for w ­ omen indicates a par­tic­u­lar history of erasure, the sense of rivalry and hierarchy between the cis female comedians and female artists in the talk show points to other dynamics at play. The huge popularity of the female artists, the ways in which their per­for­mances are framed and viewed as spectacle, and the nature of their public image all point to the need for a more capacious reading of gender guising, one that demands the deployment of a queer-­of-­color analytic. 180

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Who Are They, ­Really? Queer Visibility and Precarity It is pos­si­ble to read the per­for­mances of the female artists much as Judith Butler (2008, 2011a, 2011b) analyzed drag in the United States—as instances of queer visibility. The female artists’ per­for­mances can be interpreted as framed and spectacular instances of the “per­sis­tence and proliferation” of t­hose gender expressions that “fail to conform to norms of cultural intelligibility,” providing opportunities to “open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder” (Butler 2011b, 24). As Morcom argues, “public female dance is an arena that reveals many inconsistencies and ‘cracks’ that belie the limits of the gender system, one that is produced by patriarchy and its hierarchical gender binaries” (Morcom 2013, 88). By claiming that they are “better than ­women” not in spite of, but ­because of their perceived masculinity, and by establishing themselves as desirable figures of femininity in public, the female artists of Kerala reveal such cracks in a violently cis heteronormative public sphere—­one that does not even have a history of vis­i­ble “institutionalized” transfeminine communities like the hijras, tirunangais, or jogappas in other Indian states. However, despite their commonalities in terms of producing queer visibility, female artists must not be conflated with kotis, hijras, or drag performers, who are often united by common, nonnormative, gender/sexual identities, and communality. Instead, what is queer about female artists is their tendency to escape categorization on the grounds of gender identity and per­for­mance style, both of which are marked by caste and class norms. As argued ­earlier, they blur tropes by representing normatively desirable and “realistic” dominant-­caste femininity in a Dalit-­Bahujan-­dominated comic space that conventionally relies on burlesque repre­sen­ta­tions. The normative homogeneity of the “men performing as w ­ omen” label was also dispelled when some of the performers came out as transgender and o ­ thers maintained silence about their identities. This compounded the widespread public curiosity and anxiety about the “real” genders and identities of the performers. In the talk show interaction outlined at the start of this essay, what clearly emerges is this suspicion that the female artists ­were “too real” and retained their femininity outside the permitted bounds of the stage. Anil’s assertion that he is a class apart from the other performers is not just an assertion of masculinist competence, but also a means of asserting legible gender and acceptable sexuality, a means to avoid the encompassing narratives produced by the nature of his per­for­mance and compounded by the coming out of many of his peers as transgender. A queer-­of-­color analytic, therefore, does not reify the female artists as queer identitarian subjects nor seek categories that can fully articulate their “real” identities, but adopts queering as a capacious framework for understanding the Parthan

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conditions u ­ nder which the female artists are produced as aberrant subjects, evoking voy­eur­is­t ic curiosity, ambivalent desire, and distaste among their audience.13 Such an analy­sis does not rely on the idea of a unified gender or class system in society, and instead pays careful attention to dynamics of race, caste, class, and citizenship that genders and values bodies unevenly across dif­fer­ent social locations (Spillers 1987; Ferguson 2004; Ochoa 2014). Eschewing a resistance-­oppression binary, a queer-­of-­color analytic looks at both the coercive pro­cesses of subjectification that result in the female artists’ coherence or incoherence as subjects, as well as how female artists’ embodied senses of self serve as sites from which to apprehend and critique t­hese pro­cesses. As Cathy Cohen (1997) and ­others argue, it is not about analyses that rely solely on a resistant/queer versus conformist/normative binary, but about examining how queerness is a relation to power, a lack of intelligibility imposed on bodies by imbricated hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, class, and, in this case, caste. The public image of the female artists and their life histories as nondominant-­ caste men give them access to the female-­exclusive space of the poora par’amp to be part of forms of subaltern humor. This, in turn, enables their entry into the hybrid space of the comedy real­ity show, where their enactment of bourgeois codes of femininity within a TV studio has gained them the status of professionals. However, this image also makes way for the public pathologization of their gender and sexuality, their association with disreputability, and their position as disposable ­labor within the entertainment industry, defined by gender and caste hierarchies.14 The TV channels hire them as floating members who must perform with any competing team on the show that needs their participation. Kamath (2019) establishes that brahmin men performing as w ­ omen have, in some per­ for­mance contexts, leveraged their caste and gender capital to turn their acts of impersonation into assertions of masculinity. Conversely, in the case of the female artists, it is clear that their marginalized class and caste status further renders their sexuality and gender identity “abnormal” or “immoral” despite assertions of heterosexuality (Cohen 1997), apart from also being professionally exploited and denied opportunities. In their interviews, most of my interlocutors w ­ ere vocal about being severely underpaid despite d ­ oing roles that are increasingly central to the plots of the skits and to tele­vi­sion ratings; being unable to offset the significant costs, both financial and social, of performing as ­women; and being treated with disrespect in workplaces. “Male artists,” said Sanoj, “can go on from Mimikri to become film stars, so can females. But for female artists, they have only this much range, they ­can’t go beyond the stage—to become a star, they ­will have to play males.” Cross-­dressing performers, associated with small-­town stage shows and considered out of step with modernity, ­were simply unimaginable within the realistic logics of repre­sen­ta­tion in cinema. 182

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For t­ hose bodies that trou­ble gendered norms of per­for­mance, precarity and visibility are closely tied (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton 2017). It is ­t hese very conditions of precarity that enable the female artists to queer the norms they are meant to reinforce. In the talk show episode, cis female comedians are seen as the more legitimate stakeholders in the production and reproduction of Malayali womanhood in per­for­mance, while female artists become the Other. ­These cis female comedians are professionals who, though—­even ­because—­they perform in the same spaces as cis men, retain strict notions of propriety, publicly asserting the value of propriety over and above their professional commitment (Seizer 2005). The forms of humor that they channel are restricted to complementing cis male comedians, and they distance themselves from “grotesquery”—­forms of bodily per­for­mance that exceed the bounds of propriety, such as body humor and cabaret dance. As w ­ omen who take their place in the public sphere and in  the space of humor in par­tic­u ­lar, they represent Kerala’s self-­image of ­progressiveness. They are also presented as “­women born of good families,” standing for upper-­class, dominant-­caste values. Conversely, female artists pre­ sent nondominant-­caste, working-­class bodies that are unstable in terms of gender and take up tropes of femininity that trou­ble the ideal of the malayaal’i manka. They expose this figure as a construction through their capacity to seem “­really” like w ­ omen, often better than the w ­ omen themselves. Their experiences of poverty, noted in articulations such as performing solely for money and d ­ oing “what­ever it takes,” all deepen the dissonance between themselves and the malayaal’i manka that they represent, whereas for the cis female comedians, what is emphasized is the continuity of their personas on and off stage/screen: respectable, proper, and invested in “serious” acting. Following the work of Hansen (1998, 2001), I argue that the female artists have not only responded to shifts in per­for­mance paradigms, but themselves influenced the status quo, opening up alternative possibilities of desire, aspiration, and self-­expression in Kerala’s visual and public sphere. The im­mense popularity of the female artists also gives away the existence of a public culture that, in enjoying t­ hese per­for­mances that are condemned as “vulgar” in instances of rational debate like the talk show, violates Kerala’s self-­image as an enlightened civil society that depends on humor for rational, progressive (and cis heteronormative) critique alone. By channeling the malayaal’i manka, female artists too become figures of aspiration and desirability. Their televised per­for­mances utilize their skills through a conscious signification of the female artists’ bodies as having erotic potential. On TV, the cabaret interludes by female artists involve frequent instances of the camera moving slowly across their bodies, along with cut shots of the ­faces of the members of the audience, showing vari­ous mixtures of desire, embarrassment, appreciation, and laughter. Even as the comedy skits engage in progressive satire, the camera continues to capture Parthan

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the affective energies that are in excess of the verbal social messages appended to the skits (Mokkil 2019). Some of the female artists, like Anitha, claim this desirable femininity outside the sanctioned space of the stage by identifying as trans ­women, further challenging attempts at containment. Anitha spoke of visiting a college and almost being “torn apart” by throngs of adoring young men and w ­ omen—an affirmation of her fame and her transgender identity, but also an illustration of the fact that the actors themselves seem to have attracted desiring fans across gender identifications. Cis ­women come to the female artists asking about clothes and fashion, and cis men approach the performers with sexual propositions and marriage proposals. Viewers with transfeminine orientations have approached the female artists for advice on expressing their identity, seeing the public ac­cep­tance of the female artists as a sign of new possibilities. As Butler (2011a) notes, “realness” is a category where gender alone is not the pa­ram­e­ter for evoking desire and aspiration; it refers to a standard of authenticity where class, gender, and race (and caste) all play imbricated roles. For many nondominant-­caste, working-­class cis w ­ omen, the performers are figures of aspiration in their sartorial tastes and their channeling of desirable, dominant-­caste ­women. This desire blurs demarcations between eroticism, aspiration, and identification, thereby producing “queer positions” (Doty 1993) among viewers, where the spectator, no ­matter what their identity, momentarily experiences the “constructedness” of gender, sex, and/or sexuality. Just as the female artists’ per­for­mance creates queer positions from which audiences can take plea­sure in viewing queer bodies, they also provide spaces for the actors themselves to explore and legitimize their own identities as queer subjects, competent professionals, or both.

Conclusion: (Un)Naming the Female Artists The ways in which the female artists have been “named” by their viewing public and by academic studies (including mine) also indicate dif­fer­ent modes of subjectification, of resolving the ambiguities that characterize the female artists as bodies, spectacles, and performers. I have argued that the term “impersonation” in the case of “female impersonators” can carry certain assumptions about the performing self and the performed other, even as its prac­t i­t ion­ers blur ­t hese norms. Defining ­these prac­ti­tion­ers as “men playing ­women” interpellates them in much the same way that their audiences do: it seeks to answer the question “who are they, ­really?” in ways that affirm dominant frameworks of making sense of the world. This not only violates their self-­determination, it forecloses a richer, more contextualized understanding of the pro­cesses of subjectification at work (Ferguson 2004). Terms such as “theatrical transvestites” (Hansen 2001), 184

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“cross-­dressers” (Tharayil 2014), and “transgender performers” (Morcom 2013; Teresa 2015a) arguably eschew gender binarisms, but only to the extent that they also carry assumptions about the gender/sexual identities of the performers themselves, also aiding easy comparisons with more well-­studied and Western per­for­mance cultures like drag. Most recently, the emergence in Kerala of social protections for transgender persons and the increased po­liti­cal visibility of ­people identifying as transgender have also introduced the tendency for the female artists to be uniformly labeled as “transgenders” by their viewers, a term some of them embrace and o ­ thers vehemently deny.15 When embarking on this research, I initially sought to avoid this encompassment by using the term “queer performers” but abandoned the term upon recognizing that a queer-­of-­color analytic entailed the eschewal, or at least the critique, of naming as ways of knowing. Simply creating yet another academic or po­liti­cally strategic term for the performers would only perpetuate the logics within which they continue to be interpellated. The analytic I use, informed by debates in queer anthropology, queer-­of-­color theorization, and transnational feminist theory, entails attention to the subjectivities of the performers in ways that do not rely solely on an identitarian resistance-­conformity binary. In interviews, the name that the performers most commonly used for themselves was the En­glish term female artist. As a group and in the plural, they would use the term female artistukal’, with the Ma­la­ya­lam suffix -­kal’ for plurality. H ­ ere, ­t here is a slippage between ­whether this means “artists who perform femaleness” or “artists who are female,” one that made it an acceptable term for all the interviewees. Such usage of En­glish terms is termed “dubbing culture” by Tom Boellstorff (2003) in order to understand the usage of seemingly Western terms in non-­Western contexts. Following Boellstorff, I have italicized female artists (as a term in itself) rather than putting it in quotation marks (implicitly marking inauthenticity) to indicate that the term has emerged within the context of globalization and through hybrid media forms such as the comedy real­ity show, and that its signification is not traceable to a more au­then­tic “origin,” usually located in the West. Female artists as a “dubbed” term, therefore, provides a discursive space and vantage point to imagine subjectivity, collectivity, aspiration, and authenticity on the performers’ own terms, to accommodate the vari­ ous and contradictory valences of the claim “we are better than the w ­ omen.”

Acknowl­edgments I thank the female artists who w ­ ere my interlocutors, as well as Mathangi Krishnamurthy and Gayatri Reddy for making this work pos­si­ble. I also thank Liza Tom for her comments on ­earlier drafts. Parthan

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Notes 1. All Ma­la­ya­lam words have been transliterated via the Aksharamuka online application, using the Roman (Readable) transliteration scheme. Daavaniyut’utta Po’t’t’ichchirikal’ means “daavani-­wearing figures of laughter.” A daavani is a South Indian clothing style often specifically worn by young w ­ omen. The title itself implies a belittling stance t­ oward the female artists and seeks to make sense of them as comic figures, erasing the nuances of their skill. Nammal’ Tammil can be roughly translated in Ma­la­ya­lam as “between us,” indicating dialogue and debate. 2. Throughout, I use the term “perceived as male/men” or “perceived as female/ women” instead of “assigned female/male at birth (AMAB/AFAB).” Terms such as AMAB and cis/trans are all used within Indian queer communities, but given that ­t here are complex ongoing debates about the appropriateness of t­ hese terms, I see “perceived as male/female” as a less loaded descriptor. The terminology I use, and some of the studies I draw from, bear strong associations to transgender identity, but I wish to stay away from implicitly labeling the female artists as transgender persons. 3. All translations from Ma­la­ya­lam to En­glish are by the author. 4. Instant noodles, a food item that flooded consumer markets ­a fter India’s liberalization (Baviskar 2018), are associated with a Westernized and wealthy Other, and are often humorously evoked in Kerala as being “worm-­like” in appearance. Cheenippuzhukk is a meal of boiled tapioca, a staple diet often associated with minorities and nondominant-­caste groups in Kerala. 5. I gloss mimicry with the Ma­la­ya­lam rendering Mimikri to differentiate this Keralite art form from the theoretical concept of mimicry (Bhabha 1994). For an analy­sis of Mimikri as mimicry, see M. T. Ansari (2005). Mimikri has itself fostered a rich culture of impersonation and parody, providing a space for performers like the female artists, as well as launching some of the most well-­k nown cis male comedians in Ma­la­ya­lam cinema. 6. For analyses of liberalization, globalization, and their impact on popu­lar culture and conceptions of womanhood in Kerala, see Lukose (2009), and in New Delhi, see Mankekar (1999, 2004). 7. ­These shifts are attributed to the development of the Arabian Gulf region in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing large populations of male mi­grants from Kerala as l­abor, and the liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s (Jayakumari 2012). 8. The words of Sanoj, one of the female artists I interviewed, are telling in this re­spect: “The samiti only tells us the character, and we, with the heart of a w ­ oman . . . ​we watch every­t hing, so we know what to wear for each situation. Okay, if the girl is poor, ­we’ll wear pat’t’upaavaat’a and daavani. If they want a rich, modern ­woman, a jealous ­woman, then you wear jeans and top and change your hair and lipstick. If they want a ‘club’ type of ­woman, then you wear a half-­sleeve and come as a ‘society’ lady. So we plan quickly. I learn most from TV itself—­ cinema and serials—if ­t here is no cinema, ­t here is no Mimikri, ­t here is no us [female artists].” 9. Morcom’s work uses “transvestite,” a term now considered derogatory, and misgenders transfeminine performers as “transgender men.” While the terminology is problematic, Morcom’s central argument is instructive h ­ ere. 10. All the names used for the female artists interviewed are pseudonyms. 11. This was most evident in the difficulties I faced in accessing the poora par’amp space as a dominant-­c aste Malayali cis w ­ oman researcher living with her f­ amily at the time—it was considered inappropriate by my ­family for me to visit the space alone.

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12. ­These are informal terms of addressing male friends, signifying male homosociality. 13. ­Here, I draw specifically on Roderick Ferguson’s (2004) framing of queer-­of-­color analy­sis as investing in culture as a site from which to challenge the lack of intersectionality in Marxist critique. I am also drawing on Judith Butler’s (1994) and Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) critique of the ways in which academic studies on identity tend to seek subjects that can yield greater “truths” about objects of analy­sis like gender and sexuality. 14. The story of P. K. Rosy, the Dalit actress who played the (dominant-­caste) Nair protagonist of Kerala’s first motion picture, Vigatakumaaran (The Lost Boy), is a testament to the vio­lence, both physical and discursive, faced by actors who engage in “caste guising” in the visual sphere (Menon 2017). For more on caste and gender in Ma­la­ya­lam cinema, see Rowena (2011). 15. The tendency for transgender identity to subsume contextually articulated gender variance and thereby enact West-­centric and elitist models of politics has been widely studied (cf. Dutta and Roy 2014).

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Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Th ­ ings Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dutta, A­n i­r ud­d ha, and Raina Roy. 2014. “Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 3:320–337. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: T ­ oward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Franke, Richard W., and Barbara H. Chasin. 1994. Kerala: Radical Reform as Development in an Indian State, 2nd ed. Oakland, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2018. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gossett, Reina, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds. 2017. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hansen, Kathryn. 1998. “Stri Bhumika: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 33, no. 35:2291–2300. —­—­—. 1999. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. —­—­—. 2001. “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 24, no. S1:59–73. Heller, Patrick. 1999. The ­Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jayakumari, Devika. 2007. Engendering Individuals: The Language of Re-­Forming in Early Twentieth ­Century Keralam. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. —­—­—. 2012. “Migration, Transnationalism, and Modernity: Thinking of Kerala’s Many Cosmopolitanisms.” Cultural Dynamics 24, nos. 2–3:127–142. Jayakumari, Devika, and Mini Sukumar.  2006. “Making Space for Feminist Social  Critique in Con­temporary Kerala.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 41, no.  42:​ 4469–4475. Kamath, Harshita Mruthinti. 2019. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance. Oakland: University of California Press. Krishna, K. R. Kavya. 2016. “Gender and Per­for­mance: The Reinvention of Mohiniyattam in Early Twentieth-­Century Kerala.” In Transcultural Negotiations of Gender, edited by Saugata Bhaduri and Indrani Mukherjee, 123–133. New Delhi: Springer. Kumar, Ratheesh P. 2005. “Haasyaakshepam? Mimikriyut’e’ Ulpatticharitam” [Satire? The Origin Story of Mimicry]. Pachakuthira, May 2005. Lukose, Ritty. 2009. Liberalization’s ­Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Madhavan, Arya. 2017. “Introduction.” In ­Women in Asian Per­for­mance: Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Arya Madhavan, 1–12. London: Routledge. Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Tele­ vi­sion, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —­—­—. 2004. “Dangerous Desires: Tele­v i­sion and Erotics in Late Twentieth-­Century India.” Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 2:403–431. Meduri, Avanthi. 1988. “Bharatha Natyam—­W hat Are You?” Asian Theatre Journal 5, no. 1:1–22.

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Menon, Bin­du. 2017. “Affective Returns: Biopics as Life Narratives.” Biography 40, no. 1:116–139. Misra, Sanghamitra, and Tejaswini Niranjana. 2005. “Thinking through ‘Region.’ ” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 40, nos. 44/45:4674–4678. Mokkil, Navaneetha. 2019. Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Morcom, Anna. 2013. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphree, Patrick D. 2009. “Goddess-­Men: Nationalism, Brahmanism, and Female Impersonation in Indian Religious Theatre.” Ecumenica 2, no. 2:41–54. Nair, Sreekandan. 2012a. “Daavaniyut’utta Po’t’t’ichchirikal’, Part I” [Daavani-­Wearing Figures of Laughter]. Nammal Thammil [Between Us]. Thiruvananthapuram: Asianet. —­—­—. 2012b. “Daavaniyut’utta Po’t’t’ichchirikal’, Part II” [Daavani-­Wearing Figures of Laughter]. Nammal Thammil [Between Us]. Thiruvananthapuram: Asianet. Newton, Esther. 1972. ­Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in Amer­i­ca. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochoa, Marcia. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Per­for­ mance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parameswaran, Ameet. 2017. Per­for­mance and the Po­liti­cal: Power and Plea­sure in Con­ temporary Kerala. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Putcha, Rumya S. 2013. “Between History and Historiography: The Origins of Classical Kuchipudi Dance.” Dance Research Journal 45, no. 3:91–110. Ramberg, Lucinda. 2014. Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Routray, Sailen. 2008. “Refocussing on Regions in South Asia: A Review Article on Orissa.” Con­temporary Perspectives 2, no. 2:360–371. Rowena, Jenny. 2002. “Reading Laughter: The Popu­lar Ma­la­ya­lam ‘Comedy-­Films’ of the Late 80s and Early 90s.” PhD dissertation, Central Institute of En­glish and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. —­—­—. 2011. Te’mmaat’ikal’um Tampuraakkanmaarum: Malayaal’am Sinimayum Aanattangngal’um [Rowdies and Lords: Ma­la­ya­lam Cinema and Masculinities]. Calicut: Subject and Language Press. Seizer, Susan. 2005. Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Soneji, Davesh. 2012a. Bharatanatyam: A Reader. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. —­—­—. 2012b. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2:65–81. Sreekumar, Sharmila. 2009. Scripting Lives: Narratives of “Dominant W ­ omen” in Kerala. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Teresa, Vinita. 2015a. “Gendering Mimicry and Mimicking Gender: A Discussion of Gender Per­for­mances in Comedy Real­ity Shows in Ma­la­ya­lam Tele­v i­sion Channels.” Gnosis 1, no. 2:124–132.

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—­—­—. 2015b. “Popu­lar Humour and the Malayali Public Sphere.” MPhil thesis, Hyderabad Central University. Tharayil, Muraleedharan. 2014. “Shifting Paradigms: Gender and Sexuality Debates in Kerala.” Economic and Political Weekly (2014): 70–78. Thomas, Sonja. 2018. Privileged Minorities: Syrian Chris­tian­ity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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CHAPTER 9

Cosplay, Fandom, and the Fashioning of Identities at Comic Con India Sailaja Krishnamurti

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wo young South Asian men are chatting casually outside a stall at a crowded fairground in Bengaluru. One is wearing a brown leather bomber jacket, cap, and khaki pants, the other a crisp navy officer’s uniform with gold epaulettes. Around their left arms each wears the Nazi swastika insignia. They pause their conversation periodically to smile for photos with vari­ous passersby: Queen Maleficent; several Deadpools; a well-­muscled toddler Incredible Hulk; No-­Face from the anime classic Spirited Away (2001); the ­great warrior Baahubali from a recent Bollywood film by the same name (2015). When Gotham City villain The Penguin walks up to say hello, the Nazi officer leans in to shake hands and pose for the camera. It is December 2017, and this eclectic cast of characters are all cosplayers at Comic Con Bengaluru. A comic con is a convention for fans of comics and other aspects of “geek culture,” including gaming, science fiction and fantasy, and popu­lar film and tele­vi­sion. Conventions like this one bring fans directly into contact with content creators, actors, producers, and merchandisers, making them a key site for promotion in the comics and entertainment industries. But more importantly, t­hese conventions are an impor­tant space for community building and self-­expression.1 Cosplay, or “costume play,” is one of the most popu­lar fan culture activities at comic cons. Cosplayers construct and wear costumes based on a character from a favorite cultural text, universe, or “fandom.” Comic cons and cosplay events are proliferating around the world. ­These fan culture gatherings have long been popu­lar in Japan and ­Korea (Rahman, Wing-­sun, and Cheung 2012), and have a significant presence in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope (Lamerichs 2011), but only in the last de­cade have they gained traction in India (Thacker 2018). The largest such events in the region are hosted by Comic Con India, a Delhi-­based organ­ization that organizes fan events in several Indian cities. 191

Figure 9.1. ​The Penguin and the Nazi officer pose for photos in December 2018. Photo by the author.

Cosplay is an emerging practice of impersonation, material culture, and per­ for­mance in India that is also a mode of self-­fashioning. As the editors define it in the Introduction to this volume, impersonation is “the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic per­for­mance that is perceived as  not one’s own.” As cosplayers create and assume the guise of a par­tic­u­lar character, they also fashion an identity for themselves as “au­then­tic” participants in a globally circulating culture of fandom. Indeed, participation in cosplay spaces requires access to specific forms of cultural capital that include conversance in fan spaces; it also requires the economic capital necessary to access ­these spaces. The investment of time, ­labor, and money cosplayers put into their costumes may vary widely. Competition participants might spend weeks or 192

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months working on costumes that can include molded armor, mechanical ele­ ments, special effects, and wearable technology. More casual cosplayers might create s­ imple, homemade costumes using fabric, cardboard, and paint. But all of them are using costumes both to enable their own material transformation and to allow them access to the social space of cosplay. What ­matters among cosplayers is the demonstration of detailed knowledge of the “fandom” or cultural text, and a vis­i­ble commitment to authenticity and innovation. Authenticity might be expressed through exacting reproduction of all details or ele­ments of a character’s costume and persona. Innovations might include “play” with aspects of a character’s gender, racial, or sexual expression, sometimes incorporating ele­ ments of another character or the player’s own body or persona. Between 2015 and 2017, I attended and participated in three comic cons in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, in connection with my larger research proj­ect on South Asian religions in Indian comics and graphic novels. My objective was to learn more about the Indian comics industry and meet local creators. But although India’s comics and science fiction cultures are flourishing, I observed that Indian texts w ­ ere less vis­i­ble at t­ hese events and w ­ ere not popu­lar among cosplayers. The comic cons that I attended ­were dominated by the con­spic­u­ous consumption of and participation in American, Japa­nese, and Korean cultural texts and fan culture practices. I became intrigued by the ways that cosplay and fan culture ­were being embraced in ­t hese large public events. In this chapter I draw on a combination of field observations, conversations with participants, and data from news and social media to offer a sketch of comic cons and cosplay in India.2 I argue that through cosplay, Indian fans fashion selves and contribute to the emergence of a transformative social space for the exploration of gender, sexual, and ethnic identities. Ellen Kirkpatrick uses the term “embodied translation” to describe how cosplayers translate fantastical repre­sen­ta­tions, like the impossible skills and bodies of superheroes, into real-­world, tangible, material forms (2015, 4.9). Building on this concept, I argue that India’s cosplayers engage in embodied translation between the fantastical and the real, the ­imagined and the material, through creative play and the ongoing negotiation of community rules and bound­aries. Embodied translation, however, can also produce challenges. Indian cosplayers’ impersonations of characters from Japa­nese, Korean, and American texts prompt complex questions about the politics of racial mimicry in transnational cosplay culture.

Contextualizing Cosplay and Comic Con in India While costuming and character per­for­mance are ele­ments of many forms of cultural, artistic, and social spaces, “cosplay” is a specific practice that is located Krishnamurti

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in fan culture. The term is often traced to Japa­nese anime publisher Takahashi Nobuyuki, who used the phrase in reporting on his observations of costumed fans at a US comic con in 1984 (Winge 2006, 66).3 In the 1980s, costuming was already well known in the United States as an activity at early comic cons and other “geek culture” spaces like Star Trek conventions or re­nais­sance fairs (Lamerichs 2014). Takahashi encouraged fans in Japan to engage in this kind of costume play to celebrate their favorite characters. In Japan, cosplay began to flourish with the growth of the manga and anime otaku fan base through the 1980s and 1990s and became associated with other costuming practices connected with fashion, m ­ usic, and sexuality (Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji 2012).4 In Japan, the United States, and around the world, conventions are a primary site for cosplayers to practice their craft. Some of t­ hese conventions are specific to a par­tic­u­lar fandom (a community built around a par­tic­u­lar cultural text) or genre (e.g., anime or gaming), while ­others, like San Diego Comic Con or Atlanta’s Dragon Con, are large-­scale events meant to showcase a number of media platforms.5 While t­hose events have been r­unning for de­cades, the first Comic Con India was held in 2011. The event’s Delhi-­based founder, Jatin Varma, became interested in comics while living in the United States for a degree program (Relph 2013; Nair 2017). According to promotional materials, the first Comic Con India in Delhi in 2011 had about 5,000 visitors (“About Us” n.d.). By 2013, conventions w ­ ere taking place annually in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. In 2016 and 2017, a Pune venue was added as well. The size and scale of events has increased with each year, and in 2017, visitors numbered around 50,000 in each major city.6 Venues for Comic Con India are typically large fairgrounds or exhibition centers. Tickets in 2017 w ­ ere around 400–500 rupees for each day. Th ­ ose purchasing “super fan” tickets at around 1,400 rupees get a pass for the w ­ hole weekend, as well as a bag, a cape, a “super fan” button, and other “swag” items. The price of attendance is comparable to seeing a movie in an air-­conditioned multiplex theater: expensive, and certainly prohibitive for many who might want to attend. Without question, Comic Con India hosts events across cities in India that cater to the English-­educated upper ­m iddle class, ­people who have disposable income for tickets, and also to pay for the vari­ous forms of ­media associated with the event, such as comics, movies, video games, costumes, and other paraphernalia. Among the range of attractions, participating in and observing cosplay has become one of Comic Con India’s biggest draws. The organ­ization now even hosts a National Championship of Cosplay each year. Beyond Comic Con India, a burgeoning number of other similar conventions and competitions indicate a growing interest in cosplay culture. In 2017 and 2018, cosplay conventions not affiliated with Comic Con India took place in Calcutta 194

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and Guwahati. Another convention called AnimeCon was held for the first time in Chennai in 2018. In 2016, India joined the annual World Summit of Cosplay in Japan for the first time, and a national preliminary competition was held to select the Indian delegates. Competitors at this level are dedicated and committed participants in cosplay. Well-­k nown Indian players like Jeet Molankar, Sameer Bundela, or Niha “Novocaine” Patil, all of whom specialize in characters from gaming, manga, and anime, have found ways to monetize their activities through sponsorships and paid appearances. But at Comic Con India, ­there are also many attendees at the other end of the spectrum who are cosplaying for the first time and may not be as deeply entrenched in fan culture. B ­ ecause of this range of participants, Comic Con India provides a useful venue for reflecting on some aspects of cosplay as impersonation.

