“Folk” and “folk culture” has a long history going back to pre-industrial times. But in India, the era of industrialisation has been slow and uneven in its progress. The lives and livelihoods of the majority of our people have remained embedded in pre-industrial modes, rooted in agriculture or even food-gathering. In their cultural lives too, people have continued with forms of expression and communication which have, for the most part, long become extinct in more industrialised nations.

Folk cultural forms must not be regarded as surviving “primitive” models of communication, caught in a time-warp. Rather, they represent a different paradigm of communication. In the 21st century, while some such modes of expression have gone extinct, still others have foregone their “folk” character. But there are still some folk forms that have responded better to changing circumstances and have, so far, developed in their own way, and within their specific contexts. It is these “living” folk forms I encountered during my field visits as the vice-president of the Paschimbanga Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre, from the late 1970s onwards, and then later, as an honorary advisor to the Adivasi and folk artists who founded the Pashchimbanga Adivasi O Lokshilpi Sangha in the year 2000. 

West Bengal has a vast agrarian sector, with a majority of small peasant producers, which has accommodated numerous lives and livelihoods. For the most part, people belonging to so-called “lower castes,” Muslims, and other minorities and tribal communities in Bengal have some traditional rights to the land they till and still have some control over their means of production. This is where multiple forms of folk culture — songs, dances, folk drama — have flourished over a long time. These folk forms are essentially nourished by local linguistic and material resources.

Rural Patrons of Folk Culture

Orality is one of the most striking features of these folk forms. Even with the spread of literacy in the countryside, they have retained their oral immediacy through a close and direct contact with their consumers — that is, other small producers, through a constant effort at creative improvisations. 

These forms are thus essentially performative; even plastic forms like pictures, designs, masks, or models are usually created to accompany live performances. Each performance is unique and is shaped anew by the immediate experiential ambience and their audience. This vitality excludes any externally-imposed criteria of “purity” of form and content.   

The performances are often seasonal and mobile. Many performing teams of Kabigan, Gambhira, Alkap and Kushan, consisting of seasoned professionals, depend at least partially for their livelihood on their performances. They move from village to village on “call shows” for specific occasions. Others like the Bauls, the Fakirs or even the scroll-painters (patuas) are itinerant by their very profession. In some cases, the entire community in a village turn into performers on festive days. If we are asked, who the patrons of folk culture are, the answer has to be the community to which they belong — the rural, labouring poor. It is they who keep this folk culture alive. It is culture for them, of them and by them. This also gives folk culture its syncretic quality.

For instance, the movements, rhythm, and music of the Saontal and Oraon people may seem to us to have set patterns according to the occasion being observed through the performance, such as Baha, Karam, Dasain, and Lagre. But, the words of the accompanying songs vary from locality to locality, according to immediate daily experiences of the particular community. They could narrate the woes of people living in mining areas, a fall in the family’s income preventing a girl from buying a new sari for a festival, or the benefits of education. 

These songs are composed by people when working on the land, or in forests and in conversations among themselves. This is much more than spontaneous expression; it is part of an ingrained oral culture lost to industrially-advanced societies. The composite language called Sadri used by tribal communities, who once migrated to tea gardens, exemplifies this same creativity. Uniquely, performances in Sadri retain the set choric movements, rhythm, and music even while integrating into them wefts of new content and imagery.

‘Traditional’ or Contemporary?

The chitrakars/patidars (patuas), when I first met them, were a marginalised community of Muslims (OBC) — their marginalisation proceeding partly from their art of scroll-painting representing an idolatrous pantheon of local deities (Radha-Krishna, Rama-Sita, Hara-Gouri, Manasa, Bonbibi) and Sufi saints (Satya-pir), many of them venerated alike by Hindu and Muslim peasants in the region. The scrolls were an accompaniment to narrative songs which the patua sang while they moved from village to village. 

But, any interesting local or global news and gossip like a sensational murder, a peasant uprising, the 2004 tsunami, the destruction of the twin towers in New York, or environmental campaigns were also grist for this narrative mill. Coalescing myth and reality, the patuas continued to reconstruct their own eclectic relevance for their local audience.

Patronage by sections of the rural rich, where present, does not contain the secret of folk culture’s vitality. So, what then is its relationship with dominant culture? Contrary to the “subaltern” viewpoint, they do not represent two mutually exclusive worlds. Of course, dominant culture is forever seeking to co-opt some of the creativity of folk cultural forms for its own consumers. Indeed, elements of the “folk” may be found in most cultural products enjoyed by the upper echelons of society. Folk cultural forms may themselves be embedded in ideological “traditionality,” sharing dominant values and modes of behaviour. In spite of this, the former remains able to develop their creative resources, constantly subverting their own “traditional” character through comic laughter and irony.

In Kushan performances, Lord Rama would be roundly abused by his sons for mistreating his wife while the “low-caste” robber Ratnakara  (later Valmiki) would make fun of the cowardice of Brahmins, specifically Brahma and Narada, threatening to rob and kill them to feed his starving family. In Gambhira songs, Shiva would be addressed as “nana” (grandpa) and heckled because he cannot find solutions to the many woes suffered by his human devotees. 

In Alkaap, the protagonist would often be the poor, foolish peasant uttering home truths without understanding their significance. Verbal duels in Kabigan, accompanied by music and dancing, would demonstrate utter irreverence for pious conservatism. Similarly, Fakirs and Bauls would expose the hypocrisy of institutionalised religion and social hierarchies through their songs. One can go on giving examples of such worldly creativity.

Folk Culture and the State

Before Independence, the colonial regime had generally been neglectful of these forms, which they considered archaic. In some of Rabindranath Tagore’s most perceptive articles, he had emphasised how in our country, traditionally, these folk forms have been a living and open-ended form of public education and how their neglect had led to an elite educational system, which failed to connect with the large majority of our population. 

The Indian People’s Theatre Movement, as a part of our freedom struggle, had sought to build bridges with many of the rural folk forms on the ground. Sometimes, by using the latters’ repertoire of performative tools in their own creations, they were also able to revitalise these forms, making their exponents acquainted with new ideas and new content. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, we find a generation of folk artists like Nibaran Pandit, Gomani Dewan, and Lal Shukra Oraon from Bengal; Omar Sheikh and Annabhau Sathe from Maharashtra; Bhagirath Singh from Manipur; and Bishnu Rava and Maghai Ozha from Assam, taking up new political and social messages to the labouring poor in villages and towns. After Independence, the newly-formed government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru heeded the message implicit in such movements and sought to address living forms of folk culture particularly through the Sangeet Natak Akademi, a state-sponsored institution. This was followed by the setting up of the regional Akademis to ensure greater local involvement. 

This certainly led to much-needed budgetary support and some nationwide recognition for some folk forms and their exponents. The overall economic policy of the Union Government at this stage also led to some improvement in the extreme conditions to which colonial rule had reduced the