Cosplay and Impersonation Cosplay is one of several practices in which fans engage materially and creatively with a source text. Vari­ous genres of fan fiction and art, doujinshi (self-­published or amateur works), modifying games, model making and collecting, and role-­ playing games are all part of “fanwork.” But cosplay is particularly in­ter­est­ing among fan practices b ­ ecause it can be seen as a material form of self-­fashioning. Osmud Rahman, Liu Wing-­sun, and Brittany Hei-­man Cheung write that cosplay is “a pro­cess of converting the two-­dimensional (2D) image/fantasy from a page of manga, a screen of anime, or any 2D character to a three-­dimensional (3D) living character in real time” (2012, 321). In other words, a cosplayer breathes life and dimensionality into a character. More than just wearing a costume or mimicking a character, cosplayers participate in an expansive understanding of impersonation that cultivates belonging within the fan community, signaling the acquisition of cultural capital by demonstrating their knowledge of cultural texts and their awareness of the culture of cosplay. Cosplay epitomizes a DIY ethos and personal creativity expressed through well-­constructed, self-­made costumes ­because they demonstrate commitment, knowledge, and skill, a kind of “embodied citation” of the creative work of ­others (Hale 2014). Serious cosplayers might spend weeks or months putting together a costume; it might begin with careful study of a character and pro­g ress to acquisition of materials and components. Sewing and painting skills are highly valued, and some cosplayers even specialize in complex mechanical suits using found objects, plumbing parts, or 3D printing. ­There are also many cosplayers, especially ­those new to the scene, for whom a l­ittle face paint and a cape might be sufficient as they explore the venue of a fan convention. A competition or masquerade might feature costumes from across this spectrum. Krishnamurti

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Some media studies scholars refer to cosplay and other “geek culture” activities as “fanwork” or as “transformative works.”7 ­These terms refer to fan-­ created proj­ects that reshape a creative work into something new that is both in­de­pen­dently original and beholden to the original. Both terms—­“ fanwork” and “transformative works”—­emphasize the labor-­intensive ele­ment of fan culture, and are useful for conceptualizing cosplay. While knowledge about a text or genre is a key entry point into social inclusion within the fan community, it is the ­labor of transforming the text into a sartorial form that allows fans to build status. I find the term “transformative works” particularly useful ­because it refers not only to the way in which fans transform ele­ments of a text into something of their own, but also to how the text might be a f­actor in the fan’s own self-­fashioning. For example, Nicolle Lamerichs writes: Most cosplayers do not wish to exactly duplicate the character they portray; rather, they want to bring something of their own, such as ele­ments of their own appearance, into the cosplay. In that sense, they can also be compared to cover bands and other forms of impersonation in which performers enact their own versions of existing material. Moreover, characters are used as signifiers of the fan’s own identity. On the one hand, a costume shows off a player’s attachment to a certain narrative or character, and a player can gain status through high-­quality cosplay. On the other hand, the associations connected with a character are transferred to the player. Expression through a costume of a fictional character is actually self-­ expression. (2011, 5.2) Lamerichs’ description draws attention to the ­labor of representing a character in a way that is both intelligible to o ­ thers and also unique to a cosplayer’s own self. ­There are three scales of self-­fashioning that happen through cosplay: the fashioning of a character, of self, and of community. At each scale, success depends on intelligibility to o ­ thers and mutual recognition within the subcultural space of cosplay. But in each case, creativity and divergence can also create new forms of identity and meaning. In this vein, Kirkpatrick writes: For dedicated cosplayers, cosplay is not just about dressing up but also about transformation and translation. It is a complex pro­cess involving the transference of the source character from the page and the imagination onto the body. Cosplayers endeavor to transform the visuality of their body into the visuality of a fictional and usually fantastical other. This cannot be a literal transformation; their material real­ity ultimately limits and bounds their transformation. (2015, 4.5)

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Cosplay centers on interactions between the material real­ity of the cosplayer’s body and surroundings and the imaginative prosthesis—­t he fanwork—of the costume. To address this, Juli Gittinger proposes a contrast between “authenticity” and “innovation” in cosplaying strategies (2018, 91). She makes note of cosplayers who use innovative repre­sen­ta­tional strategies to make a par­tic­u­lar statement, offering the example of Vishavjit Singh’s turn as a turbaned “Sikh Captain Amer­ i­ca.” Gittinger’s study concerns Muslim w ­ omen cosplayers who find creative ways to incorporate hijab into their costumes; one example she discusses is Princess Leia’s famous hair buns reworked with the cloth of the cosplayer’s hijab. She argues that through ­t hese kinds of transformations, the ­women are consciously subverting assumptions about two categories of p ­ eople—­Muslim ­women and cosplayers—­that are not typically thought to overlap (2018, 88). On the one hand, scholars in the emerging field of cosplay agree that among serious cosplayers, authenticity or fidelity to a character is valued. On the other hand, the act of impersonation is valued even more when some thought has been given to a clever, creative turn that allows for unique self-­expression. Despite the under­lying adherence to “authenticity,” innovation is a key ele­ ment of cosplay. Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung (2012) point out that for dedicated cosplayers, participation in the fan community is demonstrated through an understanding of subcultural social rules and norms. But unlike other subcultures, where belonging is partly signaled by shared markers of style, the sartorial or other vis­i­ble signals of belonging to the “tribe” are in flux for cosplayers, depending on their choices of characters and texts: It is not uncommon to see many cosplayers move frequently and fluidly between dif­fer­ent characters and tribes according to their changing interests and passions. Individuals tend to wear dif­fer­ent masks to construct, transform, or reshape their temporary roles or identities over the course of self-­formation and transformation. (Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung 2012, 321) It is the ele­ment of transformative work that becomes the primary marker of subcultural belonging, and a cosplayer’s fa­cil­i­t y with play or innovation can demonstrate achievement. The transformation of self and character can take place in a number of in­ter­est­ing ways. Modifications to a character might include presenting a monstrous character as sexy, or a cute character as dangerous, or vice versa. Some cosplayers choose characters whose gender pre­sen­ta­tion is dif­fer­ent from their own, which participants call “genderbending” or “crossplay.” In this vein, some cosplayers “genderbend” a character by imagining it with a dif­fer­ent gender pre­sen­ta­tion than it has in its original context. For example, in

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a video interview Aorin Shariyari, a professional Indian cosplayer, describes creating a genderbending cosplay of the character Beerus from the anime series Dragon Ball Z (“A Day in the Life” 2018). Beerus is a male god in the form of a purple anthropomorphic cat. Shariyari’s version is feminine, but also not a cat at all. Her version of the costume introduces another transformative ele­ment, gijinka, a term that refers to the reimagining in fanwork of a nonhuman character or object as ­human. In the video, Shariyari makes a public appearance in a long purple wig with a full face of femme makeup and does not wear cat ears or a tail, but she is still recognizable to ­others familiar with the character ­because of the colors and other ele­ments of her costume. Shariyari is impersonating Beerus but has also made the character reflect her sense of self. Wearing the costume, she says in the interview, “makes you feel beautiful” and “more confident,” and making costumes gives her confidence and pride. Shariyari’s description of cosplay as both aesthetic experience and self-­ actualization makes evident the performative nature of cosplay. Conceptualizing cosplay as a transgressive form of fanwork recognizes both the embodied, phenomenological experience of per­for­mance and the plea­sure of participation in media consumption that undergirds it. To be a cosplayer, one must be a performer, a participant, and an observer all at once.

Inside Comic Con India I attended the fourth Delhi Comic Con, held at the Okhla exhibition grounds, December 4–6, 2015.8 I did not participate in cosplay but took field notes and spoke with participants in addition to interviews with comics creators.9 ­After passing through the registration area, I was ushered into a large outdoor exhibition space, where red carpet covered the grounds along corridors of stalls with white pyramid-­shaped awnings. In my observation, visitors to Delhi Comic Con did not appear to be an intensively “geek culture” crowd; rather, they seemed to be more often curious, casual observers. The largest crowds gathered for bigger bud­get promotions with giveaways and activities, and for the eve­ning cosplay competitions. Among the cosplayers, I noted that superhero and villain costumes ­were dominant, and themes connected with Indian comics or culture w ­ ere largely unrepresented. Two young men I encountered who looked like they w ­ ere dressed as warriors from an Amar Chitra Katha comic w ­ ere not actually cosplayers; they w ­ ere actors hired by the promoter of the Mahabharata-­based role-­playing game Legends of Vyas. They posed for photos with passersby and w ­ ere featured in media coverage of the event afterward (“In Pics” 2015).

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Figure 9.2. ​A volunteer talks to cosplaying Legends of Vyas cosplayers in Delhi Comic Con (2015). Photo by the author.

Other than ­t hese characters, and a public talk about Amar Chitra Katha, t­ here was ­little visibility of Indian comics. While characters connected with Indian themes and texts ­were prominently vis­i­ble on the exterior hoardings of the venue and on promotional materials, they w ­ ere much less vis­i­ble inside the convention. For example, while graphic artist Saumin Suresh Patel’s comics-­style renderings of Hindu deities and Abhijeet Kini’s Angry Maushi (Aunty) ­were displayed on the exterior promotional boards, both artists ­were ­running their own small stalls inside with l­ittle promotion or visibility. Well-­k nown Indian comics publishers including Graphic India, Holy Cow, Vimanika, and Campfire

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also had stalls. ­These all carry titles that take imaginative, speculative approaches to Hindu mythological narratives but seemed to be less prominent or vis­i­ble than the large, well-­appointed booths of Marvel and other international entertainment promoters. While characters and texts connected to India appeared to be impor­ tant to Delhi Comic Con’s local branding, they ­were not as crowd-­generating as better-­k nown international ones, and this seems to reflect a broader trend of cosplay in India. A few weeks l­ater, from December 19–21, 2015, I attended Mumbai’s Film and Comic Con, which took place inside a large ware­house in an industrial park. As in Delhi, the crowds of students and young families seemed to be generally oriented ­toward the blockbuster Marvel-­and DC-­themed areas. Indian producers ­were a l­ittle more prominent in Mumbai. Graphic India’s Sharad Devarajan and artist Mukesh Singh took the stage to discuss their graphic novel 18 Days, about the g­ reat b ­ attle in the Mahabharata. Th ­ ere was also a par­tic­u­lar area of stalls dedicated to Indian artists and publishers. Costumes in Mumbai ­were more varied and elaborate, and reflected a greater variety of characters/fandoms. Yet, even in Mumbai with its broader base of dedicated cosplayers, many of the participants in the cosplay contests ­were characters from Marvel, DC, or Disney franchises. Some ­were drawn from manga and anime, largely from well-­k nown and globally circulating series like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and Pokémon. In 2017, I returned to India to attend Comic Con Bengaluru. The event was held from December  2–4 at the Karnataka Trade Promotion Organ­ization Trade and Convention Center, a large ware­house in a sprawling industrial park area in Whitefield, south of the hi-­tech district. For this event, the entrance to the grounds was adorned with a big red archway and a sign reading “Welcome to the Geek Side.” Many visitors ­were already lining up to enter at the beginning of the day. As is typical for other public events of this scale in India, each visitor was required to pass through a metal detector and have their body and belongings searched by a guard. As was the case at other comic con events, the security entrance was split into “Fanboys” and “Fangirls”; the “Fangirls” line had a curtained booth for body searches by ­women guards. As I waited to enter, one of the costumed ­people in front of me was misgendered by an armed male security guard. He waved the person t­ oward the “Fanboys” line, but they moved ­toward the “Fangirls” line instead. The security guard looked confused, and I watched ner­vously as he attempted to correct the person about their gender; eventually, he relented and let them pass. On the other side, a team of yellow-­ shirted volunteers w ­ ere ready to greet the person with high fives and whoops, as they do for every­one, but especially for t­ hose in costume. The contrast between the social space on each side of the security entrance was striking; in this moment, the volunteers’ greetings seemed to mark out an exit from the policing of public

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space into a social space where the costumed, gendered “otherness” of the individual was welcomed.10 Just inside the entrance to the building was the registration desk for cosplayers and the cosplay medic t­ able.11 Early on the first day, the crowds inside w ­ ere large enough that the first few booths’ distance was completely choked, and it was hard to elbow my way through the crowd. Approximately one in ­every fifteen ­people I observed was in full costume, and the g­ reat majority of t­hese ­were college-­aged young ­people roughly between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Some of the ­people who w ­ ere not dressed in costume signaled their fandom in other ways, with T-­shirts, hats, or buttons. Similar to the other events I attended, ­there ­were lots of families, parents, and grandparents in attendance as well, with a few p ­ eople wearing saris or kurtas. As I moved through the crowd, I s­ topped to introduce myself and talk with cosplayers and comics creators. Cosplayers, especially ­those with elaborate costumes, are often swarmed by ­people asking to take photos and journalists looking for sound bites, and of course t­ hese public interactions are an impor­ tant part of their cosplay experience. Several cosplayers ­were willing to talk with me about their costumes and experiences at the event, but sustained conversations ­were difficult. The space was very loud, particularly with voice, sound effects, and m ­ usic blaring from speakers installed around promotional displays, and the buzzing of thousands of p ­ eople milling about. To get some air, I ate lunch with other attendees in the outdoor food court, where purchases could only be made via a special debit card that had to be prepurchased and loaded with nonrefundable cash, which is another signal of the economic privilege necessary to access the comic con space. I also sat with the audience and listened to the talks given by the vari­ous headlining guests. The usual stalls for Graphic India, Campfire, and other larger Indian comics publishers w ­ ere pre­sent, along with some smaller in­de­pen­dent and local publishers and artists. A promotional display for the film Baahubali was also prominent, and an interactive sword-­fighting activity drew some interest. But just as I observed at the previous events I attended, most convention goers seemed to gravitate ­toward very large displays for the Marvel cinematic universe, and one promoting programs for Amazon Prime. The latter is where I encountered the men dressed as Nazis mentioned in the introduction to this chapter; they ­were part of a promotion for the tele­vi­sion program The Man in the High ­Castle. I found their presence to be jarring. In the North American and Eu­ro­pean context, Nazi cosplay is generally perceived as offensive, and certainly would contravene the community guidelines; many fan conventions have explicit rules banning Nazi-­ themed costumes. Across Asia, Nazi-­themed cosplay and fashion trends are widespread enough to have been dubbed as “Nazi-­chic” (see Westcott 2016).

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As at other Indian comic cons, t­ here was a cosplay competition on each eve­ ning of the event. Throughout the day, cosplayers who wanted to participate approached the registration desk, had their picture taken, and w ­ ere given a number and a badge. About 275 competitors registered into one of five categories: sci-fi, comics/graphic novels, manga/anime, gaming, and movies/tele­vi­sion. Each night, a crowd gathered in front of the stage before the competitors had even lined up, with audience members sitting in the few available chairs, but mostly on the floor. In groups of six or seven, the competitors ­were invited up to the stage. The host, musician/actor Noble Luke, asked each contestant for their number and their character. At the mic, some contestants took the opportunity to perform their character by reciting a line or two from a film or game or enacting a signature gesture. A few whose costumes included swords or weapons hastily demonstrated combat moves. This aspect of the competition was a ­little dif­fer­ent from other conventions or cosplay masquerades, such as San Diego Comic Con, where the ele­ment of per­for­mance is more strongly encouraged, and cosplayers are invested in performing authenticity. Most competitors did not seem prepared for this ele­ment, and the host did not provide prompts beyond telling the cosplayers to identify “who you are playing, your name, and your registration number.” ­After each group finished introducing themselves, they ­were invited to pose for the horde of cameras in front of the stage and then ­were ushered off. ­There ­were certain characters that overwhelmingly dominated cosplay at Bengaluru Comic Con. In Saturday eve­n ing’s competition, for example, I counted five Deadpools and five Jokers, though two ­were “genderbent” feminine Jokers wearing skirts and with feminized makeup and hair. ­There ­were three Won­der ­Women, and three of the character Monkey D. Luffy from the manga One Piece; one was a feminine cosplay of this male character. Dozens of other characters from manga and anime w ­ ere represented, as well as from video games like Assassin’s Creed. Notably, none of the cosplayers on stage w ­ ere presenting characters from an Indian text or with an Indian theme. ­There ­were several advanced cosplayers working with architectural materials, building large structures with moving parts that often required assistance to move about. Of this group, only one presented as a w ­ oman. The four category winners of the competition and the overall competition ­were all South Asian men playing “male” characters. The overall winner for the night, Shabaz Ahmed, was a competitive cosplayer specializing in architectural costumes based on anime and gaming characters. ­There was a ­little more diversity among the cosplayed characters on the second night: ­t here w ­ ere four Deadpools and several Batmen, but each one put a unique twist on the character. Th ­ ere w ­ ere also several characters that referred to South Asian themes, something that was absent entirely the night before: three young w ­ omen played Mastani, Kashibai, and a gender-­crossed Baji Rao from the 202

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Figure 9.3 ​A Gundam cosplayer heads to the stage as volunteers hold back the crowd in Bengaluru Comic Con (2017). Photo by the author.

2015 Bollywood film Bajirao Mastani. To the excitement of the audience, a man in character as Baahubali spoke lines in Hindi from the eponymous blockbuster film. ­There w ­ ere also more ­women in the competition, and at least a few who seemed to be committed cosplayers. ­Women won in two categories at the end of the night, and both played characters outside the Marvel/DC mainstream. The winner in the comics category, who introduced herself as “Megha,” played Kier from the little-­k nown Court of the Dead comics. Her costume featured a horned mask that covered her entire face, a molded foam breastplate that accentuated breasts and waist, and a short, diaphanous skirt. The winner of the anime/manga category, “Lolia,” cosplayed as a Dynames—­a ­giant robotic “mobile suit” in the Gundam media franchise. Her costume was a large, carefully detailed structure of khaki, green, and white that she constructed using foam, paint, and, as she indicated in her brief interview on stage, “a few utensils from my kitchen.” The overall winner of the competition, Akshay Churi, wore a similar costume based on a dif­fer­ent Gundam character. On both eve­nings, the large, architectural costumes ­were favorites of the judges, but it was clear that the audience responded positively to costumes that demonstrated effort, complexity, and thought, even when they ­were less ­g rand in scale. The crowd also responded with cheers to anyone who attempted to “perform” their character through a few seconds of dialogue or a dramatic pose. Krishnamurti

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Characters, Selves, Communities As I suggested ­earlier, cosplay is about fashioning at dif­fer­ent scales. Cosplayers create characters, selves, and communities—­ones that can be both radically transformative and hegemonically exclusionary—­through their fanwork. Through cosplay, participants may impersonate a character, but they are also trying out a role in a shifting global subcultural practice. Putting on the costume of a Marvel superhero and learning a few lines from a movie can demonstrate a commitment to one’s fandom. But t­ hose whose cosplay choices reflect deep reading or viewing of other cultural texts, such as obscure comics or manga, also signal their fluency in the shared language of this subculture, an acquisition of necessary cultural capital. A dedicated cosplay competition or anime con might attract well-­versed fans who can move easily through this subculture. But ­t here are also many new cosplayers for whom the Comic Con India space is a gateway. In this vein, ­t here are multiple layers of impersonation, including the seasoned cosplayer striving for an au­then­tic imitation and the new cosplayer impersonating the hardcore fan. Some cosplay communities require intensive commitments for access. For example, Daisuke Okabe describes the very specific language and cultural space of cosplaying w ­ omen in Japan in the mid-2000s: Cosplayers make more than their own outfits. Cosplayers share rules and codes of conduct that are constructed and maintained through their everyday practice. In this sense, community rules and codes of conduct are also created by the amateur community rather than an external authority or professional standards. (Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji 2012, 236) The rules for engaging in dif­fer­ent types of cosplay ­were known by participants in the community, and newcomers w ­ ere trained to adhere to them. The ­women cosplayers interviewed by Okabe emphasized the DIY work of costume making, to the extent that they apologized to each other for buying premade ones (Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji 2012, 235). They also shared specific dismissive terms for cosplayers who demonstrated a hunger for the attention of photog­ raphers, rather than a commitment to their character or fandom (Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji 2012, 241). But very l­ ittle of this structured, rule-­based fan community ethos was vis­i­ ble at Comic Con India. In general, it seemed that cosplayers and audience members w ­ ere generous and supportive of each other, and the only boos I heard ­were directed ­toward a Tony Stark cosplayer who wore a T-­shirt with a shiny sticker in the center of his chest and a Harry Potter cosplayer whose costume was simply a Gryffindor scarf and a wand. In the context of t­ hese competitions, 204

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audience members readily chastise participants who display l­ittle effort, but reward ­those whose effort and imagination are vis­i­ble. And yet the crowd did not expect every­one to be aware of the rules of the subcultural community. In this re­spect, the cosplay environment at Comic Con India is less like a comparable event in Tokyo or New York, and more like the small-­town conventions in North Amer­i­ca where the scale attracts neither professional cosplayers nor big-­ name draws, and where many fans are entering the culture for the first time. Comic Con India is building a cosplay community by introducing Indians to an existing global fan culture and allowing them to become familiar with its contours. Transnational cosplay culture does not neatly connect to any traditional cultural practice of per­for­mance in India and South Asia more broadly; its practices and effects are quite dif­fer­ent, and it owes more to East Asian fan cultures. Cosplayers’ engagement with Indian comics and games is very l­ imited despite the richness and availability of works in t­ hese genres at comic cons. Indian cultural contexts remain vis­i­ble to some degree: Bollywood and regional cinemas, for example, though not a huge presence at comic cons, ­were reflected in a few cosplayers’ choices. Cosplay could represent an opportunity to bring Bollywood fandom into the “geek culture” frame, and this might be a natu­ral fit for some committed fans. As noted e­ arlier, Indian images and characters regularly feature in comic con events and promotional materials. But despite the ready availability of characters, and despite the wide array of impersonation practices in South Asia, as attested to by the chapters in this volume, the cosplayers I observed generally shied away from drawing on Indian themes in their fanwork. While the cultural practice of cosplay is developing in India, the source material for most cosplayers continues to be e­ ither American, Japa­nese, or Korean popu­lar cultures. One pos­si­ble reason for this might be a sense of cultural proximity to traditional narratives. Deadpool, or Harley Quinn or Gundam, or One Piece represent fictional worlds that allow an escape from the social, religious, and economic realities of younger Indians. It is also clear that many of the narratives from Indian publishers, like Holy Cow’s Aghori series or Graphic India’s Ramayan 3392 AD, play with tropes and images drawn from religious contexts, even when they are placed in a fantastical frame. To cosplay such characters requires wearing religion in a way that might feel too close to home or might feel problematic or appropriative, particularly in the current po­ liti­cal climate of India.12 For t­ hose who do opt to impersonate deities or characters from mythology-­based narratives in comics, gaming, or film, t­here is another intriguing layer to the material practice of cosplay as it collides with traditional repre­sen­ta­tional concerns. It may also be that for some participants, an au­t hen­ tic engagement with cosplay necessitates a turn to characters that are more broadly recognizable to a global audience. Krishnamurti

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In embracing portrayals of characters from Japa­nese, Korean, or American texts, Indian cosplayers demonstrate complex mimetic engagements with gender, ethnicity, and religious or cultural identity. India’s cosplay culture is critically dif­fer­ent in this re­spect from t­ hose in the United States and Japan. In Japan, of course, the g­ reat majority of participants in cosplay and otaku culture are Japa­ nese. ­There are complexities of gender and race at play in Japa­nese cosplay that are specific to that cultural context (Ito, Okabe, and Tsuji 2012). Without delving too deeply into t­ hose dynamics in this chapter, I w ­ ill suggest only that much of the cosplay in Japan concerns manga and anime subjects, and many of the characters are implicitly or explic­itly Japa­nese, or white, or nonhuman. In Eu­rope and the United States, by contrast, cosplay has historically been a white-­dominated scene both in terms of fan participation and in the repre­sen­ta­tion of characters (Gittinger 2018, 91).13 The fandoms reflected in convention gatherings, including sci-fi and fantasy media worlds, are also overwhelmingly dominated by white characters. While t­ hese worlds often include fantastical characters, aliens, monsters, and demons that might not fit neatly into a racial category, it is often easy to see how i­ magined creatures reflect or symbolize hegemonic ideas about race.14 The emerging cosplay culture in India is dif­fer­ent in both re­spects. Although ­there w ­ ere a few white and East Asian participants at the Comic Con India events I attended, and I observed one cosplayer of Black African descent in Bengaluru, the ­great majority of ­t hose I witnessed in cosplay ­were of South Asian descent. And while American films, games, and comics culture dominated the scene at ­these Indian comic cons, Japa­nese manga and anime seemed to be the next largest category of interest among fans. The audience composition therefore resulted in a very large number of South Asian ­people impersonating white and East Asian characters. No one I spoke to seemed to have given this issue of racial impersonation much thought; when I asked participants how they felt about impersonating a character outside their race or ethnicity, most just shrugged off the question. A few cosplayers appeared to have used makeup or face paint to lighten their skin, but for the most part, the result was simply a very large number of Indian superheroes and supervillains, robots, and anime characters, all implicitly innovating on their characters through their own embodiment. Ele­ments of racial impersonation or mimicry ­were also at work. In performing lines on stage during competition, some participants tried to affect a British or American accent. ­Others had memorized a line or catchphrase in Japa­nese.15 But in general, it seemed that questions about race and repre­sen­ta­tion simply did not resonate for this fan community as they might have in the United States or even in Eu­rope, where the par­tic­u­lar politics of race might mediate how individuals approach characters (Stanfill 2018). In other words, impersonation

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across racial lines seemed to be an unremarkable real­ity of participation for participants in Comic Con India. While fans seemed to have only a ­limited engagement with questions around racial impersonation, they ­were much more open and aware of gender impersonation. Th ­ ere ­were a number of “genderbent” cosplays, but very few involved cisgender men; the majority of ­these ­were w ­ omen playing or modifying male characters. Several young w ­ omen took on the character of Captain Jack Sparrow, whose flamboyant mannerisms might lend themselves to gender play. As I noted e­ arlier, a young w ­ oman cosplayed Baji Rao and performed romantic lines of dialogue with two other young w ­ omen who played Kashibai and Mastani. Another young South Asian ­woman played the character Negan from the comics and tele­v i­sion series The Walking Dead. This character is a hypermasculine, violent southern US man with a swagger and a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. The cosplayer stepped to the front of the stage and performed a short dialogue that reflected the character, swinging the bat around. But she retained aspects of her own femininity, with a long braid falling down one shoulder. It was notable that she also used makeup to make her face appear white. When I asked her about her costume choice, she told me that she chose him ­because she was a fan of the show, and that Negan was a satisfying role to play ­because he is so evil and “so macho.” The adoption of ­these roles suggests that cosplay might be a productive space for the exploration of gender for young Indian ­women. It is certainly also the case that a number of young ­women cosplayed characters that allowed them to wear revealing clothing or chose highly sexualized characters like Poison Ivy or Catwoman to play. For ­t hese young ­women, cosplay may offer an opportunity to explore and pre­sent a sexualized self-­performance that might not be so readily available in other spaces. W ­ omen like the one impersonating Negan from The Walking Dead also have access to Euro-­A merican forms of hypermasculinity through cosplay. The w ­ omen cosplayers I spoke with at the comic con all emphasized a sense of freedom within the space. This openness to gender play and sexuality also makes cosplay an impor­tant queer space (Gn 2011). In Bengaluru, I observed a number of young ­people who might be described as gender nonnormative in their outward expression, and a number of T-­shirts and buttons expressed support for the queer community. Bengaluru Pride had occurred just the weekend before. One young w ­ oman I met at the comic con, a college student, stood for hours in the outdoor food court holding a sign that said “­Free Hugs” in rainbow letters. As she stood with two friends on e­ ither side of her offering support, many p ­ eople s­ topped to share hugs or speak with her. For the most part, the ­people accepting hugs w ­ ere young men and w ­ omen also of about college age. I asked her why she was d ­ oing this.

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She told me that she had been at Bengaluru Pride the week before and had chosen to hold a similar sign ­t here as a way to break through her own anxiety and fear about being in that public space. At the comic con, she said, “this is also a huge crowd, and it can be very lonely. This is one way to connect with ­people.” Hugs ­were a way to interact with strangers in an intimate way, and to feel reassured of safety in the space. Safety is indeed a big concern in cosplay spaces, particularly for ­women, queer, and nonbinary p ­ eople. Harassment of female cosplayers is a serious ongoing issue in the community and, given the large number of ­people milling about in masks and the even larger number of p ­ eople with cameras at the comic con, privacy is also an ongoing concern. Comic Con India has a­ dopted rules around harassment that reflect the direction that other global comic cons have taken. Large signs all around the venue at each comic con read “Cosplay Is Not Consent,” and remind visitors to always ask before taking someone’s picture or touching their costume or body. ­These signs also publicized a clear and detailed anti-­harassment policy covering a number of concerns including sexual orientation, gender pre­sen­ta­tion, religion, race, and ability. While such policies may provide some comfort to t­ hose who are vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault, they cannot resolve a prob­lem that is so deeply entrenched both in fan culture and in South Asian culture (Bose 2016).16

Conclusion As the observations shared h ­ ere illustrate, cosplay is a performative, transgressive, and transformative practice that continually blurs bound­aries between performer and observer, and between text and consumer. As an emerging form of material culture and per­for­mance in India, cosplay is a space of transformation, and of what Kirkpatrick calls “translation”: a fluid meaning-­making pro­cess, one troublesome to concepts of authenticity, truth, and constancy. Translation is not static and assured; it is a movement of meaning across bound­aries, where meaning can slip and change as it echoes through differing minds, mouths, and bodies. (2015, 4.6) Indian cosplayers are not only engaging in the practice of translating fictional characters into material and embodied ones. Authenticity for cosplayers means many t­ hings, from faithful re-­creations to creative, innovative departures; it concerns the authenticity of a character, and the authenticity of the cosplayer’s commitment to the community. Playing with the tropes of authenticity and 208

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innovation, cosplayers are also translating themselves into con­temporary global culture, and making themselves intelligible. An outcome of this is the recent emergence of an Indian cosplay culture with its own professionals and celebrities. But perhaps importantly, the emergence of cosplay spaces also means the cultivation of new spaces for p ­ eople to try on and explore nonnormative identities. Through acts of impersonation, cosplayers have the potential to illuminate the limits of certain cultural practices and fictions, particularly around race, gender, and sexuality.

Notes 1. Readers unfamiliar with the comic con phenomenon may wish to view Morgan Spurlock’s (2011) documentary on the subject. 2. Informal interviews with cosplayers w ­ ere conducted at Comic Con Bengaluru in 2017. I am only identifying by name t­hose cosplayers who w ­ ere named in the media or in Comic Con India’s social media but ­were not interviewed by me. The four participants in my study with whom I had short semi-­structured interviews have been anonymized, but where relevant, I have discussed their cosplay choices. 3. Some sources suggest that the first Japa­nese usage of the word occurs in Takahashi’s publication in 1983 (Rahman, Liu, and Cheung 2012, 318). 4. Manga is the Japa­nese term for comics or sequential graphic stories; anime is the term for animated films. Both terms are also used in Korean, and are used in En­glish to refer to comics and animation from East Asia. 5. For comparison, according to the event websites, Atlanta’s Dragon Con had more than 80,000 visitors in 2017; San Diego Comic Con had double that number. 6. Corporate sponsors with companies like Maruti Suzuki have likely supported rapid growth, as have partnerships with international promoters. 7. The latter term is used widely but is best represented by the Organ­ization for Transformative Works, which also publishes the Journal for Transformative Works and Cultures. A self-­described network of fan activism, OTW also argues for the l­ egal legitimacy of transformative works like fan art that might be seen as violating copyright. 8. I encourage readers to have a look at Comic Con India’s social media accounts for photos and videos that ­w ill provide a richer visual sense of the scenes I attempt to describe ­here. 9. While I was a participant-­observer at the comic con, I de­cided not to cosplay myself ­because it was difficult to assess how it would affect how p ­ eople might interact with me, but I think that this was also a limitation of my study, as this also affected how and when I was able to interact. 10. The vis­i­ble presence of volunteers is consistent with and lends credibility to the impression that comic con is a grassroots, fan-­centered community space, even though the event itself is more corporate and commercially driven. That volunteers must undergo an application pro­cess and are encouraged to interact with visitors in par­tic­u­lar ways also indicates that a level of familiarity within the culture is necessary to serve in this role, and thus, the volunteers themselves can be understood as engaged in a kind of per­for­mance. See Mason (2015). 11. Cosplay medics, often in costume as doctors or paramedics, often circulate through crowds carry­ing tape, glue guns, and markers needed for emergency repairs.

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12. Anti-­Muslim and Hindu nationalist views are of serious concern for cultural producers throughout India. To cite just one recent example, Muslim stand-up comic Munawar Faruqui was jailed for twenty-­eight days in 2021 on charges that he intended to “insult the religious sentiments” of Hindus with jokes that he ­didn’t even make (Biswas 2021). 13. Gittinger (2018) writes about Muslim w ­ omen cosplayers. For an interview with Black cosplayers navigating the white space of cosplay, see Molinsky (2018). 14. Racial and racist analogies in the development of sci-fi and fantasy characters are well documented. The Star Trek universe perhaps offers the most well recognized examples of ­t hese. See Bernardi (1997). 15. ­There ­were very few characters that posed a dif­fer­ent challenge. One, a young man from Assam, cosplayed as Black Panther, but beyond his mask, he did not appear to change his appearance in any way. While the 2017 comic con took place just before Black Panther came out, it was still notable to me that no other cosplayers had chosen non-­white or non-­ Japanese ­human characters to play. 16. One ­woman at the 2015 Mumbai Comic Con cosplay competition used her time at the mic to berate a man in the crowd who had pointed at her and said, “Oh look, it’s flat-­chested Won­der ­Woman.”

Works Cited “About Us.” n.d. Comic Con India. http://­comicconindia​.­com​/­about​-­us​/­. Bernardi, Daniel. 1997. “ ‘Star Trek’ in the 1960s: Liberal-­Humanism and the Production of Race.” Science Fiction Studies 24, no. 2:209–225. Biswas, Soutik. 2021. “The Comic in Jail for Jokes He ­Didn’t Crack.” BBC News, January 28. https://­w ww​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​/­world​-­asia​-­india​-­55797053. Bose, Rakhi. 2016. “The Dirty Secret of Indian Comic Cons That No One Talks About.” ScoopWhoop, December  10, 2016. https://­w ww​.­scoopwhoop​.­com​/­These​-­Shocking​ -­Accounts​-­Will​-­Tell​-­You​-­W hy​-­Its​-­Not​-­Easy​-­Being​-­A​-­Woman​- ­Cosplayer​-­At​- ­Comic​ -­Con​/­#​.­y5a4ucr29. “A Day in the Life of India—­Episode 39—­Cosplayer.” 2018. Facebook, September 17, 2018. https://­w ww​.­facebook​.­com​/­indiatimes​/­v ideos​/­1202625903218340​/­. Gittinger, Juli L. 2018. “Hijabi Cosplay: Per­for­mances of Culture, Religion, and Fandom.” Journal of Religion and Popu­lar Culture 30, no. 2:87–105. Gn, Joel. 2011. “Queer Simulation: The Practice, Per­for­mance and Plea­sure of Cosplay.” Continuum 25, no. 4:583–593. Hale, Matthew. 2014. “Cosplay: Intertextuality, Public Texts, and the Body Fantastic.” Western Folklore 73, no. 1:5–37. “In Pics: Delhi Unleashes Its Inner Geek at Comic Con 2015.” 2015. Hindustan Times, December 6, 2015. https://­www​.­hindustantimes​.­com​/­more​-­lifestyle​/­in​-­pics​-­delhi​-­unleashes​ -­its​-­inner​-­geek​-­at​-­comic​-­con​-­2015​/­story​-­AtbZIrjz2L3QQ1rdH6xhGK​.­html. Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji, eds. 2012. Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kirkpatrick, Ellen. 2015. “­Toward New Horizons: Cosplay (Re)­Imagined through the Superhero Genre, Authenticity, and Transformation.” Transformative Works and Cultures 18. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3983​/­t wc​.­2015​.­0613.

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Lamerichs, Nicolle. 2011. “Stranger than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3983​/­t wc​.­2011​.­0246. —­—­—. 2014. “Costuming as Subculture: The Multiple Bodies of Cosplay.” Scene 2, nos. 1–2:113–125. Mason, Jessica. 2015. “Are Comic Cons Breaking the Law by Not Paying Their Volunteers?” Mary Sue, March 29, 2015. https://­w ww​.­themarysue​.­com​/­convention​-­volunteers​/­. Molinsky, Eric. 2018. “Black Cosplayers.” Public Radio International, May 3, 2018. https://­ www​.­pri​.­org​/­stories​/­2018–05–03​/ ­black​-­cosplay. Accessed August 8, 2020. Nair, Rohin. “Comic Con Mumbai 2017: Founder Jatin Varma Tells Us What to Expect from This Edition.” 2017. Firstpost, November 10, 2017. http://­w ww​.­fi rstpost​.­com​ /­e ntertainment ​/­c omic​-­c on​-­mumbai​-­2 017​-­founder​-­jatin​-­v arma​-­t ells​-­u s​-­w hat​-­to​ -­expect​-­from​-­t his​-­edition​-­4203551​.­html. Rahman, Osmud, Liu Wing-­sun, and Brittany Hei-­man Cheung. 2012. “ ‘Cosplay’: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity.” Fashion Theory 16, no. 3:317–341. Relph, Mridu Khullar. 2013. “­These P ­ eople Are in Line for the New York Comic Con: They Have No Idea That This Man Created Comic Con India.” Meeting Professional, December, 60–63. Spurlock, Morgan. 2011. Comic-­Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. Mutant ­Enemy, POW! Entertainment. Pittsburgh: Thomas Tull Productions. Stanfill, Mel. 2018. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies.” In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, edited by Paul Booth, 305–317. London: Wiley-­Blackwell. Thacker, Mara L. 2018. “New Energy for Indian Comics: A Qualitative Study at Comic Con India.” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 2, no. 2:160–177. Westcott, Ben. 2016. “ ‘Nazi-­Chic’: Why Dressing Up in Nazi Uniforms I­sn’t as Controversial in Asia.” CNN​.­com, December 28, 2016. https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​/­2016​/­12​ /­27​/­asia​/­taiwan​-­nazi​-­school​-­asia​/­index​.­html. Winge, Theresa. 2006. “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga Cosplay.” Mechademia 1, no. 1:65–76.

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C H A P T E R   10

Possessed Impersonation DIVINE MIMESIS IN MALABAR Rich Freeman

The aspiration of this paper is to bring an elaborate complex of spirit posses-

sion, known as teyyāṭṭam, into partial dialogue with this volume’s general theme of impersonation. In their Introduction, the editors of this volume have provided a necessarily broad characterization of practices of impersonation as the temporary taking on of an identity or guise perceived to be not normally one’s own. While this must obviously cover at least a part of what is entailed in spirit possession, my goal ­here is to provide an ethnographic perspective on the relatively greater intensity of social and personal engagements and therefore density of cultural context involved in impersonation when the person who is the object—or rather, subject—of such impersonation is divine. Accordingly, my agendum within the brief confines available h ­ ere ­w ill be to explore the cultural presuppositions and entailments of the guising and identification involved in this par­tic­u ­lar complex of spirit possession from northernmost Kerala, or Malabar. I do this partly by extending my ­earlier use of mimesis as a multistrata pro­cess for interrelating the historical, cultural, and the personal experiences of spirit possession in teyyāṭṭam (Freeman 2006), and thereby consider how ritualized possession might push the limits of impersonation as understood in other contexts.

In the Guise of Possession Teyyāṭṭam refers to the per­for­mance of costumed, spirit-­possessed dance and rituals, celebrated in annual festivals that are part of a larger cultural complex of worshipping local deities known as teyyams, presently confined to the northern districts of Malabar. This is most fundamentally celebrated in shrines that are the centers of worship for all ­those castes historically reckoned as avarṇa 212

(“without the caste-­status of var­ṇa”), who w ­ ere excluded u ­ nder caste norms of pollution (ayittam) from entry into the prominent ­temples of the region controlled by the bloc of dominant castes (the so-­called savarṇa), ­under the ritual regulation of brahmin priests. ­Those shrines exclusively dedicated to teyyam rites thus formed a largely separate, parallel religious order to brahminical ­temple worship, subordinated po­liti­cally, but largely ­free to carry on their own public rituals entailing blood sacrifice, offerings of alcohol, dance, and spirit possession. ­These avarṇa networks of shrines ­were ordered by their own stratified hierarchy of caste and lineage relations, with their own caste-­internal institutional organ­ izations of priests, ritual, and executive officiants, in partial dominance over still more subordinated strata of avarṇa castes. It is among ­t hese latter castes that some specialize in performing the costumed dance and possession rites of teyyāṭṭam, holding lineage entitlement to incarnate par­tic­u ­lar gods at par­tic­u­ lar shrines, which rights their descendants maintain to this day. Despite ­t hese communities and ritual practices having associations with “pollution,” from a savarṇa caste perspective, teyyam worship is socially pervasive, both as teyyāṭṭam proper, performed as a ritually segregated, modular adjunct to some privileged caste t­emples and domestic sites of worship, but also u ­ nder dif­fer­ent forms of possessed and iconic worship, which are culturally implicated across the entire caste spectrum of Malabar Hinduism. Since I have treated the caste dynamics and history of the partly discrepant, yet entangled o ­ rders of Hindu worship in this region elsewhere (Freeman 1991, 2006, 2010), I ­w ill restrict myself ­here to only t­ hose issues of caste and society that bear most directly on the per­for­mance of teyyam worship as it concerns the theme of impersonation. Accordingly, as our initial contextual frame for exploring what the teyyam tradition is and is about in local understanding and practice, I begin by considering the basic naming of this worship and the tangible form it takes. The ­whole complex of possessed worship that I survey h ­ ere is generally known for the most elaborately costumed form this takes, teyyāṭṭam, meaning literally “god-­dance” in Ma­la­ya­lam. While teyyam refers most abstractly to the deities (from the Sans­k rit daiva/deva) who are characteristically worshipped through possession, it can also commonly be used for the manifest form such a deity takes in conjunction with its ­human host, ­whether the latter is costumed or not. ­There is a more specific term, however, for the elaborately costumed humanoid form in which the deity appears, and that is kōlam. While the word kōlam in general Ma­la­ya­lam usage may mean simply figure or form, I characterize it with deliberation as a ­humanoid entity in this specific context ­because, though it is built up on the everyday ­human frame of the dancer through elaborate costuming and makeup, it creates an amalgam that is unsettlingly removed from ordinary humanity, not only in appearance but in its metaphysically divine attributions. As the ephemerally material instantiation of deity, fleetingly fused Freeman

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with h ­ uman stuff, a teyyam hovers uncannily during its episodic performative life between this world and some other. This form and construction of each teyyam’s kōlam is hereditarily stipulated with ritual exactitude. The costuming consists of incredibly complex configurations of wrappings, pleats, and bindings of multiple layers of dyed and patterned cloths, frequently interworked with ele­ments of woven palm leaf or painted areca spathe and clustered, braided flowers, often covering or incorporating vari­ous frames or support work, bound to the body in ingenious structural arrangements (Figure 10.1). Its appearance and particulars are often said to have been revealed through ancestral visionary experiences, and this includes weapons, insignia, and ornaments that may be part of the performing or sponsoring communities’ sacredly vested, material heritage. ­These phenomenal aspects of costuming and accoutrements may further be referenced or described in the possession liturgies themselves, thus establishing a series of indexical linkages between the discursive and the material registers of per­for­mance. This conception of the kōlam as a kind of animate sacred image (mūrti) led me, prior to other perspectives on the biographical “lives” of Indian images (Davis 1997), to treat teyyams as “living icons” and so to relate their possession to the images in Hindu t­ emples, viewing the latter as virtually “possessed” through their installation and worship u ­ nder an anthropological analytic of personhood (Freeman 1991, 1998, 1999; cf. Smith 2006). I ­shall return to something of the cultural metaphysics of ­these relations across the variety of physical forms, both animate and inanimate, at this chapter’s close. At an everyday level, however, the basic relations of agency posited between the deity and the performer are again seen in the basic designation of teyyāṭṭam itself. The lexical ele­ments of the compound mean literally “god-­dance/dancing” (teyyam + āṭṭam), with no case or other morphological marking of ele­ments to indicate their grammatical or logical relation. While our empiricist reading would construe this to mean that some implied h ­ uman agents are dancing the gods, as objects of a worldly activity, the confirmed understanding of worshippers is that the gods themselves are ­doing the dancing, through possession of their humanoid kōlams as instruments of their own divine agency. This, of course, inverts our usual understanding of “impersonation” since, rather than the impersonator “getting into character,” in the theatrical idiom, the character seems to be getting into them. Though sharing certain superficial features of form and appearance with traditional Kerala theatre (cf. Zarrilli 2000; Oberlin, Shulman, and Mucciarelli 2019), the material, discursive, dispositional, and actional engagements of spirit possession are differently charged and differently configured. And, as I ­will argue, t­ hese engagements in teyyāṭṭam inform an ontological commitment to the experiential, sustained presence of deities as persons in the lives of their performers and worshippers to an extent not ventured in any traditional theatrical forum. In the cultural experience of possession’s dialectic, ­humans do not therefore 214

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Figure 10.1. ​A typical teyyam’s kōlam, featuring a varied assemblage of expertly crafted natu­ral and manufactured materials. Photo by the author.

merely enact the identities of teyyams through donning their guise; it is rather teyyams who enact their own identities u ­ nder the guise of possessed ­humans.

More than Skin-­Deep We have seen that the exterior image of the teyyam is built up as the elaborately intricate form of the kōlam on h ­ uman bodies. Their ­human hosts, however, ­si­mul­ta­neously move under­neath and within ­these assemblages as they animate them, to lend their humanoid ele­ment to the kōlam, with their skins as the contact Freeman

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zone between the organic and the artfully artifactual. Sometimes most or all of the exposed body parts, but nearly always the face, are covered with outlandish and individually stipulated painted designs, as a kind of mimetically divinized second skin. The codified, divinely individuated iconography of the facial designs exhibit fine, parallel convolutions of baroque intricacy, which most evidently recall cultures of tattooing elsewhere in the world (Figure 10.2). Alfred Gell, who has done some of the most astute globally comparative thinking on the intricately patterned work of tattooed and formally similar designs, has posited how such patterns work as “indexes” (1998, 13) of artistic virtuosity, conveying through the semiotic force of their own “involution” a sense of immanent agency installed in the art (62). Though centrally based on his work in the Pacific islands, Gell’s use of comparative case material brings him fortuitously to a related use of kōlam, ­under a cognate signification from the Tamil country neighboring Kerala. Th ­ ere kōlam usually refers to the intricate, involutedly reticulate line designs drawn daily in powdered substances by ­women on the thresholds of their homes, recently detailed by Vijaya Nagarajan (2018). Gell attributes this practice, perhaps rather narrowly, to its apotropaic function as a sort of demon trap (though it has more positively auspicious associations in my experience), and then extends this to his general study of tattooing as well, where such designs are “defending not the threshold of the ­house, but the skin, the threshold of the body” (1998, 86).

Figure 10.2. ​The complexly involuted facial makeup typical of teyyams. Photo by the author.

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In regard to the teyyam’s makeup, while such magically defensive effects may well be in play, especially given the martial provenance of many deities, I would rather invoke Gell’s more inclusively general and positive notion of “captivation.” By this he refers to the powers of such formal intricacy to fascinate through frustrating the viewer’s sense of any pos­si­ble genesis through mundane, workaday h ­ uman agency, and therefore to create the sense of more remotely based magical and religious powers (1998, 68–71). In the teyyam’s makeup this captivating work is similarly wrought on the skin, but not as marking Gell’s threshold between a merely ­human body and a mundane, outer world. The artistry on the teyyam’s skin is rather doubly mediating of the deity’s compound presence: first, as emblematically enclosing the dancer’s internal person, whose psychophysical dynamics ­will yield to the god’s conscious takeover; and second, as the transitional divide from this formerly h ­ uman, organic form to the still more captivating artifice and structures of the god’s external kōlam. Similarly pervasive powers of artful agency, as Gell has argued, can certainly pre­sent the effect of what he describes as “distributed personhood.” I would further like to argue, however, that beyond this general level of distributed h ­ uman agency which Gell charts comparatively in the powers of formal artistry, the worship in this case of par­tic­u­lar gods through costumed possession seems to concentrate such agency into individuated, if episodically lived, historically continuous and divinely virtual persons.

Mimesis in the Assemblage of Persons Teyyams are thus a compound assemblage, both in the composite forms of the costuming, makeup, and accoutrements of the gods’ kōlams, and si­mul­ta­neously through the fusion of ­these with the physical and personal attributes and cultural knowledge of their ­human hosts ­under the transformation of possession. Individual teyyams are also associated with each other to form their own ritual collectivities, as they perform together or serially during par­tic­u­lar festivals, and across the territories of their worship. The deities thus proj­ect through their episodic, performative incarnations an ever-­renewing network of relations within and across their performing and worshipping communities (cf. Freeman 1991). In reflecting on how the beliefs and practices of this complex of possessed worship have been maintained through past generations and into the pre­sent, one cannot escape the evident pro­cesses of interactive enculturation, w ­ hether at the level of the performers or the worshippers. As to the latter, in watching ­children who regularly attend teyyāṭṭams with their families, one can see how they are guided by the adults to recognize and participate in the vari­ous phases of the rituals, all built around the central characters of the deities as tangible and discursive entities with whom they are taught to interact. As to the emergence of the god’s physical form, Freeman

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Figure 10.3. ​­Children watching the construction of a kōlam outside a makeup room. Photo by the author.

most of the makeup and costuming is done “offstage” from the main per­for­mance arena, in caste-­assigned makeup rooms or sheds. Though on the periphery or just outside the central shrine compounds, ­children often gather around ­these “green rooms” (aṇiyaṟa) in rapt fascination as they watch the makeup and costuming construction of the soon-­to-be teyyams (Figure  10.3). They then eagerly follow the nearly completed teyyams around to the front of their shrines to witness the final divine transformation through the songs and rituals, to which we s­ hall return. 218

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Since each kōlam for each of t­hese named deities—of which t­here are hundreds—­has its own exacting traditional specifications as to its costuming, be­ hav­ior, and ritual regime, each has its own identity as a virtually emergent person. In thinking about how the creation and reproduction of t­ hese divine persons comes about, I wish to expand a bit on what I have argued elsewhere (Freeman 2006), and return to a model of mimesis, but one adapted to comprising multiple layers of material and performative context. While Michael Taussig’s (1993) well-­ known exposition of mimesis ­under colonial contact takes its departure point from effigies or similar artistic forms fashioned so as to render or capture the identities or powers of social o ­ thers, we are led to ask, in contrast to Taussig’s ethnographic o ­ thers, what a teyyam could be an effigy of. What or who is being recognized ­here in its reproduced impersonation across dif­fer­ent contexts of per­ for­mance, when t­here is no real-­world correlate to the object of mimesis? The schematic answer to this complex question is that it is most immediately the par­ tic­u­lar kōlam itself, built onto a h ­ uman body and then enlivened as the teyyam that is mimetic of itself, in terms of its own former performative incarnations. We have seen, though, that the composite entity of the teyyam is only partly the material assemblage of the kōlam, ­because, as a living icon, it is empowered and animated from within and so mimetically constructed on dif­fer­ent ­human hosts from per­for­mance to per­for­mance, who then play out a w ­ hole series of complex discursive and physical activities. Th ­ ese activities have their own configured sequences and contexts, ranging from the linguistic structures of liturgies, vocalizations, and conversational interactions, to all the behavioral intricacies of the dances and ritual programs. ­These orchestrated actional structures are obviously themselves mimetic of their prior enactments across vari­ous per­for­mances, comprising the “per­for­mance” of t­ hese specific gods. So ­here we need a more complexly configured and dynamic model of mimesis than Taussig’s imagistic one of effigies to work with. I find Paul Ricœur’s analy­sis (1984) particularly helpful h ­ ere, since his efforts to relate discursive, actional, and narrative structures to each other ­under an embracing paradigm of mimesis captures the way event structures can be schematized and sedimented into cultural patterns of historical practice. We can thus use this model to fill out the discursive ele­ments of a materially mimetic paradigm, even as we turn to the semiotics of ritual action to deepen and anchor the discourse in the ethnography.

Historicizing Liturgies According to teyyāṭṭam performers, their priests, and assistants, the vari­ous genres of teyyam liturgy serve both to harbor the divine energies of t­ hese beings and to bring them into living manifestation as they are sung during the final Freeman

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stages of costuming. Accompanied by rhythms of drummers and sung partly by the support troupe and partly by the dancer, t­ hese set works in vari­ous genres of praise, narration, and invocation have been composed for each deity and passed down verbatim within the tradition. They must thus be learned for each deity, and comprise, along with all the other aspects of costuming, dance, rituals, spoken recitations, and interactive “conversational” skills, the lore which each performer who has lineage entitlement to a par­tic­u­lar deity must master. ­These orally transmitted corpora exhibit all the text-­internal features of structural cohesion and poetics that we associate with artistically authored compositions, on the one hand, and all the indexical presuppositions and entailments that we would expect of functionally ritual scripting, on the other (Silverstein 2004). At the level of thematic content, ­there are often pieces of narrative that tell the histories of the par­tic­u­lar deity. ­There are further poetically descriptive compositions, both in praise of the god’s visualized appearance (sometimes mapping onto the ­actual kōlam, sometimes supplementally imaginative), as well as of its actions and other attributes of character. The narratives may sometimes verge into small epics, describing how the deities ­were formerly h ­ umans, and recounting their lives and adventures leading up to their heroic or tragic deaths and apotheoses into teyyams. In other cases, liturgies may narrate the deeds of an already divine being, along with the circumstances of their revelation to worshippers as a teyyam and the establishment of their worship at a par­tic­u­lar shrine. In functioning as narrative, t­hese liturgical recountings are internally configured, in Ricœur’s (1984) terms, as the mimesis of past events, emplotted into text-­internal coherence with the protagonist’s actions and character to eventuate in their incarnation as teyyams. As with all emplotment, then, ­t here is an overall structural telos that ­orders constituents of the par­tic­u­lar narrative as it moves forward, but in addition to the specific plot development, this si­ mul­ta­neously validates the general cultural claims for the transformational potential of an ancestor or deity into a teyyam. But ­whether this involves the narrative death of a h ­ uman character and its apotheosis in association with a higher power, or the awesome manifestation of a deity in entanglement with other ­human characters of the past, the outcome of the narrative is that a teyyam deity is chronicled as having been manifest at a par­tic­u­lar locale in some specified past. That commemorative telos, however, while functionally organ­izing the narrative, does not end with the event of the manifestation ­t here and then, but launches itself analogically into the pre­sent: just as the teyyam was manifest in the past, through its divinized agency, so it is now through the current per­for­ mance. This formula sometimes takes the form of an explicit locution as a coda to the narrative, but is always implicit, as we w ­ ill see in the generic designation for t­ hese songs themselves. In any case, the mimetic effects of emplotting the

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past thus spill over to configure the pre­sent, so that the narratives are open ones, in which the current performer is delivered by the story’s close into the very role of foundationally possessed agent, impersonating the original impersonator, as it w ­ ere, and thereby becoming possessed himself. ­These narrative ele­ments are further interwoven with the actional structures of the accompanying rituals, so that the structuring of the songs makes vari­ous points of ordering contact with the sequencing of the a­ ctual per­for­mance in real time, carry­ing the physical events forward in their development. This is, of course, the model of ritual as projecting forward an “iconic indexicality” in Peircean terms (Tambiah 1979, 153–154; Silverstein 2004, 626), where its internal formal structures analogically map or diagram (iconically) a sequence of projected actions (indexically). I would add, however, that t­here is an equally impor­tant and simultaneous dynamic reaching backward, where the iconicity, by its own internally complex structuring, is mimetic in Ricœur’s sense of emplotment. Since the emplotment is “historical,” this iconicity therefore reaches back into time, the foundational time of the divinized characters, even as their enacted, creatively indexical manifestation reaches into the pre­sent. We can see the performative effect of this si­mul­ta­neously semiotic grounding between a mythical past and ritual pre­ sent most clearly enacted in the genres of possessed speech, which I treat shortly. The coordinated discursive song sequences and ritual actions culminate by leading into the possession phase through a series of rituals that physically transfer the deity’s enshrined power (śakti) to the dancer through his receipt of burning wicks lit from lamps kept before the permanent icon of the deity, along with powders, unguents, and other such material media of “grace” (prasādam) from inside the shrine room, which he consumes or applies to his body. As the final lines of the songs are sung, the now fully made-up and costumed teyyam twists about, seated on its stool (pīṭham) before the shrine, in a formally mimetic but contrastively animated parallel to the fixed image inside the shrine on its own pīṭham (which its stone seat or plinth is similarly called). The dancer then is given a hand mirror, and peering into it, sees that the face and eyes looking back at him are no longer his own, but rather t­ hose of the deity. The completion of this fusion between dancer and deity into a single person through this reflexive gaze is summarized by saying it is “in the mode of directly witnessing the self, by the self” (ātmāvŭ ātmāvōṭŭ, sākṣiyām prakāram) (Figure 10.4). This ends the song phase of worship, which has been instrumental in building up to the advent of possession in the dancer. Once again, the name for this ­whole genre of teyyam songs, tōṯṯam, is highly significant, as seen from its derivation. Tōnnuka is an intransitive or affective verb in Ma­la­ya­lam, meaning to seem, be thought or conceived of, to feel, or to appear to someone. Tōṯṯuka is the transitive or effective form of the verb, meaning to bring something into

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Figure 10.4. ​The mirror-­gazing rite, confirming to the dancer that he is no longer h ­ uman. Photo by the author.

conceptual being, make it appear, or manifest it; one might say it is a kind of “thought-­act” equivalent to the speech-­act (Levinson 1983, 226–283). In this regard, I have suggested it is like having both meanings of the En­glish conceive in play si­mul­ta­neously, as though to conceive of a being mentally would at once work to conceive it physically. Tōṯṯam, as the abstract noun for this activity, is therefore clearly used to name the entire genre of songs in terms of their effective agency in bringing t­hese deities into manifestation. Th ­ ese usages are further overtly and reflexively marked within the songs themselves, as both creative thought-­and speech-­acts of gods, in myth, and as declarative powers of liturgy itself to bring the teyyams into manifest presence on each ritual occasion.

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Dancing Involution With the effecting of possession, the performer leaps or lumbers to his feet (depending on the cumbersomeness of the crown), receives the god’s sword from its shrine-­sanctum, and begins a series of dance sequences. He moves in patterned cir­cuits in front of the shrines and around the compound before the worshippers, who observe generalized caste-­and gender-­designated seating or standing areas around the ritual arena. Th ­ ese dance sequences are marked by returns to the shrine, where weapons, shields, and vari­ous ritual insignia are handed off to him and exchanged for the execution of dif­fer­ent styles of weaving and reeling patterns of dance. ­These patterns of dancing, as intricately involuted in terms of the routes they trace, are, as Gell has noted with regard to Melanesian dance (1998, 94–95), very much like the South Indian threshold patterns that we noted, which are also called kōlams. He relates t­ hese, again, to that cognitive indecipherability he terms “captivation,” where the sense of impossible complexity in design seems to inscribe an agency that is beyond mundane comprehension. Indeed, one can virtually “see” the winding, iterative, encircling designs being traced out by the teyyam’s dance steps around and to vari­ous sites or features of ritual significance throughout the compound, embedding them in its own circuitry of motion. This dance, as an itinerary of movement whose destination leads nowhere, is both ritualized through its repetitive, spatial containment, and “poetically” structured in terms of calling attention to its own formal organ­ization, in the same way as verbal poetry is through its metrical compositionality (cf. Jakobson 1960). Figurationally, it thus traces a kind of invisibly e­ tched mazeway of motion when visualized transtemporally, even while it unfolds to temporal sense in metricalized units of that motion. This metricality is, of course, further extrinsically regulated by drumming, which starts slowly as background to the songs from the time the dancer leaves the makeup room for his shrine, but then increases through the possession-­rite phase, and often builds to maddeningly complex rhythms driving the dancers through their paces. It is this, of course, that gives teyyāṭṭam its name, as the gods dance (āṭṭuka) ­these cir­cuits and rhythms through their possessed hosts.

Interlocutions of Divine Personation At the close of the dance sequence, the drums stutter to a halt, and one hears the hoarse, rasping cries of the dancer emerge as he begins to speak as the god. While the e­ arlier, pre-­possession, song genres are e­ ither in a reportative third person or second person voicing addressed to the god, ­t hese terminate in the

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spoken delivery called mumpu-­sthānam (“fore-­shrine/place”), entirely in the first person, with the dancer declaiming in the very voice of the deity. Th ­ ese forms of speech begin in a kind of recitational, rhythmic prose, often delivered with a par­tic­u ­lar timbre or constriction to the voice, punctuated by rising, louder declarations. It is called mumpu-­sthānam ­under several interpretations, for like the deictic “before” in En­glish, mumpŭ is indicative of both location in space and time, while sthānam may refer to the pre­sent shrine of the per­for­mance, or distant and ­earlier ones with which it is linked. So at the outset, the mumpu-­ sthānam is performed before the shrines housing the permanent images in the forecourt of the compound as the dancer paces up and down in front of them. In verbal content, however, the genre mostly relates the god’s advent, activities, and establishment at the pre­sent shrine complex (sthānam), historically, in a temporal before. This often includes adventures of manifestation and engagement at other places and shrines, where he or she was before the current one, giving the itinerary of fore-­shrines, eventuating historically in its arrival at the pre­sent shrine, and now before the same shrine and audience of the current per­for­mance. At a par­tic­u ­lar juncture in this recitational format, the dancer may pro­cess to dif­fer­ent corners of the compound wall and, looking over it in the direction of distant shrines in other places (and other times, if that shrine is no more), call out, addressing ­t hose gods as “my dear so-­a nd-so,” further praising their attributes, and often recalling how “I did such-­a nd-­such with you.” Such invocations and events associated with other deities are usually fragments of more extended mythical narratives that include involvement of ­t hose deities’ shrine constituencies, past or pre­sent, in the broader web of regional history as context for ongoing ritual relations. Th ­ ese utterances thus performatively reconnect the pre­sent shrine to nodes in a network of other shrines (whose ritual representatives may indeed be pre­sent at the per­for­mance as guests). The speech thereby serves to ratify the vari­ous wider affiliations by lineage, clan, caste, or chiefdom through “conversation” with co-­related gods, rehearsing parts of a mythical or historical charter that situates the pre­sent shrine in its regional relationships. As divinely possessed speech issuing from a form of “impersonation,” then, this genre reaches back into time, and out over both time and space, to encompass other beings and powers in a sort of visionary speech-­act. Thus, when one attends to the words of address hoarsely cried out from the teyyam to a directionally indicated but invisible deity off in the distance, one is si­mul­ta­neously transported ­there, to contemplate its setting, yet also senses its presence ­here, since that deity is being directly addressed as a “you” by the visibly pre­sent and declaiming “I” of the embodied teyyam (Figure 10.5). Similarly, and more intensively, when the spatial frame is restricted to the pre­sent shrine, the teyyam sketches its own foundational events, again in the first person, with use of a vividly real historical 224

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Figure 10.5. ​A teyyam addressing a deity in the unseen distance as though physically pre­sent. Photo by the author.

pre­sent. Time, space, history, and social distance are thus collapsed into the virtual real­ity projected from the context of per­for­mance. Every­t hing up to this point, except for the occasional address to other gods, is cast as a kind of introspective monologue, an extended, fixated soliloquy that we as audience overhear. Shifting out of this initial phase of divine speech, the god then turns to the assembled crowd. The categories of worshippers are strictly attended to by social status and caste. Shrine officials, traditional patrons, usually of locally dominant caste, and then a ranked order of caste groupings, assembled in ideally segregated parts of the seating or standing areas ­will all be approached and addressed according to categorical social designations by office, caste, lineage, or ­house­hold names, though often in archaically traditional nomenclature Freeman

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Figure 10.6. ​A teyyam blessing the specially honored descendant of a former lordly h ­ ouse. Photo by the author.

(Figure 10.6). Prominent folk who are well known may be called by their local ­house names, and shrine officials by their titles of office. As examples, Nampūtiri brahmins may be hailed as “Payyannūr villa­gers” (where they originally settled); Nāyars, of former martial caste, as Akampaṭi (“bodyguards”); and the Tīyyas (traditionally toddy tappers) as “­Those of the Eight Lineages.” While t­ here are ritual offerings of cash given in exchange for substances of the physical grace received from the teyyam along with routinely perfunctory, generic, verbal blessings, t­ here may also be extended harangues reserved for prominent lineage representatives, who generally respond to stock questions of devotion, well-­being, and so forth, with routine answers. 226

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If worshippers have par­tic­u­lar personal concerns, however, they may raise them at this time, and t­ here are l­ater periods when the w ­ hole compound is opened up to general petitioners whose complaints, prob­lems, or gratitude for past blessings are aired, accompanied by the deity’s further receipt of offerings from the interlocutors. Th ­ ese more impromptu exchanges are the real test of the performer’s discursive skills, since he must stay in character as an archaic deity with suitable locutions and vocabulary, but interact with worshippers concerning sometimes very con­temporary prob­lems. On the other hand, the deity is expected to be transtemporally effective, and what­ever micro-­improvisations may be demanded, these are macro-­framed against a background of general expectations about how  the interactions between worshippers and deities proceed, with assistants from the dancer’s troupe, and possibly shrine officials mediating transactions as well. When all worshipping supplicants have been thus entertained and all their offerings received, ­there are a series of final verbal and ritual interactions between the teyyam or teyyams and the shrine’s priestly officials. This includes some final runs of recitation giving a synopsis of the shrine’s mythicized history, declarations of the god’s satisfaction with the constituency, and the promise of blessings for the coming seasons, ­until the next festival. Most importantly, the teyyams must then confirm that the divine powers they have received from the shrine in spirit possession are now being returned to the custody of the shrine’s permanent ritual staff. This is ritually ratified by the teyyam handing its sword back to the shrine priests, who return it to its usual place inside the sanctum, and by the formally ­triple interrogation by the priest as to the disposition of the divine power, and the t­riple asseveration by the dancer, in a classic Austinian performative (Levinson 1983, 226–283), that the power has indeed been returned. The termination is sealed by the removal of the teyyam’s crown and obeisance paid by the now merely h ­ uman dancer to the deities in the shrines, before he returns to the green room for removal of the remaining costume and makeup. What is quite clear in this larger institutional cir­cuit is that despite appearances that the “impersonation” is vested in the material, performative, and discursive artistry of the performer, the religious ideology is that he has himself been taken over by powers normally and authoritatively h ­ oused in the shrine’s image, which w ­ ere temporarily transferred to enliven him, and which he has now returned to the ritual custody of the shrine’s priests u ­ ntil they are called forth again. Having thus framed the w ­ hole per­for­mance regime from the contextual considerations of the shrine, I now wish to consider something of the performers’ own experience, in addition to taking up that other variety of performer who embodies teyyam deities, largely without costume, and to consider the role of possession’s general religious ideology a ­little more closely in its potential differentiation from other sorts of impersonation. Freeman

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A Collective Expertise The dense web of knowledge that supports the per­for­mance and maintenance of teyyam worship is distributed across a variety of priests, ritual performers, and officiants, both ­those of the vari­ous castes who own or control the shrines, and are permanently attached to a single such site and its gods by ­family and caste affiliation, and ­those avarṇa castes who perform teyyāṭṭam proper, dancing seasonally at a variety of shrines to which they also hold hereditary entitlement. While many of the ritual regimes of broader teyyam worship require mastery of intricate skills and performative expertise, the striking costuming of teyyāṭṭam and the centrality of its festivals assures that it is the dancing castes, with their talent and artistry, who are most prominently on display. It is not merely the dancers themselves who command this knowledge, however, but their f­amily members and caste fellows, as well. While many of the dancers are indeed multitalented in a number of the arts and special craft forms that go into the costuming, networks of relatives serve as the support troupe in the preparations, costuming, and makeup, not to mention the drumming and other ritual and ancillary per­for­mance roles. While the green rooms (aṇiyaṟa) are caste-­segregated, spatially or by walled partitions, performers and their troupes ­will frequently assist other performing units across this caste boundary, sharing l­abor and expertise in a cooperative spirit during the sometimes hectic simultaneous or rapidly sequential per­for­mance of teyyams. One also sees the ­children of per­for­mance troupes at t­ hese events being sent to fetch items, assisting with vari­ous costuming preparations, and even occasionally being given a drumstick to help with the easier drum rhythms. While hardly all of ­t hose men who have the caste or lineage entitlement to perform teyyāṭṭam ­w ill take up the calling, ­t hose who do so learn entirely by imitation and practice ­under their relatives and elders at home, and by singing and playing along in per­for­mances from a young age. Th ­ ose who are not suited to dancing may take up other specialized supporting roles, such as ­those of drummers or craftsmen or makeup artists, many of which similarly require years of training ­under f­ amily members. Traditionally, f­ amily or lineage entitlements to perform certain teyyams at par­tic­u ­lar shrines in a locality have been a birthright, called ceṟu-­janmam (“­little birthright,” modeled on the unqualified janmam, which referred to privileged caste, manorial land rights), and the importance of ­t hese is still highlighted by teyyam dancers. ­There are further special teyyam roles in prominent shrines or t­ emples where the descendants of local chiefs or kings must still authorize their performers by ceremonially bestowing ­t hese titled offices (sthānappēr) along with gold bangles and other clothing or insignia, on specially talented dancers selected from the hereditary lines. ­There is no doubt that historically the life of t­ hese per­for­mance castes could be onerously difficult, consigning them to a life of poverty in subservience to ­those of 228

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more power­ful or privileged social or caste standing, even as they ­were enrolled to professionally dance as teyyam deities to secure blessings for the latter in their shrines. Nevertheless, even at the height of modern Marxist efforts to denigrate teyyāṭṭam and all such Hindu practices, many of the dancers themselves staunchly maintained their belief in ­these deities and their sanctity and took pride in their birthright as chief custodians of this tradition. This is movingly seen in the life of my own teacher, Kannan Peruvannan, whose autobiography rec­ords his visionary experiences of the teyyam, Kathivanur Veeran [Kativanūr Vīran], as he learned and studied the deity’s tōṯṯam songs for his inaugural per­for­mance of the god, at age fourteen (1997, 36–55). He describes his own internalization, through prolonged contemplation, of the scenes and events from the hero’s narrative, necessarily interwoven, as I have noted above, with all the requisite rituals in all of their significance, culminating in the experience, at the onset of possession during his first public per­for­mance, that he was himself elevated to the status of identity with that deity. In this case, then, the dancer’s own life narrative was partly ­shaped by that of the god he strove to incarnate, as one of the most profound episodes of his life. While he added other experiences to this, as he learned to perform more deities, he ­later had a vision of Kathivanur Veeran, to which he attributed his own subsequent successes in life and his elevation to the title of Peruvaṇṇān (one of the aforementioned sthānappēr, or high offices for his caste of Vaṇṇān). This par­tic­u­ lar case illustrates the more general claim I wish to make regarding the possession experience in teyyam worship: the formation of a performer’s own individual sense of their sustained, everyday personhood, their “personation” (Mankekar 2015, 188–189), is s­ haped by their professionalization into impersonation, as they habituate themselves to what is at times a demanding regime of disciplined per­for­ mance as deities. We w ­ ill see that t­ here is more to this than just the professionalized enactment of a role, however. ­There is both a markedly personal, transformative experience, and a cultural ontology under­lying that experience. I have talked with many dancers as to their state of mind when they are u ­ nder such possession as the deity. Some claim to remember nothing from the time of the possession rites ­until they remove the crown. Most, like Kannan Peruvannan, however, say that they are in periods of absorption and altered perception, but snap in and out of normal consciousness as they are required to respond to a ­par­tic­u­lar task or phase of the worship. My impression, therefore, is that many who are directly engaged in the enactment of possessed incarnation by the deity report that their experiences conform to the consensus ideology, while none conveyed the sense that they ­were merely enacting the “impersonation” of a mythical character, in the sense of theater, caricature, or other mundane public per­for­ mance. Their caste fellows, such as we have seen, who are regularly engaged in the vari­ous support roles in the regular per­for­mance of teyyāṭṭams, similarly exhibit an everyday ac­cep­tance of and belief in the postulates of possessed worship. Freeman

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A further challenge to the notion that teyyāṭṭam enacts a religious ideology imposed through social power from above on hapless subalterns is the fact that per­for­mance castes or­ga­nize and celebrate ­family and lineage worship of their own caste-­i nternal teyyams, in­de­pen­dently of the shrines or communities of other castes of rank on whom they ­were or are dependent. Relatedly, one of the most socially marginalized castes of agrarian laborers, the Pulayas, who rarely associate with any other caste’s shrine cele­brations, have an entire pantheon of their own ancestral deities whom they worship through teyyāṭṭam in their own shrines. From all of this evidence, over three de­cades of research, I am therefore convinced that this complex of religious practice among ­t hese castes is founded on an overall and general commitment to teyyam deities and their mode of worship, backed by an enduring belief both in the deities and their supporting metaphysical propositions, and by a sense of the religious duty and dignity attached to a life’s profession in this role of divine “impersonator.”

Dressed-­Down Possession One of the most fundamental social facts in considering ­whether we wish to think of teyyam as belonging in the same category as impersonation is that it seems far more motivated and actively s­ haped by wider constituencies than t­ hose of e­ ither the performers themselves, as a group of professionally vested individuals, or their families and caste fellows. As I ­will argue in conclusion, I believe this is ­because teyyam is supported by a far more widespread and general religious metaphysics that underwrites possession and other forms of Hindu worship, as belief and practice. And while I have indicated how this possession complex is integrally embraced by the performing castes (rather than foisted onto them through power relations of the caste hierarchy), this finding is even more in evidence among many of the teyyam-­sponsoring castes themselves. For it is the case that most of ­these castes, from the variously ranked avarṇa communities up to the savarṇa, dominant Nāyar caste—­including some Nāyar lineages themselves—in fact appoint their own caste members as vehicles of spirit possession, as entitled shrine officials. Generally called veḷiccappāṭŭ or kōmaram (depending on the caste tradition), ­these are men with the capacity to routinely undergo ritualized spirit possession as part of their shrine’s calendrical rites for the worship of teyyams. ­These functions are vested in an office attached to their hereditary shrine, and the possession is generally by one of the same deities installed and celebrated through teyyāṭṭam at that shrine. W ­ hether the office is restricted to hereditary transmission or not, ­these individuals are generally “chosen” by the deity as initially indicated through overt episodes of dramatic seizure, odd or eerily indicative events in their lives (nimittam), or by their personally reported claims of visitation or possession by the 230

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deity. What­ever the varied individual circumstances, the candidate must be approved and their possession validated through vari­ous ritual and oracular ceremonies of confirmation by the other se­nior and reigning shrine or caste officials. If no such individual shows the approved ecstatic capacity and is subsequently ratified, the office dedicated to that par­tic­u­lar deity may sit vacant for years, or even generations. When a candidate does appear and is so validated, then they take up their office in dedication to this single deity, as members of the reigning set of shrine man­ag­ers and ritual officials. As such, they may be expected to participate in spirit possession rites on a monthly basis, as opposed to the yearly or more distantly spaced teyyāṭṭam festivals, and they hold this office for life, u ­ ntil ill health, death, or other life circumstances might disqualify them. Unlike teyyams, they often dress in plain, but ritually purified, ordinary waistcloths for their possession rites (Figure 10.7). On other formal or festival occasions, they may don a few insignia, ornaments, specifically colored or patterned waistcloths, and light headgear, such as a frontlet or headband. Th ­ ese particulars all vary by caste, lineage, and shrine tradition, as well as by ritual occasion, but their costuming is always generically unmarked in association with any par­tic­u­lar deity, and quite sparse compared to that seen in teyyāṭṭam. For all of their possession rituals they undergo rites of bodily purification and perform meditative worship and recitations that they equate in their transformative effect with the songs and rituals of teyyāṭṭam. As with teyyāṭṭam, they thereby receive the divine power of possession directly from the enshrined image, but transmitted to them most viscerally and visibly when they take up the deity’s own sword from its sanctum, which they wield for their possession dance. Fully functioning as teyyams, on ­these occasions they accordingly speak and interact with worshippers as the embodiment of the deity and give the god’s blessings and grace to their congregation. Obviously, the experiences of t­hese men with their par­tic­u­lar teyyam deity play an even greater role in “personating” them in the sense of crafting the trajectory of their individual lives and their subsequent roles in their shrine-­and caste-­ community relations. Given the ritual strictures ­under which they must live, and entitlements that accrue to them, major components of their personhood are therefore s­ haped by their impersonation of their chosen deity—or rather, the deity that has chosen them. As opposed to the teyyam dancers, who professionally incarnate a wide variety of other p ­ eople’s gods in other p ­ eople’s shrines, ­these officials incarnate just a single one of their own f­ amily, lineage, or caste deities in their own home shrine, among their own caste constituency, for life. So for t­ hese shrine-­and caste-­specific possession priests this is literally the role of a lifetime, whereas the performer of teyyāṭṭam must constantly embody a series of highly differentiated deity impersonations, marked by the specificities of varied costuming, dance, and ritual as they move from shrine to shrine over the festival season. ­These latter thus master a repertoire of shifting “impersonations.” Freeman

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Figure 10.7. ​A veḷiccappāṭŭ ­under possession by a teyyam, unadorned, except for the deity’s sword. Photo by the author.

Envisioning Consciousness in the ­Matter of Possession The under­lying cultural ontology of possession, however, is the same in both cases. This is most commonly explained locally through the concept that deities have, or actually consist of, their fundamentally subjective, animating, and agentive powers, called by the Sanskritic term caitanyam. While the word has a long Indic legacy, it is particularly relevant to the Tantric synthesis in Kerala Hinduism (Freeman 2016), where it signifies the animate substance-­force of deity, translatable perhaps as “conscious energy.” It is this same energy that is 232

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installed into shrine and t­ emple images by brahmin priests, as “tantris,” to endow them with the living and conscious presence and energy of the gods, but it is also that which dwells as the goddess’ power of cognizance, manana-­śakti, in the h ­ uman heart. Possession is the power to bring this forth and express and utilize it, and it is therefore the mandate of the kōmaram possession priest, as one explained to me, to make o ­ thers aware of t­ hese powers by displaying them through his own ­human vessel and other divinely charged ritual media. Teyyāṭṭam performers have also regularly confirmed to me that the same metaphysics of power is operative, w ­ hether it is deposited in t­ emple images by brahmins, or brought forth by the rituals of the kōmaram from his own consciousness and the shrine image, or invoked by teyyam dancers through their liturgies and donning of their divine kōlams. Indeed, certain brahmin manors (illams) sponsor their own teyyams in their outer compounds dedicated to tutelary or even their main ­family deities. The extent to which this expanded notion of possession thus informs the ritual continuum of Hindu worship in Malabar, from Pulayas and teyyam performers at one end of the caste hierarchy to the brahmin priests at the other, is a remarkable feature of the region’s religion. This is most clearly shown in the manner in which the substantialized metaphysics of caitanyam, as conscious energy, reshapes the perceptual semantics of the word darśanam in this context of possessed worship. This is a usage that is peculiar to northern Kerala and the bordering Tulu country, where a closely cognate form of costumed spirit possession is also pervasive (Claus 1979, 50). In my original fieldwork, when possession priests w ­ ere recounting their vari­ous duties of performing rituals in their shrines, they kept referring to junctures when they did and did not have or get darśanam of the deity. Initially taking this in the common Hindu sense of “seeing” or “vision,” with specific reference to a devotee coming into worshipful visual contact with the icon of an enshrined deity (Eck 1985), I soon realized this made no sense in the contexts in which locals ­were using it. On the contrary, a­ fter some confusion, it was made clear to me that to have or get darśanam, in local usage, was to enter the state of possession by the deity. In terms of the usual Hindu notions of darśanam, Alfred Gell has related the reflexivity he reads into this use of “vision” applied to the apparent agency of iconically represented deities. As he argues, the devotee sees the eyes of the deity’s image, which, in seemingly seeing them, must be agentively looking at them as they are looking at it, thereby signaling the animacy of the deity and projection of its blessing reaching back to the worshipper through the returned gaze (1998, 116–121). While this would seem a compelling exposition of the usual case, the usage of darśanam in the teyyam complex would appear to have a rather dif­fer­ent trajectory and outcome. ­Here, one has a visionary experience of oneself and the world that is taken up from the deity’s perspective, meaning that the seer in oneself must indeed be the deity. When the teyyam dancer looks at himself in the Freeman

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mirror, he sees the god looking back. Since the agency of the looking must belong to the form that is seen reflected back in the mirror, and since that form is visibly divine, the agency and experience of that looking must itself be divine. The kōmaram looks similarly into the caitanyam in his own heart, the repository of the goddess, and in that power of conscious reflection on the relation to his self, realizes that his own agency of cognizance is none other than that of the deity itself. It would seem, then, that the depth of t­ hese claims to divinely transformational experience, and the development of a cultural ontology grounded in spirit possession that extends into wider patterns of worship, are rather far from what would usually be conveyed by established uses of impersonation. In concluding this rethinking of materials from spirit possession in Malabar, I have been struck, again, by the contextual density of interconnections between its performative, social, historical, and cultural dimensions. I have tried to suggest that ­these vari­ous dimensions of sustained interaction cohere through multidimensional and coherent pro­cesses of cultural-­historical mimesis. While the teyyam gods of Malabar have very distinctive features that emerge in their “impersonation” by and through dancers and possession priests, their virtual personhood seems more thickly contextualized and deeply historical in its purchase on the lives of its prac­ti­ tion­ers and worshippers compared to the ways we might usually characterize impersonation. This is perhaps ­because the gods themselves are attributed with greater powers to actually “personate” ­others, through possession, and thus to vitally shape the lives of their worshippers in appearing before them and dwelling permanently among them at the center of their communities in their ancestral shrines. W ­ hether we wish to refashion the idea of impersonation itself to encompass such a capacious, contextually inclusive understanding of the work of spirit possession in Malabar, as integral to religious life ­there, and ­whether South Asian practices elsewhere might also demand this of us, are questions that remain productively open.

Acknowledgments I wish to express my profound gratitude to the worshippers, officials, and performers of Koottathilara Shree Vishnumoorthy Kshetram for their warmth and hospitality over a dozen years of teyyam festivals. Except for Figure 10.2, all photos were taken there.

Works Cited Claus, Peter. 1979. “Spirit Possession and Spirit Mediumship from the Perspective of Tulu Oral Tradition.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 3:29–52.

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Davis, Richard  H. 1997. Lives of Indian Images. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. Eck, Diana. 1985. Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books. Freeman, Rich [John. R.]. 1991. “Purity and Vio­lence: Sacred Power in the Teyyam Worship of Malabar.” PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. —­—. 1998. “Formalized Possession among the Tantris and Teyyams of Malabar.” South Asia Research 18, no. 1:73–98 —­—. 1999. “Dynamics of the Person in the Worship and Sorcery of Malabar.” In Possession in South Asia: Speech, Body, Territory, edited by Jackie Assayag and Gilles Tarabout, 149–181. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. —­—. 2006. “Shifting Forms of the Wandering Yogi: The Teyyam of Bhairavan.” In Masked Ritual and Per­for­mance in South India, edited by David Shulman and Deborah Thiagarajan, 147–183. Ann Arbor: Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan Press. —­—. 2010. “Untouchable Bodies of Knowledge in the Spirit Possession of Malabar.” In Images of the Body in India, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. New Delhi: Routledge. —­—. 2016. “Śāktism, Polity, and Society in Medieval Malabar.” In Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism: History, Practice and Doctrine, edited by Bjarne Wernicke Olesen. New York: Routledge. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kannan Peruvannan, Kotukkatt (with Kuttamath  A. Sreedharan). 1997. Cilampiṭṭa ōrmmakaḷ: teyyakkāranṟe katha teyyattinṟēyuṃ. Ernakulam: Kurukshethra Prakasan Pvt. Ltd. Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mankekar, Purnima. 2015. Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nagarajan, Vijaya. 2018. Feeding a Thousand Souls: W ­ omen, Ritual and Ecol­ogy in India: An Exploration of the Kolam. New York: Oxford University Press. Oberlin, Heike, David Shulman, and Elena Mucciarelli, eds. 2019. Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Silverstein, Michael. 2004. “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­Culture Nexus.” Current Anthropology, 45, no. 5:621–652. Smith, Frederick M. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Lit­er­a­ture and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual.” Proceedings of the British Acad­emy 65:113–165. Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Par­tic­u­lar History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Zarrilli, Phillip B. 2000. Kathakali Dance Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London: Routledge.

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C H A P T E R   11

Divine Embodiment in the Theatre of Ramlila Pamela Lothspeich

It is around 9:30 on a warm fall eve­ning, and the audience of about fifty ­people

is assembled before the stage, with the mostly male viewers to one side (stage left) and female viewers to the other (stage right). The audience is sparce and standing ­because of light rain. ­Behind the curtain, three svarūps (literally, “self-­ forms”), the divine leads, move onto the stage and take their seats, a bench atop a small dais draped with a maroon-­colored cloth. Suddenly a stagehand runs across the stage, pulling the front curtain to reveal the svarūps, against a satiny fuchsia backdrop. Hero Ram, wife Sita, and b ­ rother Lakshman sit motionless, their gazes fixed outward. The trio are dressed in courtly finery, with brilliant makeup, heavy jewelry, and rhinestone-­studded crowns. For about twenty minutes, Ramlila (rāmlīlā) organizers, male community members and dignitaries, step forward one by one to do devotions, moving the ārtī platter adorned with a camphor lamp (kapūr kā dīyā), incense (dhūpbattī), jasmine flowers and r­ ose petals, bananas, sugar crystals (miśrī), red powder (rolī), and some grains of ceremonial rice (akshat) in clockwise circular movements before the svarūps.1 ­Those on stage move into a V-­shaped configuration to give the audience a clear line of sight, clapping and singing bhajans (devotional songs). At the conclusion of the ceremony, the stagehand draws the curtain closed, and another volunteer passes the ārtī platter through the audience, allowing ­people to take blessings with a sweeping gesture of their hands. The dramatic portion of the Ramlila now begins; the night’s per­for­mance ­w ill show Queen Kaikeyi pressuring King Dashrath to banish his beloved son Ram to the forest for fourteen years. Ramlila is a form of vernacular theatre that depicts the earthly travels of Lord Ram, that is documented from the early nineteenth ­century, but according to oral history, dating to the late sixteenth c­ entury when Tulsidas composed his Rām­carit­mānas, a major literary source for Ramlila, although Ramlila may be 236

even older. The description of a Ramlila ārtī above is based on my observation of a per­for­mance in Bareilly, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the fall of 2017, but it is typical of t­ hose at many amateur and professional per­for­mances of Ramlila, a religious dramatic festival popu­lar across northern India, especially in the Hindi-­speaking regions. The festival often lasts ten to fifteen days and generally culminates on the day of Dussehra, when Ram slays the demon-­k ing Ravan. At most Ramlilas, ­whether staged by neighborhood residents or contractually hired troupes, casts are generally comprised of cis men and boys, who perform in both male and female roles, although at a minority of Ramlilas, casts also include cis w ­ omen and girls.2 ­There is also a significant amount of nonhuman per­for­mance in that vānars (celestial monkeys), bears, vultures, deer, demons, and deities all take the stage in Ramlila. The actors who perform t­ hese vari­ous roles perform difference in visually spectacular ways. Enthused, vānars create a ruckus and destroy a forest. Provoked, the sleeping g­ iant Kumbhkarn throws pots, tree branches, clay pots, and chairs. Infatuated, the de­mon­ess Shurpnakha flirts with Ram, and his ­brother too. With its many forms of guising, Ramlila is serious play, and by this I do not mean simply or primarily the metaphysical and “classical” connotations of the term “līlā,” which in any case has already been discussed at length by ­others (Hein 1972; Kapur 1990; Sax 1995; Hess 2006; Schechner 2015). Over-­ attention to this centuries-­ old term, I feel, risks obfuscating the material conditions of Ramlila performers and invisibilizing the social structures of inclusion and exclusion on the ground of Ramlila culture. Rather, I would emphasize the very real fun and sociality that often occurs in Ramlila—­onstage, backstage, and offstage. On a social level, the sartorial and somatic guising of performers clearly creates a space for jouissance—­pleasure, abandon, and escape. While sociality is a significant feature of Ramlila, in this chapter I primarily consider the ritual role and social significations of the svarūps who serve in divine roles in Ramlila. At the outset, I should mention that despite the stated subject of this volume, “impersonation,” I hesitate to apply the term to t­ hose who serve as svarūps in Ramlila, mainly b ­ ecause it seems to belie performers’ own assertions on the ­matter. Many of the dozen or so adult svarūps I have conversed with on this point have expressed their conviction that t­ hose who play divine roles do in fact become the deities they play while in makeup and costume. However, some gave responses that w ­ ere not so clear cut. One “Ram,” for example, explained that it was the fact that the audience members treated him as divine and worshipped him as such that made him feel unlimited and like God, but he also emphasized that he himself was changed by the experience. He said it made him feel h ­ umble—­that he had a deep responsibility as a svarūp: “For the duration you play Ram, you ­don’t even think of physical pleasures. It’s as if the physical senses are kind of ­silent and your focus goes somewhere ­else. So both you yourself are Lothspeich

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thinking about and feeling the qualities of the svarūp, and more importantly, audience members are treating you like God. This is what makes you God.” Other svarūps spoke more generally about getting into their roles and feeling an intense closeness to the deity they ­were playing while in per­for­mance or during the ­whole Ramlila season. One “Sita,” a cis female actor, for example, said she simply feels “calm and relaxed” while performing on stage. Another “Sita,” a cis male actor, said he “just feels like Sita” when in w ­ omen’s dress and makeup. A ­couple of actors indicated they felt they ­were merely performing roles, as in a theatrical per­for­mance. Although not technically a svarūp, one Ravan relayed that if he performs well enough, the audience ­w ill ­really accept that he is Ravan. He added, “Education makes no difference in terms of one’s faith.” Hearing such responses, my sense is that the term “impersonation” does not do justice to the situation of svarūps.3 Thus, as I expand upon below, I prefer to use the language of “divine embodiment,” for this particular form of guising in Ramlila, with the caveat that any and all translations fall short and fail to convey critical cultural nuances of the term “svarūp.” In this chapter, I discuss the semiotic relationship between svarūps and other ideas and per­for­mance practices within Hinduism, and I examine some of the intersections of casting and social identity that obtain in “amateur” neighborhood productions, t­ hose or­ga­nized and performed by local residents. I focus on some of the sociopo­liti­cal realities on the ground that shape how svarūps are selected and how they are presented in per­for­mance. In d ­ oing so, I draw on my experiences at around twenty Ramlilas in Uttar Pradesh, most in the western part of the state, nine of them amateur, on visits in 2006, 2010–2013, 2017, and 2019. While Ramlila cultures are quite varied and t­ here is g­ reat diversity in Ramlila practices, I argue that in general, t­hose with the most social capital are also t­hose most likely to appear in divine roles, suggesting that t­here is a correlation between one’s social station and ability to “impersonate up.” I further contend that a ­great deal of socially indexed information, particularly with re­spect to caste, class, and gender, is coded in Ramlila performers’ own language, comportment, costuming, makeup, and skin tone in Ramlila. While performing roles in Ramlila, performers also seem to si­mul­ta­neously enact social norms and tropes like “the pious brahmin” and “the chaste, virtuous wife.” In this way, we can see in Ramlila, as in countless other examples globally, the intersection of intentional dramatic per­for­mance and social performativities from the wider world.

Ārtī, Svarūps, and Potential Analogues Although Ramlilas are all dif­fer­ent, one defining feature of the form is the incorporation of ārtī, a religious ritual in which the divine leads are worshipped 238

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Figure 11.1. ​An ārtī tableau of Ram, Sita, and Lakshman dressed for their forest exile, at an amateur neighborhood Ramlila in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, 2013. Photo by the author.

onstage or in an open setting, in tableau. In fact, ārtī is such an impor­tant feature of Ramlila that some organ­izing committees have special subcommittees that are tasked with arranging special ārtī programs each night, complete with m ­ usic. Sometimes the stage setups for ārtī are more complex and entail more adornment than the one I have described above. Sometimes other deities besides t­ hose in the main story appear in tableau—­for example, Ganesh, Saraswati, and even Bharat Mata, wrapped in a sari reminiscent of the tricolor Indian flag. The goddess Durga also often appears during the annual, multi-day festival of Durga Puja or Navaratri (literally, “nine nights”), which coincides with Ramlila. Ārtī pre­sen­ta­tions of Durga can be quite elaborate; I have seen one conducted with ten young girls dressed as the goddess, and another as a single adult Durga with a tiger (costumed person) lying at her feet. However, ārtī in Ramlila is most often reserved for t­ hose deities who are to appear in that eve­ning’s per­for­mance, with speaking parts. In addition to Ram, his ­brothers, and Sita, ­t hese typically include deities such as Hanuman, Vishnu, and Lakshmi. Besides the opening ārtī ritual, the divine leads also appear in tableau in the pro­cessions ( julūses) that accompany some per­for­mances. For example, they often r­ ide in a concluding rājgaddī (enthronement pro­cession), a feature of many neighborhood Ramlilas. This usually occurs one or two days a­ fter the war, and Lothspeich

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Figure 11.2. ​An ārtī tableau of Lakshman and Ram at a Ramlila staged by a professional troupe in Nawab Ganj, Uttar Pradesh, 2012. Photo by the author.

is meant to signify Ram and his party’s triumphant return to his kingdom of Ayodhya. In rājgaddī pro­cessions, ­there is typically a series of floats, often pulled by bullocks and h ­ orses to give an ancient ambience, conveying vari­ous pairings and groupings of adorned gods and goddesses, with Ram and his entourage featured prominently. Most of the deities sit in tableau, although Shiva sometimes appears, dancing his tāṇḍav dance, and Krishna, playing his flute and sporting with Radha. Often t­ here is a marching band or recorded m ­ usic, creating a festive mood. As such pro­cessions move through preplanned routes, ­people come out to watch, and the svarūps themselves often make stops at homes and ­temples along the route, where they receive hospitality and refreshments, and dispense blessings. Some Ramlilas, especially older ones, incorporate special julūses to signify Ram’s marriage pro­cession (barāt), and journey to the forest, marking his exile (vanvās), with the svarūps crossing an a­ ctual body of w ­ ater, often a tālāb (constructed pond), signifying the Ganga River, along the way. While I am not the first to notice this, the phenomenon of svarūps in Ramlila seems to have some analogical affiliation with that of mūrtis (sculptural forms), which Joyce Flueckiger glosses as “physical forms that ‘embody’ (or are the body of) a deity” (2015, 77). Indeed, svarūps and mūrtis have similar ritual functions, and offer a tangible means of contact and communion between devotee and God. Svarūps also appear in other Vaishnava dramatic “līlā” forms like Raslila (raslīlā) 240

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Figure 11.3. ​Ram, Sage Vishwamitra, and Lakshman travel by ­horse carriage in Ram’s barāt on the day of his wedding, at a Ramlila staged by residents in Pilibhit, 2013. Photo by the author.

on Krishna, centered in Mathura-Vrindavan, and Pandavlila (pāṇḍavlīlā) on the Pandavs (heroes of the Mahabharat), based in the Garhwal region of the Hi­ ma­la­yas. Both forms tell and perform (often with dance) the stories of Krishna and the Pandavs, respectively.4 Prior to the twentieth ­century, Ramlila, Raslila, and Pandavlila all tran­spired in open spaces, out of doors, sans stage, like many forms of premodern theatre and dance in India; Pandavlila still does so, but the other two forms only rarely do so nowadays. Stylistically and aesthetically, Ramlila comes closer to Raslila than Pandavlila. Further, in Ramlila and Raslila, ­t here seems to be a stronger analogue between svarūps and mūrtis than in Pandavlila. As Alf Hiltebeitel notes, “in both of ­these northern traditions, the svarūps are comparable to icons” (1995, 208). In both, performers occasionally hold tableaux, and not only in ārtī, but also during the drama midstream, providing moments of visual intensity for the audience to savor. Classic examples of this in Ramlila are when Ram holds aloft the bow of Shiva just before breaking it, and when Hanuman bears Ram and Lakshman astride on his shoulders, one on e­ ither side. The phenomenon of svarūps in Ramlila also seems to have some analogical affiliation with what is generally called deity possession in Hindu ritual practice, although Ramlila and possession rituals are very dif­fer­ent practices, and Lothspeich

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prac­ti­tion­ers themselves do not generally acknowledge such an affiliation. Deity possession is actually a feature of vari­ous forms of Hindu per­for­mance practices, including Pandavlila in Garhwal, Draupadi rituals in Tamil Nadu, and Teyyattam (teyyāṭṭam) rituals in the Malabar region.5 Like Ramlila, t­hese forms have narrative components and ritual ele­ments, and utilize intentional dramatic practices such as costuming, makeup, ­music, and so on. In Pandavlila, Draupadi rituals, and Teyyattam, ritual specialists utilize rhetorical and performative strategies, including dancing and drumming, to effect the “coming” of the Pandavs and other gods, that is, deity possession. Describing Pandavlila, William Sax observes that a text “is embodied in p ­ eople and their memories—as Pāṇḍavalīlā, the ‘play’ of the five Pandava ­brothers” (1991, 275). The text of Ramlila—­Tulsidas’s sixteenth-­century Rām­carit­mānas and countless other local scripts—is also embodied in Ramlila. But in Ramlila the pro­cess of divine embodiment is more circumscribed, and as my interlocutors have told me, involves donning a par­tic­u ­lar sartorial guise and maintaining a par­t ic­u ­lar demeanor in ritual and per­for­mance. It also requires that the svarūps be selected and trained well ahead of the per­for­mance. In using the language of “divine embodiment,” I am following Aditya Malik (2010, 2016) and Aftab Jassal (2016, 2017), who both use that language to refer to forms of deity possession in India. While ­earlier scholarship on deity possession in South Asian contexts tended to describe it as the sudden taking over of the h ­ uman body or the experience of an internal, altered state, Malik sees it more reflexively and sympathetically. His understanding of divine embodiment in jāgar (“awakening”) rituals takes to heart indigenous understandings of it as knowledge, not mere “belief” (2016). In this regard, he productively asks why possession cannot be understood as “a multisensory bodily practice, like asceticism, yoga, meditation, and other forms of personal cultivation, and like an assortment of ritual practices involving the invocation of presence other than one’s own immediate self” (Malik 2016, 143). We might well ask the same of divine embodiment in Ramlila, understanding it as a kinesthetic bodily practice tied to both affective religious experience and philosophical thought. Besides having dif­fer­ent ritual components, t­ here are other impor­tant differences between divine embodiment in Ramlila and in deity possession rituals, in terms of both the deities and the h ­ uman agents involved. As Frederick M. Smith summarizes, “In con­temporary India, most deity possession, even of brah­mans, is by folk deities” (Smith 2006, 151). The possessing deities in both Draupadi festivals in Tamil Nadu and Pandavlila in Garhwal are also not major male deities. Hiltebeitel notes that in the former, rituals and myths emphasize Draupadi’s association with Ka­li in her “most violent and impure aspects” (1995, 208). Similarly, William Sax writes that in Pandavlila, “the dangerous and sexually active Draupadi is explic­itly identified as Ka­li and is sometimes the 242

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recipient of dramatic blood sacrifices” (2002, 135). This is not so in Ramlila and Raslila, where the svarūps, chiefly Ram and Krishna—­who are both forms of Vishnu—­are prominent pan-­Indian male deities, and possession in this manner does not figure in. In all of ­t hese religious practices, social markers, especially with re­spect to class, caste, and gender, also come into play in terms of the ­human agents. First, as Smith observes, “In South Asia, as elsewhere, more ­women than men appear to experience possession” (Smith 2006, 68). Plus, in possession rituals generally, ­t hose from historically marginalized, oppressed castes are widely represented. On this, Malik notes that t­hose involved in jāgar rituals in Kumaon “often (although not always) belong to low-­caste Dalit communities” (Malik 2010, 212). Jassal adds, “the capacity of possession rituals to empower and elevate p ­ eople of lower social rank has become one of its defining features” (Jassal 2016, 8). Members of oppressed caste groups are also the chief agents in Teyyattam and Draupadi festivals (Freeman, this volume; Hiltebeitel 1995, 208). The social status of t­ hose who play leading roles in the three līlā forms, however, is quite dif­fer­ ent. In Pandavlila, landowning, caste-­privileged Rajputs sponsor the event and play the Pandavs, whom they consider their ancestors. ­Here is how Jassal describes their presence in one Pandavlila: “Five power­f ul b ­ rothers belonging to a landholding f­amily played the Pandavas . . . ​they w ­ ere all above six feet tall, with handsome, chiseled features; they wore their wealth and privilege with practiced ease” (Jassal 2016, 6). Relatedly, in Ramlila and Raslila, brahmins and members of other savarṇa, privileged caste groups have historically been most likely to serve as Ram and Krishna, while Dalits have been mostly confined to playing small roles and serving as extras.6 The neighborhood associations that sponsor Ramlila tend to be caste-­and class-­diverse, but again ­there is ­little repre­ sen­ta­tion from Dalit communities.7 However, ­t hese are not universals; t­ here is much variation in Ramlila communities, and the situation is rapidly changing. In the following sections, I give examples from vari­ous locations, to give a sense of this variation and illustrate how casting decisions and the per­for­mance of social tropes can intersect in Ramlila.

Divine Embodiment on a Nineteenth-­Century Model In an illuminating article, “Class and Gender Politics in the Ramlila,” Nita Kumar deconstructs the idea of līlā in a longer discussion about Ramlila culture in Ramnagar-­Varanasi, home to a number of old Ramlilas. With reference to the Chetganj Ramlila in Varanasi, established in 1888, known for its per­for­ mance of nakkaṭeyā (the cutting of [Shurpnakha’s] nose), entailing an elaborate pro­cessional march of the demon army, she writes: Lothspeich

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But what if lila is also a discourse, a set of rules with which statements can be made both about what is True and what is False? What if, like other discourses, it is also necessarily located in power, power that works not through the better recognized forms of repression or domination, but through the sheer creation of knowledge, specially the knowledge of what is Right? (Kumar 1992, 40–41) Implying an affirmative response to ­t hese questions, Kumar goes on to argue that the “discourse of lila” is deeply structured and works to exclude and marginalize some cohorts, including w ­ omen. The free-­wheeling, male-­centric culture of Banarsīpan (Banarsi-­ness), she suggests, forecloses the entry of ­women to many public forms of leisure, recreation, and social abandon, including ­those specific to Ramlila. She further suggests that Ramlila is a constructed tradition that performatively expresses hierarchical social relations through the enactment of a traditional story (Kumar 1992). My own observations at the Ramnagar Ramlila, located across the Ganga River from Varanasi, some three de­cades ­a fter Kumar’s have led me to some similar conclusions. The same hierarchical social structures relating to caste and gender seem to be rather firmly in place ­t here too. Part of this is due to the “preservationist” stance of its organizers, who strive to maintain many of the structures and patterns established in the early nineteenth c­ entury when it was founded by the kings of Kashi (Varanasi), and this is especially apparent in the casting of the svarūps. With regard to the cast and the audience, Richard Schechner has stated: When the boy actors enact the gods, spectators regard them as divine. Inversions abound. Ramlila is a time when rich persons dress simply and eat street food while poor persons dress beyond their means and enjoy expensive, voluptuous treats. . . . ​A nd of course the largest inversion of them all: five Brahmin boys become gods. (2015, 72) This is, of course, an oversimplification of the Ramlila culture at Ramnagar. Where Schechner sees inversion and irony, I see normalcy and status quo. Although rich men do show up in s­ imple white homespun (khādī) dress, their foreheads adorned with sandalwood paste and Vaishnava ṭīkās, and partake of the associated rituals of chewing pān and drinking ṭhanḍhaī (a spiced, milky drink infused with seeds, nuts, and sometimes cannabis), they also come bearing the trappings of nineteenth-­century aristocracy, like hand-­ tooled walking sticks, tipped and wrapped with ornate silver, and twenty-­first-­ century luxury goods like the SUVs that ferry them from scene to scene. Even many “ordinary” devotees often travel by motorcycle rather than on foot as in 244

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an ­earlier period. At “Lanka” especially, many o ­ thers just come to socialize and attend the fair. More than overturning social norms and power structures, I would say that the Ramnagar Ramlila actually manifests and reinforces them. That is, it works to performatively replicate existing social and gender hierarchies and normativities, ones rooted in the nineteenth ­century when the Ramlila as we know it was founded. Ramnagar is not typical of Ramlilas in northern India, and not just due to its extended length and connections to royalty. Almost all of the organizers and principal performers are brahmin men and boys, many of whom have hereditary rights to roles and land g­ oing back to the nineteenth ­century. Th ­ ere is just one cis female performer, who appears on five days of the per­for­mance to sing and dance, and to speak the lines of the de­mon­ess Shurpnakha in her “beautiful” guise. What Ramnagar’s five brahmin boys perform is not so much divinity per se but rather society’s conceptions of normative brahminhood, even though in the Ramayan, of course, Ram is said to be of the kṣa­tri­ya (royal or warrior) caste, and only temporarily assumes the guise of a brahmin. In the Ramnagar Ramlila, as at many Ramlilas, the brahmins who serve as svarūps maintain their brahminical social capital both in and outside of per­for­mance, indicated by the general reverence paid to them. The male svarūps at Ramnagar Ramlila also perform the “repetitive acts” or learned social conventions of class and gender, along with their designated roles. Ramnagar’s audience skews ­toward the el­derly and is overwhelmingly male, at least 90 ­percent by my estimation. While the working poor and renunciants are surely in attendance at Ramnagar, it still requires a certain amount of economic capital to be able to afford a month of leisure and religious devotions in Ramnagar. Sadhus aside, it is difficult for ­t hose of the working class to lose wages during the entire monthlong per­for­mance. Even in western Uttar Pradesh, one Ramlila performer explained to me his absence at the per­for­mance one year by saying he had to drive his auto rickshaw so he could earn money. It is also difficult for many w ­ omen to set aside their domestic work for such extended periods. W ­ omen also face social barriers and the practical prob­lem of a lack of facilities. In 2017, I asked a number of audience members (male and female) why so few ­women attend the Ramnagar Ramlila. Many cited ­women’s domestic responsibilities. One man said it was due to ­women’s seclusion (“Pardā bahut hai”). Another man, a nemī (a dedicated Ramlila attendee/devotee), whose account I heard second­hand from a male colleague, opined that ­women should not attend ­because of their mānsik dharm (menstrual cycle). This idea, that ­women are ritually impure during their periods and hence should not come into contact with sanctified spaces, has also been observed among prac­ti­tion­ers of Kuchipudi (kūcipūḍi) (Kamath 2019, 135) and Kathakali (kathakalī) (Zarrilli 2000, 213), but does not seem to generally hold in Ramlilas beyond Ramnagar. Lothspeich

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I should add that at Ramnagar, the designation “svarūp” is expressly reserved for Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Bharat, and Shatrugna, while at most Ramlilas the term extends to other deities, most notably Hanuman, who also appear in per­ for­mance. The fact that it is for the most part brahmin men and boys who serve as svarūps and pātras (dramatic characters) at Ramnagar suggests that at this and many other, especially older-­style Ramlilas, many o ­ thers do not have the power or social capital to participate in divine embodiment, as ­others in this volume have noted with re­spect to impersonation. In neighborhood productions, notably, ­people often refer to Ramlila performers as “kalākārs” (artists), not pātras, suggesting the performers’ association with mimetic theatre, and their own appreciation of performers’ artistry in Ramlila. The monthlong Ramnagar Ramlila is still one of the oldest continuous Ramlilas. This very famous Ramlila has been variously described by scholars, but often in ways that distance it from modern theatre with pretentions to realism. Anuradha Kapur (1990) refers to it as “non-­mimetic theatre,” and Schechner (2015) as a kind of “environmental theatre.” Th ­ ese are apt descriptions since the Ramnagar Ramlila does not take place on a single stage but rather at a series of minimally developed outdoor spaces, chiefly open fields, canals, ­water tanks, and t­ emple courtyards, where tableaux, pantomime, pro­cessions, stylized recitation, and a chorus are salient performative features. Organizers of Ramlila strive to maintain the continuity and consistency of its performative details, although some changes have slipped in, including development and encroachment at the sites that have inevitably changed its character, as Schechner notes (2015, 113–114). To give two examples I have noted on my visits, two banks are now tucked ­u nder the raised pavilion in “Ayodhya,” and cement trucks can now be seen parked on the field of “Lanka.” Unlike the pātras, many of whom play hereditary roles, the svarūps at Ramnagar are chosen anew each year for the per­for­mance. As Ramlila scholar Dharmendra Yadav explained to me, the chief guru-­director (vyās) and his sons first assem­ble a group of candidates from surrounding towns and villages, who are not well known to residents of Ramnagar and Varanasi.8 Then the maharaja himself personally selects the five svarūps from ­t hese candidates. On my 2017 visit to Ramnagar, I asked the two sons of the chief vyās about what qualities they look for in the svarūps. They told me the svarūps “should have a sweet [madhur] voice.” It is also impor­tant for the svarūps to be able to proj­ect loudly and clearly b ­ ecause t­ here is no use of microphones. Other desirable characteristics Kapur notes in her authoritative book on the Ramnagar Ramlila, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods, are suitable height, beauty, age (typically eight to thirteen years), and talent (1990, 6–7). The ­brothers added that it was their tradition to place brahmins in the roles of the svarūps ­because they are pure vegetarians who d ­ on’t eat onions and garlic, alluding to the idea in Ayurveda and guṇa theory that such 246

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foods incite physical passions. The belief that svarūps should be young boys without facial hair is an old one, with a long history in the per­for­mance traditions of both Ramlila and Raslila as it developed in Mathura-Vrindavan (Hein 1972, 72, 136, 266; Hawley 2005, 127–128). Ramlila may, in fact, have initially borrowed this per­for­mance convention from Raslila. For one month prior to the Ramnagar Ramlila, the boys chosen for the roles of Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Bharat, and Shatrughna live in the dharmśālā (religious retreat) of the chief vyās and his f­amily, where they undergo training. During the per­for­mance itself, they are transported on the backs of sā­ dhus, so that the svarūps’ feet do not touch the ground. Other official members of the cast travel by means of a special “pātra bus,” while Beautiful Shurpnakha, her accompanists, and dozens of laborers, many of them Dalits and Muslims, travel on foot. At the Ramlila in 2019, Yadav relayed to me that men of the Prajapati community prepare the Petromax lamps, while men of the Bind community carry them to illuminate the Ramlila a­ fter dark. Muslim men light the torches and drive the elephants that sometimes bring the maharaja and his entourage to and from the per­for­mances. Dalit Musahars carry the dolīs and palkīs (types of litters) weighing hundreds of pounds, often in groups of four to eight men. As I observed in 2013 and 2017, eight men convey Sita’s wedding party over a mile from Janakpur to Ayodhya, then hold the litters aloft for some five to ten minutes outside the gates of Ayodhya, giving the audience an extended vision of the scene. They are part of the per­for­mance too, although they do not appear in costumes and makeup. And, as at many Ramlilas, Dalit laborers sweep the grounds ­a fter each eve­n ing’s per­for­mance, their marginalized status contrasting sharply with the exalted status of the svarūps. During the ārtī ritual that concludes each eve­ning’s per­for­mance, the audience grows significantly, as p ­ eople rush to the site to catch a glimpse of the svarūps and receive their blessings. The chief vyās is the one responsible for overseeing the daily ārtī. He first seats the svarūps, w ­ hether on a dais, atop an elevated pavilion, or in a boat in the ­middle of a tank. Then he places massive garlands of white flowers interspersed with other colorful flowers and sacred tulsī leaves on each svarūp and gives them each a lotus to hold. ­After he steps away, a pātra pertinent to that eve­ning’s per­for­mance (Kaushalya, Sunaina, Gu­ha, ­etc.) steps forward to raise the ārtī lamp—­here a ghee lamp made of brass—­and rings a bell, standing to the side, so the audience may have an unencumbered view of the svarūps.9 The ritual concludes with the lighting of several flares, as a mālī (gardener or florist) showers the svarūps with flower petals, prompting the audience to erupt in cheers of “Victory to Lord Ram!” Following the ritual, Yadav said, ­t hese garlands, which are made by brahmins, are distributed accordingly: Ram and Sita’s garlands are sent to the maharaja, and the garlands of the other svarūps, Lakshman, Bharat, and Shatrugna, are distributed to vari­ous pātras, Lothspeich

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who often share them with f­amily and friends. The garlands are then used in worship for the entire year.

Neighborhood Ramlilas beyond Ramnagar Some old Ramlilas on the nineteenth-­century model still exist, and t­ hese tend to be in the Varanasi-­Ramnagar region and in rural areas. Th ­ ese constitute a small minority of Ramlilas t­ oday; in general, they pre­sent Ramlila in the round, utilizing pantomime, tableaux, and recitation more than dramatic acting and oration. They are stylistically similar to the Ramnagar Ramlila, but operate on a much smaller scale. As at Ramnagar, they tend to place the ārtī ritual at the conclusion of the per­for­mance, following the pattern of religious observations in Hindu ­temples. In this way, ārtī serves as the emotionally charged devotional high point of the per­for­mance. However, the vast majority of con­temporary Ramlilas, both amateur and professional, transpire on s­ imple outdoor proscenium stages, ­whether temporary or fixed, which open to a field of spectators. In many re­spects, they are treated as a theatrical production. That is, they generally involve formal auditions, planning meetings, and lengthy rehearsals. The per­ for­mances themselves typically employ scripted dialogue, planned and improvised m ­ usic, curtains to demarcate scenes, rotating stage setups, and so forth. In this dramatic context, ārtī generally comes at the beginning of the per­for­ mance, where it serves as both a kind of opening ceremony as well as an inaugural religious ritual. Opening with the ārtī ritual also has the practical effect of clearing the way for the theatre of Ramlila to end on a dramatic high note—­the wedding of Ram and Sita, the death of Dashrath, the slaying of Kumbhkarn, e­ tc. Although the svarūps are themselves recipients of public acts of devotion, some amateur Ramlila performers have told me that they have their own private devotions related to Ramlila. One former “Hanuman,” for example, told me he essentially stayed in his divine character for the full two weeks of the Ramlila—­ fasting, maintaining celibacy, performing devotions, and sleeping on the floor— in keeping with Hanuman’s reputation as a stalwart ascetic and selfless servant of Ram. In this, he seemed to be taking on the role of a brahmacārī, a chaste and devout student, or a sādhū (ascetic). Another actor who played vari­ous medium-­sized roles showed me his own personal ritual before entering the stage. Taking me to a small t­ emple b ­ ehind the stage, he laid his Ramlila dress before vari­ous deities, performed a pūjā (ritual of devotion), and prayed, in his words, “to perform well on stage.” Such quiet and private devotions of kalākārs (artists) at amateur Ramlilas are very dif­fer­ent from the public devotions that transpire during the ārtī ritual, and show that the religious significance of the form extends well beyond the onstage per­for­mance itself. 248

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Organizers at older-­style Ramlilas tend to keep to the practice of placing young brahmin boys in the roles of svarūps, and look for certain criteria in candidates, which seem to echo ­t hose at Ramnagar. In explaining this now rare practice, organizers who adhere to it have reported that they consider young performers more beautiful than adult ones, that it has always been a part of their tradition, and that it is more historically accurate than the alternative, making adult men svarūps. The logic of this last point corresponds to what we find in many literary versions of the Ramayan: Ram and his b ­ rothers are said to be young teen­agers. An or­ga­nizer at one such Ramlila told me, “The svarūps should be young and without facial hair b ­ ecause then they are more beautiful and p ­ eople ­w ill have more faith in them.” A professional actor in a mostly brahmin troupe provided an explanation regarding caste I have heard at several venues: “Ram, Lakshman, Sita, Hanuman—­they’re all brahmins b ­ ecause then anyone can touch their feet,” implying that other­w ise it would be “polluting” for them to do so. It was in the early twentieth ­century that Ramlilas began to move from unbounded outdoor environments onto ­simple stages, due to modernizing impulses in India’s urban theatres, especially the Parsi theatre, whose traveling companies brought a new style of musical theatre from major metropolises Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Delhi to smaller cities across the subcontinent. Along with the growth of proscenium-­style Ramlilas, ­t here also developed a desire for theatrical verisimilitude in Ramlila practices. This meant that, gradually, the divine leads “grew up” and w ­ ere no longer played exclusively by brahmin boys. That adult actors (including cis w ­ omen) w ­ ere cast as the heroes in many twentieth-­century TV and cinematic adaptations of the Ramayan further solidified this trend, and helped pave the way for cis w ­ omen to enter Ramlila casts. At the same time, even as the picture-­box effect of the European-­style proscenium, with its associated constructions and ideologies of realism, seems to have curtailed the ritual aspects of Ramlila, it has allowed for heightened dramatic spectacle and engaging theatre. This new view of Ramlila as part nāṭak (theatrical play), part ritual also seems to have opened up space for the democ­ratization of the tradition, paralleling wider social currents, since casting could then be a function of who would best play Ram and the rest based on their talents as actors and physical suitability. A push for “realism” has also been cited by organizers as a ­factor driving the trend to bring more cis ­women and girls onto the Ramlila stage. In contrast to the pattern at older-­style Ramlilas, at proscenium-­style Ramlilas, one usually finds adult men (or older teen­agers), not young boys, in the roles of the svarūps. Traveling professional Ramlila troupes, likewise, usually do not have c­ hildren (or w ­ omen) in their casts. In terms of gender, I have heard the explanation at neighborhood productions that “Sita cannot be a girl,” b ­ ecause if she ­were, the performer herself would be married to Ram in actuality. Other Lothspeich

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interviewees have suggested that cis ­women just ­a ren’t as effective as actors, ­because they are inclined to be emotionally restrained on stage, or that the mixed-­gender environment of Ramlila culture is not suitable (and perhaps even not safe) for young ­women. Nevertheless, neighborhood associations that or­ga­ nize local Ramlilas are increasingly bringing cis w ­ omen and girls into their casts, including in the role of Sita, as are professional Ramlila troupes, especially those in large cities. Although the casts of many amateur neighborhood Ramlilas tend to be more socially inclusive than that at Ramnagar, performers are still predominantly cis men and boys, and disproportionately p ­ eople from privileged caste groups, especially for divine roles. At many venues in Uttar Pradesh, t­ hose with brahmin surnames like Sharma and Mishra are still more likely to be placed in the roles of the svarūps than ­t hose with other common surnames in Uttar Pradesh such as Agrawal, Gupta, Jauhari, Kashyap, Khanna, Kumar, Mehrotra, Saxena, Shrivastav, Singh, and Yadav. Members of t­ hese communities and many more participate in and perform in Ramlila, but ­there still seems to be much preferential casting on the basis of caste and class, driven by both explicit and implicit biases. Sometimes, however, the same actors, regardless of their social position, continue to play svarūps or other major roles year ­after year simply ­because it is so difficult to recruit and train new actors for what often amounts to about fifty hours of theatre (plus rehearsals and meetings) each year. One Ramlila actor, who has played two major roles, explained to me in 2017: “[Nowadays] ­people ­don’t want to work hard. The directors keep using the same actors ­because they ­don’t want to take the time to train new actors for the big roles.” Some amateur Ramlilas seem to have no explicit social prescriptions about who can perform in which roles, and this is a trend I see growing in neighborhood productions. This is the case at the Ramlila production in the Cantt neighborhood of Shahjahanpur, a small city located between Delhi and Lucknow. Established in 1962, this Ramlila is sponsored by the Ordnance Clothing Factory, a major employer in the city, and indeed many of the performers are employees of the factory, which manufactures uniforms and blankets for the Indian military. The cast and the organizers of this Ramlila reflect a diversity of caste, class, gender, and religious identities. In recent years, about 20 ­percent of its large cast of around seventy has been Dalit, and tellingly, a large painting of Dalit civil rights leader Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) hangs backstage. Cis ­Women and non-­Hindus—­including several Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims—­ regularly perform onstage and do other creative work at this venue. The fact that many of the ­people involved in the Ramlila work together at the factory, and that some are also involved in Shahjahanpur’s active community theatre, undoubtedly helps to create community at this neighborhood production.

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As I have mentioned, Ramlila performers often enact con­temporary social tropes that circulate beyond the stage in wider society, more than abstract ones from the historical or mythical past. Casting choices—­who gets to play God and the rest—­and the manner of the per­for­mance itself—­how God and the rest are performed—­a re critically impor­tant and can work to affirm or break down Hindu orthodoxies and social normativities. A g­ reat deal of socially indexed information is coded in the performers’ language, be­hav­ior, comportment, costuming, skin tone, and makeup in Ramlila. Although a prince, as per the narrative of the Ramayan, Ram often appears in the guise of a pious brahmin—­a brahmin in keeping with con­temporary social norms and expectations about brahminhood; Sita, meanwhile, is an idealized chaste and virtuous wife as per normative standards. He acts serenely and dutifully, and speaks wisely and philosophically. She takes small steps with locked hips, looks down, and does not raise her voice. ­These traits and gestures are also indexed and reinforced through costuming and makeup practices, which also uphold social norms about beauty and prestige. To take the example of makeup, Ramlila performers, especially t­ hose in major, “positive” roles, typically receive a base coat of makeup to lighten their complexion at all kinds of Ramlilas. Skin-­l ightening makeup practices in the Parsi theatre and the Indian film industry have also been commented upon by scholars, who suggest that in ­t hese contexts, light skin tone is meant to variously convey social capital (class and caste prestige), beauty, purity, and piety (Hansen 1999; Beeman and Narayan 2012; Cowaloosur 2016). In my conversations with makeup artists at vari­ous Ramlila venues, several explained that the purpose of the base makeup was to make the face “camakdār” (bright and shiny), “sundar” (beautiful), “gorā” (light-­complexioned), and/or vis­i­ble from afar. Conversely, characters of the demon class, especially Tadka and Kumbhakarn, often appear in black costuming and sometimes also in black makeup (on the face and/or body). They generally appear ghoulish, with fangs, horns, and so on, especially in proscenium-­style productions. This outward pre­sen­ta­ tion, coupled with ­t hese characters’ typically “uncivilized” be­hav­ior at some Ramlilas, seems to place them in line with what Romila Thapar and Philip Lutgendorf have said of the rākshases (demons) in Sagar’s TV series Ramayan, namely, that their repre­sen­ta­tion on screen seems designed to correlate them with India’s ādivāsī or tribal communities (Thapar 1989, 74; Lutgendorf 1990, 155). In sum, makeup practices in Ramlila, coupled with a general preference for light-­complexioned actors in “positive” roles, points to the legacy of the racism and the racialization of caste perpetuated by the colonial British and colonial-­minded Indologists.10 It is also a sign of the pervasiveness of white supremacy and white beauty standards globally, facilitated by Euro-­American

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imperialism and profiteering multinationals selling skin-­lightening products in the Global South.11

Conclusion For many participants in Ramlila, the sartorial and somatic pre­sen­ta­tion of the svarūps seems to be a critical component of the per­for­mance. This was brought home to me during a visit to the Tulsi Smarak Bhavan in Ayodhya in 2013. This is an institution that sponsors Ramlilas all year round, with a dif­fer­ent professional troupe performing it anew ­every two weeks. Each eve­ning, the same el­derly gentleman would climb onto the stage while the per­for­mance was in pro­gress and do a full-­body prostration (daṇḍvat) before each performer, respectfully touching his feet. Afterward, he would exit the stage with folded hands, placing an offering on the ārtī platter. This example shows how divine embodiment in Ramlila per­for­mance has deep religious significance for many participants, and cannot be reduced to the per­for­mance of dramatic roles. Looking at the wider history of Ramlila, it seems clear that formerly, brahmin boys chiefly served as svarūps, in the days when royals, aristocrats, and wealthy merchants w ­ ere its main patrons. What I have seen in “ordinary” amateur productions is that while ­people of vari­ous ages and caste and class backgrounds play svarūps, they still tend to be male, handsome, light-­complexioned, and caste-­and class-­privileged. However, over the past c­ entury, Ramlila has changed considerably, and casts have become much more diverse in terms of caste, class, and gender. Increasingly, Ramlila is viewed as a “folk” form of the working class; in the twenty-­fi rst ­century, many middle-­and upper-­middle-­class ­people are distancing themselves from it. At the same time, more and more, members of historically marginalized caste groups and cis ­women are entering Ramlilas, sometimes in major roles, including the divine leads, and sometimes in managerial and creative capacities. In this essay, I have suggested that amateur neighborhood Ramlilas are the most inclined to include a wide array of performers, in ways that are reflective of their local communities. With their more diverse casts and outlooks, t­ hese “ordinary” Ramlilas can effectively challenge systems of power and trou­ble social hierarchies, as when a non-­brahmin performs Ram’s brahminhood. Most of ­t hese Ramlilas do not follow the pattern at Ramnagar and older-­style Ramlilas, placing young boys in the roles of svarūps to pre­sent scenes and enact pantomime. Instead, they generally prefer to cast men and older teen­agers in ­these roles. They also tend to follow the conventions of repre­sen­ta­t ional mimetic theatre, where dialogue and dramatic acting are key ingredients of the per­for­mance. The casts of professional troupes are also varied, but they tend to be made up of men from privileged caste groups, although 252

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Figure 11.4. ​An audience member touches the feet of a professional actor portraying the divine sage Narad, while he performs at the Tulsi Smarak Bhavan in Ayodhya, 2013. Photo by the author.

some troupes, especially t­ hose in and around Delhi, do count cis w ­ omen in their casts. In fact, much is changing in the world of Ramlila, and cis w ­ omen are increasingly appearing on Ramlila stages, both amateur and professional ones alike. What a range of Ramlilas show is that the form is both a per­for­mance and a site of social performativities relating to caste, class, and gender. While the Lothspeich

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per­for­mance itself is deliberate, intentional, and practiced, the performativities of Ramlila seem to naturally and unconsciously manifest on stage, just as they do in daily life. In this chapter I have used the language of “divine embodiment” to capture the guising of svarūps in Ramlila, in alignment with the other contributors in this volume who have plumbed the pro­cesses of impersonation to suggest that ­those with the most social capital often have the most power to impersonate, especially when it comes to “impersonating up.” Historically, this has had deep resonances in the theatre of Ramlila.

Acknowl­edgments I am deeply indebted to all of the many Ramlila organizers and performers who have generously and kindly supported my research on Ramlila over many years, especially Anil Mishra in Bareilly, Ankit Saxena and Krishnamohan Sharma in Shahjahanpur, Amrishkumar Sharma in Pilibhit, and Manoj Tripathi in Bisalpur. “I thank all of them, as well as Dharmendra Yadav, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Devendra Sharma, Randeep Singh Taneja, Claire Pamment, Kellen Hoxworth, and Melanie Magidow for their many insights and suggestions that contributed to this chapter. Research for this chapter was supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship in 2012–2013, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship in Fall 2017.

Notes 1. The flowers, bananas, and sugar crystals are religious offerings. As in Hindu worship generally, the food offerings are consumed by devotees as blessings. The red powder and rice grains are used to make an auspicious mark (tilak or ṭīkā) on the forehead of devotees. All of the items used in ārtī are considered auspicious and blessed. 2. Transfeminine performers, who may or may not identify as ­women, also perform in Ramlila, often in female roles and as dancers. 3. Both Hein and Hiltebeitel, however, do use the term “impersonation” to refer to svarūps in the līlā forms (Hein 1972; Hiltebeitel 1995). 4. In keeping with pronunciation in many con­temporary languages, including Hindi-­ Urdu, I spell the Indian epics as “Mahabharat” and “Ramayan.” 5. See Rich Freeman’s chapter, “Possessed Impersonation: Divine Mimesis in Malabar,” in this volume. 6. Organizers of the small amateur Ramlila in Mumtaz Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, established in 1964, told me in 2013 that both Dalits and Muslims ­were actively involved in their Ramlila, as organizers and actors. However, one member said that beginning in 2008 or 2009, Dalit participation started tapering off, due to, in his opinion, “Ambedkar,” which I understood as the influence of the Dalit movement. In that span of time, Dalit membership in the Ramlila association declined from fifteen to twenty members to four (out of thirty-­five to forty members).

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7. On caste, casteism, and Dalits in con­temporary India, see, for example, Dutt (2019) and Yengde (2019). 8. Yadav completed his PhD dissertation on the Ramnagar Ramlila at Banaras Hindu University in Spring 2021. 9. According to Yadav, t­ here are two special ārtī prayers sung by the Rāmāyaṇīs (members of the chorus) while Kaushalya performs artī to Ram and Sita when they arrive in Ayodhya ­a fter their wedding (on day seven), and when they appear on the last day of the Ramlila (day thirty-­one) for a special bhor kī līlā, or daybreak līlā. 10. On race, caste, and colonialism, see, for example, Thapar (2015, 12–15). 11. On July 2, 2020, the multinational com­pany Unilever changed the names of its skin-­ care products Fair and Lovely and Fair and Handsome to Glow and Lovely and Glow and Handsome, and removed references to “whitening,” “lightening,” and “fairness” in its marketing, in response to criticism that its products promote colorism and anti-­Black racism, with other companies following suit. Unilever heavi­ly markets its products in India and many other parts of the Global South (Jones 2020; “HUL Rebrands” 2020). On skin bleaching, “light-­ skin-­color valorization,” and “transnational racial regimes” in the context of Ghana, see Pierre (2012). On colorism and the Ramayan in the context of precolonial Java, see Saraswati (2013).

Works Cited Beeman, Angie, and Anjana Narayan. 2012. “ ‘If Y ­ ou’re White, ­You’re Alright’: The Reproduction of Racial Hierarchies in Bollywood Films.” In Covert Racism: Theories, Institutions, and Experiences, edited by Rodney D. Coates, 155–173. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Cowaloosur, Vedita. 2016. “Not Quite Black: Black Skin in Popu­lar Indian Cinema.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 51, no. 52:76–84. Dutt, Yashica. 2019. Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir. Delhi: Aleph. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. 2015. Everyday Hinduism. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Hansen, Kathryn. 1999. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. Hawley, John Stratton. 2005. “­Every Play a Play within a Play.” In The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia, edited by William S. Sax, 115–130. New York: Oxford University Press. Hein, Norvin. 1972. The Miracle Plays of Mathura. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hess, Linda. 2006. “An Open-­Air Ramayana: Ramlila: The Audience Experience.” In The Life of Hinduism, edited by John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan, 115–139. Berkeley: University of California Press,. Hiltebeitel, Alf. 1995. “Draupadī Cult Līlās.” In The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia, edited by William S. Sax, 205–234. New York: Oxford University Press. “HUL Rebrands Fair & Lovely as Glow & Lovely ­a fter Dropping ‘Fair.’ ” 2020. Times of India, July 2. https://­t imesofindia​.­i ndiatimes​.­com​/­business​/­i ndia​-­business​/­huls​ -­f air​-­lovely​-­s kin​-­c are​-­brand​-­to​-­b e​-­k nown​-­a s​-­g low​-­lovely​/­a rticleshow​/­767520​37​ .­cms. Jassal, Aftab. 2016. “Divine Politicking: A Rhetorical Approach to Deity Possession in the Hi­ma­la­yas.” Religions 7, no. 9: article 117.

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—­—­—. 2017. “Making God Pre­sent: Place-­Making and Ritual Healing in North India.” International Journal of Hindu Studies 21, no. 2:141–164. Jones, Laura. 2020. “Unilever Renames Fair and Lovely Skin Cream ­a fter Backlash.” BBC Online, June 25. https://­w ww​.­bbc​.­com​/­news​/­business​-­53178088#:~:text​=­Uni​­lever​ %20​w ill​%20rename%20Fair%20%26%20Lovely,which%20are%20sold%20across%20 Asia. Kamath, Harshita. 2019. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kapur, Anuradha. 1990. Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Kumar, Nita. 1992. “Class and Gender Politics in the Ramlila.” Indian Economic and Social Review 29, no. 1:37–56. Lutgendorf, Philip. 1990. “Ramayan: The Video.” Drama Review 34, no. 2:127–176. —­—­—. 1991. The Life of a Text: Performing the Rām­carit­mānas of Tulsidas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malik, Aditya. 2010. “In the Divine Court of Appeals: Vows before the God of Justice.” In Hinduism and the Law: An Introduction, edited by Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr., and Jayanth K. Krishnan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —­—­—. 2016. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Hi­ma­la­yas. New York: Oxford University Press. Pierre, Jemima. 2012. “The Fact of Lightness: Skin Bleaching and the Colored Codes of Racial Aesthetics.” In The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race, 103–122. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saraswati, L. Ayu. 2013. “Ra­sa, Race, and Ramayana: Sensing and Censoring the History of Color in Precolonial Java.” In Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, 15–35. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Sax, William S. 1991. “Ritual and Per­for­mance in the Pāṇḍavalīlā of Garhwal.” In Essays on the Mahābhā­ra­ta, edited by Arvind Sharma, 274–295. Leiden: E. J. Brill. —­—­—­, ed. 1995. The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia. New York: Oxford University Press. —­—­—. 2002. Dancing the Self: Personhood and Per­for­mance in the Pāṇḍav Līlā of Garhwal. New York: Oxford University Press. Schechner, Richard. 2015. “Performed Imaginaries: The Ramlila of Ramnagar and the Maya-­Lila Cosmos.” In Performed Imaginaries, 81–138. New York: Routledge. Smith, Frederick M. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Lit­er­a­ture and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. Thapar, Romila. 1989. “The Ramayana Syndrome.” Seminar 353:71–75. —­—­—. 2015. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. New York: Penguin. Yengde, Suraj. 2019. Caste ­Matters. Delhi: Penguin Random House. Zarrilli, Phillip B. 2000. Kathakali Dance-­Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. London: Routledge.

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C H A P T E R   12

Resisting Brahminical Patriarchy in Kuchipudi Dance THE STORY OF HALEEM KHAN Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

I’m Muslim. P­ eople think I d­ on’t want to keep up tradition for some reason.

­ eople think I am taking advantage of the tradition. P P ­ eople think I am crazy. . . . ​ But what I believe is that if you are interested in dance, you have to try it. . . . ​So I ­w ill keep trying,” said Haleem Khan, a professional Kuchipudi (kūcipūḍi) dancer skilled in impersonation. Dressed in an elegant blue silk kurta with his hair swept across his forehead, Haleem spoke with a gentleness in his voice that belied the challenges of his life story. I met Haleem a few years ­earlier in 2011 at the University of Hyderabad, where I co-­organized a conference on Kuchipudi with dance scholar Anuradha Jonnalagadda. Haleem found me in the audience ­after a pre­sen­ta­tion and introduced himself as a Kuchipudi dancer and “female impersonator,” the English-­language term used by Kuchipudi dancers to describe the practice of cisgender men donning the strī-­vēṣam (­woman’s guise). Hearing Haleem’s name and his background as a Kuchipudi dancer surprised me, as Muslim dancers are virtually unheard of in Kuchipudi dance circles, much less one who impersonates. Impersonation, or the donning of a gender vēṣam (guise) in staged per­for­ mance, is foundational to Kuchipudi dance. Kuchipudi arises from an eponymous village in the Telugu-­speaking South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and is propagated by brahmin men who have lived in the village for generations. According to popu­lar hagiography, Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi dance, prescribed that all brahmin boys in Kuchipudi village should don the strī-­vēṣam at least once in their lives. Siddhendra’s prescription continues to resonate among the brahmins who live in the village’s agrahāram (brahmin enclave), and they continually cite it as their reason for impersonation. My ­earlier work (Kamath 2019a) focused on the brahmin men of Kuchipudi village, particularly their skills in impersonation. I argued that contrary to Euro-­American understandings of gender and sexuality, impersonation in 257

Kuchipudi village is a normative practice that enables the construction of hegemonic brahmin masculinity for village brahmin men. However, this e­ arlier work centered, for the most part, on village brahmins; non-­brahmin and non-­ Hindu impersonators like Haleem ­were largely absent. In this chapter, I shift from the brahmin male body in strī-­vēṣam to foreground alternative forms of impersonation pos­si­ble within Kuchipudi dance. In December 2015, I had the opportunity to interview Haleem about his life story, and this interview, along with his recorded public talks, make up the primary ethnographic material for this chapter. For Haleem, impersonation is not simply the adoption of a character’s dress and gait within the temporally ­limited confines of a staged per­for­mance. Rather, impersonation is an act of strug­gle, longing, and self-­assertion within and sometimes against Kuchipudi, a dance form steeped in brahminical patriarchy (Chakravarti 1993, [2003] 2018). At first glance, Haleem’s practice of donning the strī-­vēṣam seems to uphold the brahminical structures implicit within Kuchipudi dance: like the brahmin male dancer from the village donning a w ­ oman’s guise to fulfill Siddhendra’s prescription, Haleem dons the strī-­vēṣam to become authorized as a Kuchipudi dancer. However, rather than viewing Haleem’s impersonation as an act of mimesis that reinscribes brahminical norms and practices, I interpret his efforts as subverting the authority of the brahmin male body in strī-­vēṣam. Haleem refashions Siddhendra’s prescription from a religious rite of passage for brahmin men to a secular rite of passage available to all dancers, irrespective of religious identity. In d ­ oing so, Haleem articulates his own vision of impersonation, which, ultimately, carves a path for resisting the brahminical patriarchy undergirding Kuchipudi dance.

Brahminical Patriarchy in Kuchipudi Dance As a dance form arising from a brahmin agrahāram in Telugu-­speaking South India, Kuchipudi is grounded in brahminical patriarchy (Chakravarti 1993, [2003] 2018). The village’s brahmin families point to land rec­ords that tell of their historical location in Kuchipudi for generations. For example, a property document from 1763 lists families with the following fifteen surnames as residents of the Kuchipudi village: Bhagavatula, Bokka, Darbha, Yeleswarapu, Ha­ri, Josyula, Mahankali, Pasumarti, Peddibhatla, Polepeddi, Vallabhajosyula, Vedantam, Vempati, Vemu, and Venukunti (Jonnalagadda 1996, 40). ­These fifteen brahmin surnames, along with a few other surnames, such as Chinta and Tadepalli, make up the “hereditary” brahmin families of Kuchipudi village. Descendants of ­t hese families continue to live in the village ­today, and many engage in and promote “traditional” Kuchipudi per­for­mance practices.1 258

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The hereditary male performers from Kuchipudi village self-­identify as Vaidiki, a sect of Telugu-­speaking Smarta brahmins whose occupational practices traditionally focus on Vedic rituals. The Vaidiki brahmins of Kuchipudi village, however, do not engage in religious ritual, but, instead, are known for their skills in per­for­mance, particularly the practice of impersonation. The brahmin men who inhabit this community consider themselves the exclusive ­bearers of “tradition,” or sāmpradāyam. Maintaining sāmpradāyam for village brahmin men is often articulated through per­for­mance, particularly the enactment of all-­male dance dramas such as kalāpas and yakṣagānas, which are grounded in Hindu religious narratives. However, as the work of Rumya Putcha (2013) and Yashoda Thakore (2020, 2022) clearly demonstrates, the repertoire of Kuchipudi dance t­oday, particularly the popularly performed solo items, is grounded in courtesan Kalavantulu per­for­mance rather than originating from the village’s brahmin dance community, a point that is largely overlooked in con­ temporary dance circles. The practice of impersonation holds par­tic­u ­lar importance in constructing the “mythopoetics” (Putcha 2013, 2–3) of Kuchipudi dance, namely due to its associations with the figure of Siddhendra. According to his hagiography, Siddhendra was a young brahmin boy from the village of Kuchipudi versed in religious and dramatic texts. A ­ fter he was arranged to be married to a girl from a neighboring village, Siddhendra had a divine vision of the Hindu deity Krishna with his wife Satyabhama. Siddhendra de­cided to abandon all worldly ties and dedicate his life in ser­v ice to singing Krishna’s praises. Envisioning himself as Satyabhama, Siddhendra wrote Bhāmākalāpam, a dance drama featuring Satyabhama’s love and separation from Krishna. He taught this dance drama to the brahmin boys of Kuchipudi village and prescribed that all brahmin men from the village’s agrahāram must enact Satyabhama in the dance drama Bhāmākalāpam at least once in their lives. His prescription that all brahmin men from Kuchipudi village must don Satyabhama’s guise at least once in their lives continues to be cited by brahmin men in the village ­today, who envision it as a performative rite of passage.2 While anyone, regardless of gender, caste, or nationality, can take classes at one of the village’s numerous dance institutes, not every­one is encouraged to embody the ostensibly traditional ele­ments of the Kuchipudi repertoire, specifically donning Satyabhama’s strī-­vēṣam. In par ­t ic­u­lar, brahmin ­women from Kuchipudi village are restricted from such traditional forms of per­for­ mance. Kuchipudi brahmin ­women primarily occupy domestic roles and, aside from a few notable exceptions, rarely participate in the performing arts. This practice of gender exclusion has been justified by Kuchipudi male dancers for the following reasons: w ­ omen have monthly periods that prevent them from regular per­for­mance; ­women w ­ ere not allowed to travel unaccompanied by male Kamath

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relatives; and journeys to per­for­mance locales ­were often very difficult and ­women could not cope with such strenuous conditions. Through the course of the twentieth c­ entury, the gender composition of Kuchipudi dance outside the village has drastically shifted, and through several postcolonial transformations, savarna3 cisgender w ­ omen, particularly brahmin ­women, dominate the Kuchipudi stage. However, a paradox remains: although savarna ­women from outside the village are now encouraged to dance, ­women from the village’s hereditary brahmin families continue to be excluded from dance. In March 2014, I interviewed ten w ­ omen from village brahmin families who all expressed some degree of exclusion from Kuchipudi dance.4 For example, Chavali Balatripurasundari, the ­daughter of well-­k nown Kuchipudi guru Vempati Chinna Satyam, relayed to me that her f­ ather did not encourage her or her s­ isters to dance: My ­father ­didn’t teach us. He ­didn’t encourage us. That’s ­because he strug­gled ever since his childhood to get into this field. He strug­gled a lot, and every­one knows about that. B ­ ecause he strug­gled, he ­didn’t want his ­children to strug­gle. Even though he knew we w ­ ere interested, he would avoid us. Also, ­because ­we’re girls, and we would have to get married. He would think, “­Will they get married? What trou­bles w ­ ill other p ­ eople give them?” and ­wouldn’t encourage us. He knew that we r­ eally liked dance. That’s why he thought if he cut our interest in the beginning, it ­wouldn’t develop. (Cited in Kamath 2019a, 146) Many other ­women simply told me that it was not part of the Kuchipudi sāmpradāyam for brahmin w ­ omen from the village to dance. The village’s agrahāram maintains an endogamous system of marriage in which brahmin ­women usually marry into another brahmin f­ amily within the village, although this practice has changed in recent years. For the older generation of w ­ omen living in the village, many have relations in the Kuchipudi agrahāram through both their natal and marital families. This closed system of marriage results in ­women having multiple connections to dance; many of the w ­ omen I interviewed not only have husbands who are professionally tied to dance in some capacity, but also ­fathers, ­uncles, ­brothers, and sons who are professional dancers, teachers, or musicians. This closed system of marriage also leads to multiple layers of exclusion; as d ­ aughters and s­ isters, w ­ omen are proscribed from learning dance, and as ­mothers and wives, they are discouraged from even watching their husbands dance in public, a point made evident in my interviews with Vedantam Rajyalakshmi and Vedantam Lakshminarasamma, the wives of two stalwart Kuchipudi dancers (Kamath 2019a, 137–142).

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The exclusion of brahmin ­women from participating in Kuchipudi dance, both through their natal and marital families, serves to institutionalize and uphold brahminical patriarchy within the village, where such brahminical patriarchy does not only imply the sexual control of w ­ omen to maintain caste purity through patrilineal succession (Chakravarti 1993, 579). Brahminical patriarchy in Kuchipudi village also extends to the domain of per­for­mance, particularly by prescribing which bodies can and cannot dance. Brahmin men from the village are authorized to don Satyabhama’s strī-­vēṣam by their founding saint; brahmin ­women, by comparison, are restricted to the domestic sphere and are even actively discouraged from watching public dance per­for­mances. Brahmin men’s control over dance, in turn, serves brahminical patriarchy writ large by secluding ­women from public spaces and maintaining the village’s endogamous system of marriage. Although some Kuchipudi w ­ omen expressed a desire to participate in dance, ­t hese ­women still upheld caste and gender norms in the village. For example, Vedantam Rajyalakshmi, the wife and m ­ other of well-­k nown male dancers in the village, relayed to me: Ever since my childhood, it always used to be the case that men would take on the strī-­vēṣam to perform. From what I know, it was never the case that ­women would put on a costume and perform onstage. Nowadays, p ­ eople are performing their own pātras [characters]. Even now, in my village, our men still perform in strī-­vēṣam. Outsiders also may be performing, but none of us like it. It’s only appealing if men from our village take on the role. . . . ​­People might ask the question why? Who should perform? Only our ­people [i.e., ­people from Kuchipudi village]. Who should be appreciated? Only our p ­ eople. Hundreds of p ­ eople have danced. We villa­gers may go and watch. But we all think that whoever may be performing, only ­people from our village who have our blood should dance. No one e­ lse has that. That’s the mindset of all our ­people. (Cited in Kamath 2019a, 146)5 Rajyalakshmi stated that only ­people from the village with “our blood” should dance, meaning only village brahmins should dance, particularly in the ritual role of Satyabhama. Although she described to me her overt interest in learning dance as a young girl, Rajyalakshmi still upheld the gender and caste hierarchies of the village. As the m ­ other and wife of village brahmin men, Rajyalakshmi, like other brahmin ­women in the village, functioned as both “gateways” and gatekeepers of brahminical patriarchy (Chakravarti 1993, 579; [2003] 2018, 34). Kuchipudi village maintains a system of brahminical patriarchy by circumscribing brahmin ­women from dance per­for­mance. Impersonation,

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particularly donning Satyabhama’s strī-­vēṣam, serves as a seminal way to uphold brahminical patriarchy in village spaces and even enables the construction of hegemonic brahmin masculinity. However, outside the village context, the utility of the brahmin man in strī-­vēṣam is challenged through the introduction of new dancing bodies on the Kuchipudi stage. What happens when a Muslim dancer learns and performs a dance form grounded in brahminical patriarchy? The remainder of this chapter ­w ill focus on a Muslim Kuchipudi dancer, Haleem Khan, who carves out his own path for Kuchipudi dance through the practice of impersonation.

The Story of Haleem Khan “I used to be a very sick child, so I was kept away from sports and any other activities. I never even participated in school functions or dramas,” said Haleem when I asked him about his ­family background and journey with dance in December  2015.6 Haleem grew up in the town of Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, which he characterized as “a small village,” where, he said, his only exposure to dance at a young age was through television and film. Despite this, Haleem always had an interest in dance, which he kept hidden from his parents and ­sister. Fi­nally, when studying in intermediate (the equivalent of American high school), Haleem heard through a friend of a local Kuchipudi dance teacher, Pasumarti Nagamohini, and approached her the very same day. A ­ fter a few sessions of observing the teacher, Haleem began to learn basic steps and jatis (series of steps) alongside other new students who w ­ ere c­ hildren much younger than he was. Six months ­later, when his teacher got married and moved out of Ongole, Haleem found himself in the same position as before: without a teacher but still longing to dance. Fi­nally, he heard of another Kuchipudi teacher, Raja Venkata Subrahmanyam, who had just moved from the town of Guntur to Ongole and who had trained u ­ nder the well-­k nown Kuchipudi guru Vempati Chinna Satyam. Haleem approached the new guru, apologizing for his lack of consistent schedule, but the guru readily agreed to teach him, seeing Haleem’s keen interest in dance. Although Haleem was fi­nally able to learn properly u ­ nder a guru, he had difficulty keeping his dance training from his parents. Raised in a Sunni Muslim ­house­hold, Haleem knew that his parents would not approve of his learning Kuchipudi, a dance form that traditionally features stories from Hindu religious narratives. Aware of their likely disapprobation, Haleem practiced in secret, often locking himself in the bathroom to review his lessons. Haleem told his parents he was attending computer classes and was always sure to come home by 7:30 or 8:00 in the eve­ning to avoid raising any suspicions. However, as an aspiring 262

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dancer, Haleem found such a schedule to be challenging, especially given that public per­for­mances often run late into the eve­ning. He also saved pocket money to pay for dance lessons, grateful that his guru never insisted on regular fees for classes. Fi­nally, Haleem de­cided it was time to move out of Ongole to Hyderabad, the urban metropolis and capital of the Telugu-­speaking state of Telangana. In Hyderabad, Haleem found a greater degree of flexibility in his schedule and training and was able to interact with a wide variety of teachers and dancers and participate in a range of per­for­mances. Haleem also began to choreograph new dance pieces and network with organizers to expand his dance profile in Hyderabad. In the early years of Haleem’s c­ areer, he performed “as a boy,” that is, dressed in the costume of a male Kuchipudi dancer, which includes a stitched silk dhoti (lower garment) and bare chest, adorned with gold-­plated dance ornaments. However, Haleem was interested in expanding his repertoire, and so he de­cided to experiment with donning the strī-­vēṣam. When I asked Haleem why he de­ cided to don the strī-­vēṣam, he told me: ­ ere’s this common point that [all Kuchipudi dancers] must do Th Bhāmākalāpam once. You know, I always saw Bhāmākalāpam with someone [­else] ­doing it, but I had never given a try ­because I was very shy. And I was very worried what p ­ eople might think. It was not only other ­people. I was worried about myself and my own image. W ­ ill I be able to like myself if I do strī-­vēṣam? ­Will I be able to do justice if I do that? It was my own basic interest that I wanted to do strī-­vēṣam for Bhāmākalāpam. I always heard the idiom or proverb that if you have not done strī-­vēṣam once in your lifetime, you are not r­ eally authorized to call yourself a Kuchipudi dancer. Then I told myself, “You are d ­ oing so many Kuchipudi per­for­mances, why ­don’t you do that also?” As stated at the start of this chapter, all brahmin men from Kuchipudi village must impersonate Satyabhama’s role in Bhāmākalāpam at least once in their lifetime, a prescription that continues to circulate in the village ­today. Within the confines of Kuchipudi village, impersonating Satyabhama serves as a religious rite of passage that enables normative and even hegemonic forms of brahmin masculinity in the village, both onstage and in quotidian life. However, as per Haleem’s justifications, impersonation serves as a secular rite of passage for the urban Kuchipudi dancer outside the village; the religion-­and caste-­based valences of impersonating Satyabhama are markedly absent in Haleem’s comments, which simply refer to an idiom or proverb that “if you have not done strī-­vēṣam once in your lifetime, you are not r­ eally authorized to call yourself a Kuchipudi dancer.” Haleem’s creative exegesis of Siddhendra’s prescription to Kamath

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impersonate carefully sidesteps the circumscriptions on gender and caste, while still authorizing his own longing to impersonate. Most brahmin men from Kuchipudi village also raised Siddhendra’s prescription to impersonate as their reason for donning the strī-­vēṣam. Very often, however, donning a ­woman’s guise was done out of requirement, rather than a desire to impersonate. For example, Pasumarti Keshav Prasad, a brahmin from Kuchipudi village, said to me: We all learned Kuchipudi and had to don a ­woman’s guise at least once. I also wore it once, but just for fun. I w ­ asn’t a professional performer when I wore it, but I wanted to have that experience of donning the strī-­vēṣam at least once. The reason is ­because Siddhendra Yogi had a vow for all of the Kuchipudi ­people. ­Every man who is born in Kuchipudi needs to wear Satyabhama’s vēṣam at least once in his life. . . . ​Other­w ise, why would I do it? My face d ­ oesn’t suit a female role. I look like a rā­k ṣa­sa [demon]. (Cited in Kamath 2019a, 63–64) Unlike Keshav Prasad, Haleem approached the decision to take on the strī-­ vēṣam with a g­ reat degree of caution and care. When first donning the strī-­vēṣam, Haleem did several t­ rials with makeup and costume and recorded them, on both video and audio and sent them to his guru and friends for their feedback. Although his friends approved of his vēṣam, Haleem remained unconvinced that he was believable enough in his attempts at impersonation. However, his guru and other elders convinced him other­w ise: My masterji and some other elders told me, “It is not that you want to look like a w ­ oman onstage. You are a man. You cannot definitely look 100 ­percent like a ­woman. But you have to enact the rest. If you are looking 50 ­percent as a w ­ oman from a distance with hair, makeup, e­ tc., then the remaining 50 ­percent, you add with your grace and femininity. This is from your own talent, from your own experience.” That triggered me. I told myself, “Why am I worried? If I think I am talented, if I think I am a person who can do this, I need to give it 100 ­percent.” Once Haleem de­cided to don the strī-­vēṣam, he never turned back. For a while, Haleem staged shows in both male and female costume with an intermission in between, but t­ hese per­for­mances proved challenging in the long run, and he ultimately de­cided to dress in strī-­vēṣam for most of his public per­for­ mances (see Figure 12.1). Haleem described his decision to continue with impersonation as grounded in repertoire: while male dancers have more athletic dance items, their repertoire 264

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Figure 12.1. ​Haleem Khan in strī-­vēṣam. Courtesy of Haleem Khan.

is far more l­ imited than that of female dancers, who can perform solo items, such as jāvaḷis and padams, which are short lyrical songs that emphasize a range of emotions (abhinaya). Haleem said to me: [When in strī-­vēṣam], I felt I wore a mask. And ­behind the mask, I can express so much. . . . ​[As a male dancer], t­ here are only fifteen or twenty items you can do, so you cannot explore the world of jāvaḷis and padams. ­These all feature poets who have written poetry from the point of view of a ­woman: how they see, how they talk, how they react. If a ­woman is feeling shy or romantic on stage, it’s beautiful. I’m not saying it’s not ­there for men dancing. . . . ​Prob­ably I’ve done what I wanted to do as a male dancer. I’ve jumped all over and shown energy. I’ve jumped from ­there to ­here and ­here to ­t here. But as I’m getting older, I try to balance this long journey. I’m at that stage that I am experimenting with a lot of emotion [abhinaya]. Indeed, male dancers can perform abhinaya items in traditional male costume, a practice that is commonplace for other dance forms such as Bharatanatyam or Kathak. However, for Haleem, the practice of donning the strī-­vēṣam affords him a new perspective, or “mask,” from which to perform expression-­based pieces such as jāvaḷis and padams (see Figure 12.2). In addition to abhinaya items, Haleem has also experimented with choreography and repertoire. In order to engage a wider array of audiences, Haleem has moved beyond traditional Kuchipudi items that usually have lyr­ics in Telugu or Sans­krit and now choreographs his own items set to Urdu ghazals and even the En­glish poetry of John Keats and Rabindranath Tagore. Haleem has also experimented with using vari­ous venues for his per­for­mances. Rather than restricting himself to sabas (indoor proscenium theatres), Haleem has performed in a range of spaces in Hyderabad and across India, spanning from coffee shops to corporate settings. For example, a c­ ouple of months a­ fter my first introduction to Haleem, he sent me pictures from a show titled Yaad-­e-­Maazee (Poetry in Dance), performed at the outdoor La Makaan stage in Hyderabad in March  2011. The show began with dance pieces set to Urdu ghazals, including the poetry of kings Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1611 CE) and Abul Hasan Tana Shah (r. 1672–1686 CE). Haleem concluded the show with Telugu padams (short lyrical songs) composed by Hindu devotional poet Annamayya (1424–1503 CE). In a review of the per­for­mance in The Hindu, dance critic Ranee Kumar states: Halim Khan who impersonated a ­woman enthralled the audience with his chiselled expressions and an equally impressive costume to match. Ghazals are not tuned to classical dance whose rhythmic patterns are set to tala. Despite ­t hese constraints and that of the stage, Halim was able to pre­sent 266

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Figure 12.2. ​Haleem Khan in strī-­vēṣam. Courtesy of Haleem Khan.

through abhinaya what could not be actually said with feet. The hastha mudras [hand gestures] w ­ ere of course culled out of Kuchipudi grammar to denote the more emotive aspects of the ghazals. (Kumar 2011) For the per­for­mance of Yaad-­e-­Maazee, Haleem creatively adapted the foot movements and hand gestures of Kuchipudi dance to the musical register of the Kamath

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Urdu ghazal and used facial expression to convey the emotional resonances of the lyr­ics. According to Haleem, his willingness to experiment with choreography and to perform in new spaces has broadened the scope of Kuchipudi; according to his estimate, he has brought in 2,000 new audience members to watch his per­for­mances (see Figure  12.3). Haleem explained that his experimental choreography caters to non-­Telugu speakers, many of whom have not had sustained exposure to Kuchipudi: “I can say with lot of pride and happiness, that I have created at least more than 2,000 ­people as audience. I created venues for dance. I created audience. I created new experimental dance.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Haleem’s efforts in Kuchipudi dance have been criticized by the brahmin men of Kuchipudi village. When I asked one village brahmin man about Haleem, my interlocutor summarily dismissed Haleem by stating: “I ­don’t like his strī-­vēṣam.” Another brahmin dancer pre­sent during the conversation agreed with this curt assessment. Under­lying such critiques are the anx­i­eties the community of village brahmins must feel about Haleem, a Muslim dancer who is remarkably talented in strī-­vēṣam. The fact that Haleem can rival the younger generation of Kuchipudi dancers from the village threatens the very significance of the brahmin male body in vēṣam. When I asked Haleem about his interactions with the hereditary brahmin Kuchipudi community, he was extremely reluctant to express any criticism. Crediting them for propagating Kuchipudi for generations, Haleem spoke respectfully about the village’s brahmin community. Reading between the lines of Haleem’s interview, I sensed the kinds of critiques he faced from village brahmins and Kuchipudi dancers more broadly. For example, Haleem stated that he is critiqued for performing in strī-­vēṣam for all his per­for­ mances, rather than reserving strī-­vēṣam for a par­t ic­u ­lar female character in a dance drama. Haleem readily admitted that he performs solo expression-­ based pieces such as jāvaḷis and padams, rather than the traditional dance dramas from the village, ­because he has not been trained in the latter genre. Given my fieldwork in Kuchipudi village, I understood Haleem’s limitations in training: while the village brahmins might readily teach solo items and sections of dance dramas like Bhāmākalāpam to village outsiders, the ostensibly “traditional” ele­ments of the Kuchipudi repertoire are reserved for the village’s brahmin male community. Most Kuchipudi dancers, including Haleem, have learned to perform Satyabhama’s role in a single item such as her praveśa daruvu (introductory song), but are not trained to perform the entirety of her character in the Bhāmākalāpam dance drama, including the dialogues (vācika abhinaya) between Satyabhama and her friend Madhavi. When the full Bhāmākalāpam dance drama is staged in Kuchipudi village with a male dancer enacting her strī-­vēṣam, the lead roles of Satyabhama and Madhavi are reserved for village brahmin men. This exclusionary practice forces dancers 268

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Figure 12.3. ​Haleem Khan performing in strī-­vēṣam. Courtesy of Haleem Khan.

such as Haleem to explore elsewhere to expand their repertoire and choreography. Despite t­ hese critiques, Haleem seemed undeterred in his interest in donning the strī-­vēṣam. Continuing his narrative quoted in the beginning of this chapter, Haleem told me: If they are trying to stop me, I smile at myself and think, “I am trying to take your baby out and show the world. If you want me to stop it’s not a good idea.” I think very silently to myself and I d ­ on’t ­really want to fight. But I am aware that t­ here are so many f­ actors. I’m Muslim. P ­ eople think I ­don’t want to keep up the tradition for some reason. ­People think I am taking advantage of the tradition. P ­ eople think I am crazy. . . . ​But what I believe is that if you are interested in dance, you have to try it, you have to try it ­until you drop dead. So I ­w ill keep trying. I ­w ill keep trying something. If p ­ eople like it or not, it’s their interest. Haleem’s determination to continue dancing and experimenting with dance permeated the rest of my conversation with him. Regardless of the vari­ous critiques he has faced, Haleem expressed resolve to continue dancing on the path that he has carved out for himself as a Kuchipudi dancer and impersonator. In more recent years ­after my interview with him, Haleem has become more vocal about his personal journey. For example, in 2017, Haleem gave three in­de­ pen­dently or­ga­nized TED Talks in urban locations in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in which he described his story as a Muslim Kuchipudi dancer.7 Two of the events in Warangal, Telangana, and Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, opened with Haleem performing an item in honor of the Hindu deity Shiva in strī-­vēṣam, followed by a talk describing his personal journey. In the third talk, TEDxHyderabadWomen, Haleem outlined the challenges that he faced when telling his parents about his interest in dance. Although his parents fi­nally came to accept Haleem’s c­ areer choice to become a professional dancer, Haleem was worried about what his parents would think about his choice to don the strī-­ vēṣam; he told the audience about this decision to impersonate: Before that, what crossed my mind is: What would ­people think? That was a cultural shock just dancing itself. Now this. How would I convince my parents ­because they ­were at least decent enough to leave me alone. Now if I impersonate, what would they think? What would my f­amily go through? What would my immediate friends think? What would society point out? . . . ​If the question is classical dancer, the ste­reo­type answers are: that must be a ­woman, that must be gay, that must be effeminate, without

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a job. So do I care? No, even ­today I danced. But it was a very tough decision to impersonate. (Khan 2017c) In the TED Talk or­ga­nized in Warangal, Haleem critiqued o ­ thers for thinking he might have a “boyfriend” (Khan 2017a). As an urban dancer and professional impersonator, Haleem is certainly aware of transnational views on gender and sexuality that position him as nonnormative due to his practice of impersonation; in ­t hese public talks, he dismissed intrusive comments and speculations about his gender and sexuality by critics.8 Immediately ­after raising the issue of gender and f­amily, Haleem ended the Warangal talk by simply stating: “Who cares? Let them think what they think. This is what I am. This is what I want to do. This is what I intend to do. This is what I love to do” (Khan 2017a). Haleem is indeed unique among Kuchipudi dancers. His striking appearance in strī-­vēṣam, combined with his Muslim background, cosmopolitan outlook, and willingness to experiment with choreography, has allowed Haleem to move easily into transnational spaces and make a name for himself as a Kuchipudi dancer. However, his longing to impersonate has also come at a cost: Haleem is read as outside the bound­aries of traditional Kuchipudi dance circles and outside the bound­aries of traditional expectations for a cis male urban professional in his thirties. But Haleem is unconcerned with such critiques and policies of bound­aries. At the end of our interview, Haleem told me: “I feel very proud to say this in the interview that many p ­ eople should know the word Kuchipudi by me. I lived as a dancer, that’s it. I can die tomorrow. I am very full as a dancer.”

Conclusion: Impersonation and Power In per­for­mance, impersonation is often imbued with an aura of play; the act of impersonation involves a sleight of hand purposefully intended to delude audiences. As Pamela Lothspeich notes in her chapter in this volume, “the sartorial and somatic guising of performers [in Ramlila] clearly creates a space for jouissance—­pleasure, abandon, and escape.” The playfulness of impersonation is certainly evident in the case of Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma (1935– 2012), the most famous Kuchipudi impersonator of the twentieth ­century. Akin to theatre impersonator Bal Gandharva (Hansen 1999), Satyanarayana Sarma was well known for taking plea­sure in fooling his audiences into thinking he was a ­woman onstage and off. For example, in an autobiographical article, Satyanarayana Sarma (1996) describes how once, while in the town of Nagpur, he performed the role of Usha in the dance drama Uṣā-­pariṇayam

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(Marriage of Usha). When he went into the dressing room to change his costume between scenes, a wealthy patron entered and began making amorous advances. To return to the stage in time for his next scene, Satyanarayana Sarma says he was forced to reveal his identity to his prospective suitor. Satyanarayana Sarma describes this moment thus: “He felt embarrassed and returned to his seat ­after saying that had I ­really been a lady, he would have bequeathed his entire property to me, but unfortunately I happened to be male” (1996, 86). Satyanarayana Sarma undoubtedly delights in such stories of passing as a ­woman, and he told me similar stories when I met him in the summer of 2006, and again in December 2007. The shift from impersonation to passing enables the construction of Satyanarayana Sarma’s hagiography as a legendary impersonator. However, the plea­sure Satyanarayana Sarma obviously takes in fooling his audience and in incidents he frames as patently humorous points to his own inherent power—­power he also takes plea­sure in. The aesthetic plea­ sure and brahmin male privilege Satyanarayana Sarma feels are, of course, not experienced by Haleem, who is critiqued by the brahmins of the village for his strī-­vēṣam. Juxtaposing Haleem alongside Satyanarayana Sarma reveals that impersonation is not simply a playful act of deception within the confines of staged per­for­mance. Rather, impersonation is a per­for­mance of power that enables certain bodies (cis, male, brahmin) to assert authority and other bodies (queer, female, oppressed-caste, non-Hindu) to be denied power. As noted in the introduction to this volume, impersonation also hinges on the power of performativity—it takes effect through repetition, in this case the iterative practice of donning the strī-­vēṣam by the brahmin men of Kuchipudi village at the exclusion of o ­ thers. My reading of impersonation as both a per­ for­mance of power and the power of performativity is not ­limited to Kuchipudi dance but extends to other instances of impersonation, including some in this volume. In the case of Kuchipudi, the brahmin impersonator is situated at the very heart of sāmpradāyam (tradition): his body in vēṣam fulfills the prescription made by Siddhendra to the brahmins of Kuchipudi village. His body upholds the legacies of brahminical patriarchy. At first glance, Haleem’s interest in donning the strī-­vēṣam seems to uphold brahminical patriarchy in Kuchipudi dance: like the brahmin male dancer’s strī-­ vēṣam, Haleem’s impersonations seem to fulfill the prescription of Siddhendra, the founding saint of Kuchipudi dance. In fact, one could read Haleem as impersonating the brahmin male body in strī-­vēṣam as “impersonating the original impersonator,” as Rich Freeman observes about the teyyam performers in his chapter in this volume. However, ­t here is more to Haleem’s story than simply mimesis and reinscription of brahminical norms. In par­tic­u ­lar, Haleem reinterprets Siddhendra’s injunction to impersonate when saying:

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­ here’s this common point that [all Kuchipudi dancers] must do T Bhāmākalāpam once. . . . ​I always heard the proverb that if you have not done strī-­vēṣam once in your lifetime, you are not ­really authorized to call yourself a Kuchipudi dancer. Then I told myself, “You are d ­ oing so many Kuchipudi per­for­mances, why ­don’t you do that also?” As a Muslim man in strī-­vēṣam, Haleem’s impersonation challenges the founding narrative of Kuchipudi village and the eponymous dance form arising from this village. For Haleem, Siddhendra’s hagiography is not l­imited to the village’s exclusive community of brahmins but extends to all dancers, regardless of their background. Haleem transforms Siddhendra’s prescription to impersonate from a caste-­and gender-­exclusive religious rite of passage for village brahmin men to a secular rite of passage available to any dancer, irrespective of religious affiliation. Haleem also creatively reimagines the scope of impersonation for new audiences particularly by experimenting with choreography and performing in alternative spaces. Per­for­mances such as Yaad-­e-­Maazee, which explic­itly juxtapose Urdu ghazals and Telugu padams, expand the traditional repertoire of Kuchipudi dance beyond Hindu-­centered, brahminical dance dramas that primarily foster a brahmin aesthetic.9 Haleem also artfully deflects critiques that ­others have leveled at him, including suggestions that characterize his sexuality as nonnormative. Instead, Haleem remains insistent on his passion and right to dance. Through his decision to impersonate, his choices in choreography, and his willingness to speak publicly about his story, Haleem carves out his own space in the Kuchipudi dance community without the approval of his village brahmin counter­parts. While Haleem does not and cannot mobilize brahminical patriarchy in ser­v ice of his dance, he became a successful impersonator, nonetheless. I conclude this chapter by returning to the question: What happens when a Muslim cisgender male dancer learns and performs a dance form grounded in brahminical patriarchy? Through his choice to impersonate, Haleem opens up new possibilities on the transnational Kuchipudi stage by calling into question the necessity of the brahmin male body donning a w ­ oman’s guise. While Haleem’s acts of re­sis­tance are certainly respectful—he is careful to never critique the brahmins of the village—­his existence alone provides a path for exposing the tenuousness of brahminical patriarchy that grounds Kuchipudi dance. Haleem’s impersonation does not replicate the power structures of brahminical patriarchy, but rather challenges and even divests from brahminical patriarchy undergirding both Kuchipudi village and Kuchipudi as dance. Haleem’s per­for­ mance of re­sis­tance comes by virtue of his body in strī-­vēṣam, which for generations has been reserved for village brahmin men. In other words, dancing

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in vēṣam is a gesture of dissent for Haleem, one that creatively legitimizes which bodies get to dance in which guise.

Acknowl­edgments Thanks to Haleem Khan, Sailaja Krishnamurti, Pamela Lothspeich, Shana Sippy, and Petra Shenk for their feedback on this chapter. A version of this chapter was presented at the Indian Dance and Dissent webinar or­ga­nized by Swarthmore College and Jadhavpur University in April 2020, and I thank the organizers Pallabi Chakravorty and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, as well as my fellow panelists Kareem Khubchandani and Priya Srinivasan.

Notes 1. See Kamath (2019a, 17) for a map of the Kuchipudi village agrahāram. 2. For a detailed discussion of Siddhendra’s prescription, see Kamath (2019a, chapter 1; 2019b, 172–176). See also Arudra (1994), Jonnalagadda (1996), Putcha (2013), and Thakore (2020) for a discussion of the figure of Siddhendra in the context of Kuchipudi. 3. In line with Dalit scholars and activists, including the recent work of Thenmozhi Soundararajan (forthcoming), I use the term savarna (without diacritics) to identify ­t hose with caste privilege. For recent scholarship that complicates caste and lineage in the context of South Indian dance, see the work of Yashoda Thakore (2022). 4. For a discussion of my interviews with village brahmin ­women, see Kamath (2019a, chapter 5). 5. Similar practices of gatekeeping are evident in the per­for­mances observed by Rumya Putcha (2019) at the Siddhendra Yogi Mahotsav in 2009. 6. Unlike most of the interviews I conducted with Kuchipudi dancers for my broader study, my interview with Haleem was conducted entirely in En­glish. 7. In 2017, Haleem gave the following three TED Talks: (1) TEDxHyderabadWomen in Hyderabad, Telangana (Khan 2017c); (2) TEDxSREC in Warangal, Telangana (Khan 2017a); and (3) TEDxGITAMUniversity in Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh (Khan 2017b). 8. For example, in an interview with iDreamMedia​.­com about his “gay role” in the Telugu film Nuvvila, Haleem states: “When I started that Nuvvila, it was a ­great banner and I was given a very comically gay role. I performed it with a lot of inhibitions. Being a classical dancer, it’s a stigma that a lot of classical dancers are predicted as gay. Why am I ­doing that even more loudly? But I had been asked by many to do that role, including Ravi Babu Garu [the director] himself.” See https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­scceFthQAug. Out of re­spect for his privacy, I did not directly broach the topic of his gender and sexuality in our interview. 9. When describing her own teacher, Sobha Naidu’s, per­for­mance of the brahmin aesthetic choreographed by Kuchipudi brahmin guru Vempati Chinna Satyam, Thakore (2022) writes: “As the male [b]rahmin aesthetic flowed through a female non-[b]rahmin body to another non-­brahmin Kalavantulu body, I wondered how Chinna Satyam knew what ‘kaliki

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tanamu’ or, femininity, felt like, when he taught her to raise her shoulders and chest with closed eyes, and lift her chin a l­ittle. Though I did not fully understand the sensuality, I always wondered if, given a choice, she would have done it differently.”

Works Cited Arudra. 1994. “Lingering Questions and Some Fash­ion­able Fallacies.” Sruti 115:​ 29–31. Chakravarti, Uma. 1993. “Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State.” Economic and Po­liti­cal Weekly 28, no. 14:579–585. —­—­—. [2003] 2018. Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens. New Delhi: Sage. Hansen, Kathryn. 1999. “Making ­Women Vis­i­ble: Gender and Race Cross-­Dressing in the Parsi Theatre.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 2:127–147. Jonnalagadda, Anuradha. 1996. “Tradition and Innovations in Kuchipudi Dance.” PhD dissertation, University of Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu School of Performing Arts, Fine Arts and Communication. Kamath, Harshita Mruthinti. 2019a. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance. Oakland: University of California Press. —­—­—. 2019b. “Two Bhak­tas, One District: Revisioning Hagiography and Imagery in Telugu South India.” Journal of Hindu Studies 12, no. 2:168–191. Khan, Haleem. 2017a. “Art Is beyond Religion.” YouTube, April 18. https://­w ww​.­youtube​ .­com​/­watch​?­v​=­PsaNGiCcSXM —­—­—. 2017b. “Breaking Ste­reo­type: One STEP at a time.” YouTube, June  13. https://­ www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=v­ JFcth4WdkM. —­—­—. 2017c. “Impressionist Dancer.” YouTube, February 6. https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​ /­watch​?­v​= e­ tcgV9d4O74 Kumar, Ranee. 2011. “Dance Like a W ­ oman.” The Hindu, March 17. https://­w ww​.­thehindu​ .­com​/­features​/­friday​-­review​/­dance​/­Dance​-­like​-­a​-­woman​/­article14950926​.­ece. Putcha, Rumya S. 2013. “Mythopoetics and the Production of History in Kuchipudi.” Yearbook for Traditional ­Music 47:1–26. —­—­—. 2019. “Gender, Caste, and Feminist Praxis in Transnational South India.” South Asian Popu­lar Culture 17, no. 1:61–79. Satyanarayana Sarma, Vedantam. 1996. “Bhrukunsuvus of Kuchipudi.” In Kuchipudi Mahotsav 1996, a Souvenir, 86–87. Mumbai: Kuchipudi Kalakendra. Soundararajan, Thenmozhi. Forthcoming. The Trauma of Caste. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Thakore, Yashoda. 2020. “Her Story of Dance.” Suno India, n.d. https://­w ww​.­sunoindia​ .­in​/­her​-­story​-­of​-­dance​/­. —­—­—. 2022. “Dancing Caste, Rethinking Heredity: A Kuchipudi Artist Reflects on Her Multiple Lineages.” Scroll​.­in, April 10. https://­scroll​.­in​/­article​/­1021494​/­dancing​-­caste​ -­rethinking​-­heredity​-­a​-­kuchipudi​-­artist​-­reflects​-­on​-­her​-­multiple​-­lineages.

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CONTR IBU TORS

Chaya Chandrasekhar (she/her) is an educator, art historian, and exhibitions curator. As Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, she contributed to the exhibition Goddess: Divine Energy and served as lead curator for Intimate Encounters: Indian Paintings in Australian Collections. Her other curated exhibitions include Inspired Asia: Art from the Richard Krause Collection at Marietta College and On Being Gandhi: The Art and Politics of Seeing for the Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University. Chandrasekhar’s current research interests include post-­independence Indian photography, and she has published on the work of Raghubir Singh. A­ni­rud­dha Dutta (they/them) is Associate Professor of Gender, W ­ omen’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Dutta’s research interests include transnational sexualities, globalization, development, po­liti­cal economy, and the institutionalization of gender and sexual politics in India. Their work has appeared in journals such as Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Gender and History, and South Asian History and Culture. Dutta also works as a volunteer and adviser with several collectives of gender nonconforming communities such as kotis and hijras in eastern India. Rich Freeman (he/him), teaching in Duke University’s History Department, is a cultural anthropologist with training in Sans­k rit and Dravidian languages, specializing in the Hinduism of historical and con­temporary Kerala. He has conducted extensive fieldwork studies in the folk culture of northern Kerala, including into the spirit possession of teyyam worship and the institution of sacred groves, as well as into Kerala’s high t­ emple culture, studying its ritual regimes and textual relations to tantrism. He has further published on the 277

literary culture of early Ma­la­ya­lam in its relation to regional identity, caste, and society through both Sanskritic and locally Dravidian genres of lit­er­a­ture. Janice Glowski (she/her) is Museum and Galleries Director at Otterbein University, Westerville, Ohio, where she also teaches art history and museum and curatorial studies. She co-­founded the Otterbein and the Arts: Opening Doors to the World (ODW) con­temporary arts program and publication series, which has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. ODW exhibitions include On Being Gandhi: The Art and Politics of Seeing, and Between Us: Identity and Relationship in Tibetan Con­temporary Art. Outside of museum-­related work, Glowski researches Tibetan art in the diaspora and has published on stupa architecture and its role as loci for cross-­cultural ­engagement. Kellen Hoxworth (he/they) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published in American Quarterly, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, TDR, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. His essay “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman” received the 2018 Errol Hill Award for outstanding research in African-­American theatre and per­for­mance studies. He is currently working on a monograph that traces the transnational circulations of blackface minstrelsy and related forms of racialized per­for­mance from the prerevolutionary circum-­Atlantic world through the nineteenth-­century Anglophone imperium, titled Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Per­for­mance. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (she/her) is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Lit­er­a­t ure and History at Emory University. Her research focuses on the textual and per­for­mance traditions of Telugu-­speaking South India. She is the author of Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance (University of California Press, 2019). She also co-­translated the classical Telugu text Theft of a Tree with Velcheru Narayana Rao, published by the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press, 2022). Sailaja Krishnamurti (she/they) is Associate Professor and Head, Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston. Her research takes a critical race feminist approach to issues of religion, repre­sen­ta­tion, and migration in the South Asian diaspora and in transnational media cultures. She is the author of several refereed articles and book chapters and is co-­editor of Relation and Re­sis­tance: Racialized ­Women, Religion and Diaspora (McGill-­Queens, 2021).

278

Contributors

Krishnamurti is a founding member of the Auntylectuals, also known as the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective. Pamela Lothspeich (she/her) is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of Asian and ­Middle Eastern Studies, and Director of the New Faculty Program in the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the Indian epics in Hindi lit­er­a­ture, theatre, and film. She was the guest editor of a special issue titled “The Field of Ramlila” in Asian Theatre Journal (Spring 2020), and is the author of Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009). Shehzad Nadeem (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he teaches courses on theory and urban sociology. Nadeem is the author of Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves (Prince­ton University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book about yoga titled Yoga for Nihilists: Liberation from Beliefs. Christian Lee Novetzke (he/him) is Professor of South Asia Studies, Comparative Religion, and Global Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies, and Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington. Novetzke is the author of Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press, 2008) and The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2016), as well as coauthor with Andy Rotman and W ­ ill Elison of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016) and co-­editor with John Stratton Hawley and Swapna Sharma of Bhak­ti and Power (University of Washington Press, 2019). Claire Pamment (she/they) is Associate Professor of World Theatre and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at William & Mary. She is also the Director of the GSWS program at William & Mary. A scholar and theatre-­maker, she works in areas of Pakistani theatre and per­for­mance, foregrounding marginalized practices at the intersections of class, gender, sexuality, religion, and race. Her collaborative work with khwaja sira and trans communities includes the devised theatre play Teesri Dhun and the short film Vadhai. Her books include the monograph  Comic Per­for­mance in Pakistan: The  Bhānd  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and  Badhai: Hijra-­Khwaja Sira-­Trans Per­for­mances across Borders in South Asia (Methuen Drama, 2022), collaboratively authored with Adnan Hossain and Jeff Roy.

Contributors

279

Shilpa Parthan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research examines the emergence of transgender welfare as a priority for Indian (subnational) state governments with a focus on the state of Kerala, moving beyond a focus on nationally legible rights-­based LGBTQIA+ politics. Her research interests lie at the intersections of the anthropology of the state, South Asia studies, development studies, and queer, feminist, and trans studies. Her work has been published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Sumathi Ramaswamy (she/her) is James  B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and, more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2021), Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s W ­ oman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022, co-­edited with M. Juneja), and the digital proj­ect “B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India” (https://­sites​.­duke​.­edu​/­bisforbapu​/­). Rosie Thomas (she/her) is Professor of Film at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, and Co-­ Director of the Cheve­ning South Asia Journalism Programme. Her early research as a social anthropologist was on the Bombay film industry and, since 1985, she has published widely on Indian cinema, with a special focus on pre-­ and early post-­independence films. Throughout the 1990s she made documentaries, arts, and current affairs programs for UK tele­vi­sion. She is co-­founder and co-­editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and the author of Bombay before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (State University of New York Press, 2013).

280

Contributors

INDEX

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Abbasi, Hamza Ali, 161 abhinaya, 266–68 ādivāsī communities, 251 Ahmed, Sara, 5, 45 Ahmed, Shabaz, 202 AIDS, 159 Amar Chitra Katha, 198–99 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 89, 250 Ānandamaṭh (Chatterjee), 110, 113 Apu (The Simpsons character), 7, 42, 60 ārtī, 236, 238–41, 239, 240, 247, 248, 252 āsanas, 110, 112, 115, 116, 121–22 Austin, J. L., 3, 5, 227 Australia: blackface per­for­mance in, 43, 49; Fearless Nadia, 70, 72 authenticity, 148–68; in cosplay, 197, 202; female artists, 179, 184 Ayurvedic medicine, commodification of, 110, 116, 122 AYUSH. See Ministry of AYUSH (India) Azaria, Hank, 7, 42, 60n1

“The Bengalee Baboo” (Carson), 45–52, 46 Betab, Naryan Prasad, 72–73 Bhabha, Homi, 6–7, 44 Bhāmākalāpam: Siddhendra prescription, 257, 258, 259, 263–64, 272–73 Bha­ra­ti­ya Ja­na­ta Party (BJP), 109, 117 Bhaumik, Kaushik, 74 Bhave, Vinoba. See Vinoba blackface, 42–43, 47, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 58 Bobby, Almas, 154, 155, 156, 158–59, 161–62, 163, 164 Boellstorff, Tom, 185 Bosco, D., 98 Bose, Shib Chunder, 57 Bourke-­W hite, Margaret, 93 Brahmachari, Dhirendra, 114 Brahmo Samaj, 111, 112–13 brownface, 11–12, 42–64 “brown voice,” 7, 42, 60 Butler, Judith, 3, 150, 181, 184; Gender Trou­ble, 7

Baahubali, 191, 201, 203 Bahuroopee Gandhi, 100–101 Balatripurasundari, Chavali, 260 Balkrishna, Acharya, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120 Basavaraju, Byagadehalli, 85–95, 102–3, 105 Bataille, Georges, 103 Becket, Diana, 71

Carlson, Marvin, 5 Carson, Dave, 11, 43–60, 46, 50 caste: deity possession and, 243, 247; female artists, 179, 182; in film casting, 187n14; in Līḷācaritra, 24, 27–32, 33; racialization of, 251; in teyyāṭṭam, 212–13, 228–30, 232. See also Dalits; impersonation of Shudras in Līḷācaritra

281

Chakraborty, Chandrima, 113 Chakradhar (thirteenth c­ entury), 25–39 Changezi, Zara, 162 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra: Ānandamaṭh, 110, 113 Chatterjee, Sudipto, 44 Chaturvedi, Mahesh, 98–99 Chaudhuri, Itu, 120 Cheung, Brittany Hei-­man, 195, 197 Chinna Satyam, Vempati, 260, 262, 274–75n9 chromolithographs, 76 Churi, Akshay, 203 circus culture, 75–76 cleaning products and culture wars, 119–21 Cohen, Lawrence, 153 Coleman, A. D., 92 colonial mimicry, 42–64, 67 comedy real­ity tele­v i­sion shows: India, 174–75, 178, 182, 183–84 Comic Con India, 191–95, 198–209 comics and graphic novels, 199–200, 201 Conquergood, Dwight, 5 cosplay, 191–211; Japan, 194, 195, 204, 206 “cow protectors” (gau rakshaks), 120 cow urine, 119 crime shows, tele­v i­sion: Pakistan, 156–59 Dalits, 28, 32–33, 120, 187n14; in Ramlila, 243, 247, 250, 254n6 dance cultures, 171, 172, 176, 177, 259, 266. See also Kuchipudi; Mohiniattam Davé, Shilpa, 6–7, 42 deity possession in Hindu ritual practices, 236–56 Deka, Kaushik, 116 Delhi Comic Con, 198–200, 199 Devarajan, Sharad, 200 “divine embodiment” in Ramlila, 236–56 drag, 8, 181, 185 Draupadi, 242–43 Durga Puja, 239 Dutt, Madhusudan, 62n21 Dutta, A­ni­rud­d ha, 149, 152, 153, 157 “erasure” (Madhavan), 180 Evans, Mary. See Fearless Nadia

282

Index

facial makeup: in Ramlila, 251; in teyyāṭṭam, 216–17, 217 “fake” and “real.” See authenticity fan culture, 191–211 Fearless Nadia, 65–84 female artists: Kerala, 169–90 “female impersonation,” 9, 131, 169–90; Dave Carson, 53; Kuchipudi, 257–75; lagan (launḍā nāc), 127–47, 141, 143. See also drag; goddess impersonation and embodiment Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS) Collective, 5–6 Fenton, Mary, 73 films, Indian, 65–84, 97 Flueckiger, Joyce, 10, 240 food: offerings, 236, 254n1; as pedagogy, 29–30 Gandharva, Bal, 9, 131, 271 Gandhi, Indira, 114 Gandhi, Mohandas, 77, 116; impersonation of, 85–108 Gandhi, Ram. See Srivastava, Ram Dayal gays and lesbians. See LGBT ­people Gell, Alfred, 216, 223, 233 genderbending in cosplay, 197–98, 202, 207 gender exclusion, 180, 244, 245, 259–60 gender impersonation, 2, 8–10, 171–72. See also “female impersonation”; “male impersonation” Gender Trou­ble (Butler), 7 gender-­variant ­people, impersonation of. See impersonation of transgender and gender-­variant ­people gender-­variant performers, 127–47, 179. See also transgender performers “gestural reconstruction” (Nair), 10 Gittinger, Juli, 197 goddess impersonation and embodiment, 10, 238–39, 249–50 Godfrey, Charles Leland, 58 Goldberg, Whoopi, 42 Gonyle, 119–20 Gopal & Gulam (Ponni), 103–5, 104 Grimaud, Emmanuel, 99 “guising” (word), 2, 3, 16 Gundam cosplay, 203, 203

Hamzić, Vanja, 154 Hansen, Kathryn, 9, 72, 79–80, 81, 131, 171, 176, 178 Hansen, Miriam, 69–70 Hasb-­e-­Haal, 148–49, 150 haṭha yoga, 110, 111, 112, 114, 121. See also āsanas Hemadri (Hemadpant), 36–37 hijṛās. See kotis and hijṛās Hiltebeitel, Alf, 241 Hindu nationalism (Hindutva), 109, 115–21 HIV/AIDS, 159 “homosexual panic,” 149, 155, 164 Hossain, Adnan, 153, 156 Hunterwali, 65, 68, 75 Hyder, Qurratulain, 71 “impersonation” (word), 1–2, 3, 16, 130, 184 impersonation, public. See public impersonation impersonation of deities: in cosplay, 205. See also deity possession in Hindu ritual practices; goddess impersonation and embodiment impersonation of En­g lishmen. See mimicry of En­glishmen impersonation of fictional characters. See cosplay impersonation of Parsis, 53–56, 73 impersonation of peasants, 101–2 impersonation of Shudras in Līḷācaritra, 27–39 impersonation of transgender and gender-­variant ­people, 148–49, 157 impersonation of yogis and healers, 109–26 indexicality, 214, 220, 221 Indian films. See films, Indian Indian Transgender Bill. See Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill (India) Jain, Kajri, 90 Jamaat-­e-­Islami, 163 Jameel, Mehlab, 160 Japan: cosplay, 194, 195, 204, 206 Jassal, Aftab, 242, 243 Jayakumari, Devika, 176 Johnson, E. Patrick, 7 Jonnalagadda, Anuradha, 257

Ka­li, 242 Kamath, Harshita, 171, 182 Kannan Peruvannan, 229 Kapur, Anuradha, 246 kar­ma yoga, 118 Karnad, Girish, 68 Kashish, Nadeem, 160, 161, 163 Kathivanur Viran, 229 Keshav Prasad, Pasumarti, 264 Khaki, Mohammad Aslam, 154, 155–56 Khan, Faris, 152, 156, 160 Khan, Haleem, 257, 258, 262–74 Khan, Thesni, 170 Khubchandani, Kareem, 7–8 khwaja siras, 148–68 Kini, Abhijeet, 199 Kirkpatrick, Ellen, 193, 196, 208 kōmaram. See veḷiccappāṭŭ (kōmaram) kotis and hijṛās, 127–47, 148 Krishna, K. R. Kavya, 176 Krishnamacharya, T., 111–12 Kristeva, Julia, 151, 155 Kuchipudi, 245, 257–75 Kumar, Nita, 243–44 Kumar, Ranee, 266–67 Kunhikrishnan, V. K., 99 Kutiyattam, 10 lagan (launḍā nāc), 127–47, 141, 143 Lamerichs, Nicolle, 196 Laws of Ma­nu, 40–41n18 LGBT ­p eople, 128, 129–30, 274n8; Pakistan, 149, 153, 159, 163, 164. See also “homosexual panic”; transgender performers Līḷācaritra, 25–39 Liu Wing-­sun, 195, 197 Loomba, Ania, 44 Lootaru Lalna, 77, 78, 79 Lorenzen, David, 113 Lothspeich, Pamela, 271 Lucman, Mubasher, 160, 161 Luke, Noble, 202 Lutgendorf, Philip, 251 Madhavan, Arya, 180 Madhya Banglar Sangram, 127 Mahanubhavs, 25–39

Index 283

makeup. See facial makeup male effeminacy, 128, 132; Dave Carson and, 43, 52, 57–58 “male impersonation”: Sulochana, 74 Malik, Aditya, 242 Malik, Bubbli, 150, 161–62 Mankekar, Purnima, 4, 130–31 Manusmṛiti. See Laws of Ma­nu Marvel, 200, 201 Mathews, Charles, 43 Meyer, Bernie, 106n16 mimicry, colonial. See colonial mimicry mimicry of En­glishmen, 77, 79; by Gandhi, 101 mimicry of yogis. See impersonation of yogis and healers Mimikri, 174, 176–77, 186n5 Ministry of AYUSH (India), 110, 122 minstrelsy, 11, 43, 47, 48–49, 50, 52–53, 58 Mir, Abida, 82 mirror-­gazing rite in teyyāṭṭam, 221, 222, 234 “mirrors and win­dows” in photography (Szarkowski), 91–92 Modi, Narendra, 109–10, 114, 120 Mohiniattam, 173, 176, 177 Morcom, Anna, 131, 171, 177, 181 Muslims: India, 120, 197, 210n12, 247, 254n6, 257, 258, 262–74; Kuchipudi dancers, 257, 258, 262–74; Pakistan, 150–51; stand-up comics, 210n12; ­women cosplayers, 197 Mustafi, Ardhendu Sekhar, 44, 58 Myers, Ruby. See Sulochana (Ruby Myers) Nadia. See Fearless Nadia Nagamohini, Smt. Pasumarti, 262 Naidu, Sobha, 274–75n9 Nair, Srinath, 10 nakedness, 102–3, 102 Nanda, Serena, 152–53 Nazi cosplay, 191, 192, 201 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 114 Nobuyuki, Takahashi, 194 nudity. See nakedness Nyong’o, Tavia, 48 Orientalism, 6, 48; in films, 68, 74 Orientalism (Said), 6

284

Index

Pakistan: khwaja siras. See khwaja siras Pakistan Supreme Court. See Supreme Court of Pakistan Pakistan Tehreek-­e-­Insaf-­Gulalai (PTI-­G), 160 Pakistan transgender rights bill. See Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill (Pakistan) palimpsests, 121; impersonation as, 25–26, 27, 33, 39 Pandavlila, 241, 242–43 Parker, Andrew, 4 Parkinson, J. C., 56 Parsis, impersonation of. See impersonation of Parsis Parsi theatre, 131 “Patanjali” (name), 111 Patanjali, Ayurved ­Limited, 109–13, 116–22 Patanjali Yogpeeth Trust, 116 Patel, Baburao, 65, 66, 82, 97 Patel, Saumin Suresh, 199 patriarchy, 31, 34–38, 129, 171, 178; in Kuchipudi, 258–62 “per­for­mance” (word), 3–4 per­for­mance studies, 4–8 “performativity” (word), 3–4 photography, 90–97, 99 Pierce, J. O., 62n22 Pinch, William, 113 Pinney, Christopher, 76–77 Ponna, Balaji: Gopal & Gulam, 103–5, 104 possession by spirts. See spirit possession public impersonation, 24–41, 85–108 Pushpamala N., 96 Putcha, Rumya S., 6 “quare” theory (Johnson), 7 queer space, cosplay as, 207 queer theory and analy­sis, 7, 78, 172, 173–85 racial impersonation: in cosplay, 206–7. See also blackface; brownface; yellowface “racial impressions,” 45 racialization of caste. See caste: racialization of Rahman, Osmud, 195, 197 Rajyalakshmi, Vedantam, 261

Ramdev, Baba, 109–26 Ramlila, 236–56 Ramnarayan, Akhila, 91 Reddy, Gayatri, 153, 165n Rosy, P. K., 187n14 Roy, Parama, 66–67 Roy, Raina, 152 Sadhguru, 117 Said, Edward: Orientalism, 6 Sai Ram, 99 Saleem, Junaid, 148, 150–51 sāmpradāyam, 259, 260, 272 Saraswati, Dayanand, 115–16 Saria, Vaibhav, 152, 154 Sathi, Margi, 10 Satyabhama, 259, 261–64, 268 Satyanarayana Sarma, Vedantam, 271–72 Sax, William, 242–43 Schechner, Richard, 3, 5, 244, 246 Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, 4 Sellers, Peter: brownface per­for­mance, 42, 60 Sen, Keshub Chunder, 113 Serano, Julia, 4 Shanmugham, A., 98 Shariyari, Aorin, 198 Shiva, Cop, 85, 88, 90–96, 92–95 Siddhendra, 257, 258, 259, 263–64, 272–73 The Simpsons: Apu, 7, 42, 60 Singh, Bhagat, 77, 79 Singh, Mukesh, 200 Singh, Vishavjit, 197 Sinha, Ajay, 96, 97 Sinha, Mrinalini, 8 skin lightening, 251, 255n11 Smith, Frederick, 242, 243 Soman, Deepa, 99 spirit possession, 212–35 Spivak, Gayatri, 150 Srivastava, Ram Dayal, 99 Subrahmanyam, Raja Venkata, 262 Sulochana (Ruby Myers), 74 Sundari, Jayshankar, 9 Supreme Court of Pakistan, 153–56, 159 svarūps, 236–38, 240–50, 252 Szarkowski, John, 91–92

Tantrism, 232–33 Taussig, Michael, 69, 97, 101, 219 Taylor, Diana, 18n7 tele­v i­sion: India, 169–70, 173–85; Pakistan, 148–49, 150, 156–59, 160–62 teyyāṭṭam, 212–35, 243 Thakore, Yashoda, 274–75n9 Thapar, Romila, 251 Thapliyal, Mansi, 98–99 “third-­sex” identity: Pakistan. See khwaja siras “transgender” (label), 179, 185 transgender p ­ eople, impersonation of. See impersonation of transgender and gender-­variant ­people transgender performers: India, 127–47, 178, 179, 181, 184, 254n2 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill (India), 152 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill (Pakistan), 148, 149, 151–52, 159–64 Trivedi, Poonam, 44, 56 Tulsidas: Rām­carit­mānas, 236, 242 Tulsi Smarak Bhavan, 252, 253 Vaidiki, 259 Varma, Jatin, 194 veḷiccappāṭŭ (kōmaram), 230–32, 232 “vernacular modernism” (Hansen), 69–70 Vinoba, 98 Vivekananda, Swami, 111, 112 Wacha, D. E., 52 Wadia, Homi, 66, 68, 77 Wadia, Jamshed, 73, 74, 75, 77 Wadia ­brothers films, 65–84 Water­house, Richard, 44 Weber, Max, 113–14 White, Pearl, 66, 73, 74 Worth, Robert, 117 Wright, Huntley, 59, 60 Yaad-­e-­Maazee, 266, 267–68, 273 Yadav, Dharmendra, 246, 247 yellowface, 57 yoga, 109, 118. See also haṭha yoga yogis, impersonation of. See impersonation of yogis and healers

Index 285

MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS O F A S I A A N D T H E PA C I F I C

Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese M ­ usic and Dance Henry Spiller Hearing the F ­ uture: The M ­ usic and Magic of the Sanguma Band Denis Crowdy Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities Edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of K ­ orea’s Central Folksong Traditions Roald Maliangkay Making Waves: Traveling M ­ usics in Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific Edited by Frederick Lau and Christine R. Yano Song King: Connecting P ­ eople, Places, and Past in Con­temporary China Levis S. Gibbs Minority Stages: Sino-­Indonesian Per­for­mance and Public Display Josh Stenberg Networking the Rus­sian Diaspora: Rus­sian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai Hon-­Lun Helan Yang, Simo Mikkonen, and John Winzenburg Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism Joshua Howard Sound of the Border: Music and Identity of Korean Minority in China Sunhee Koo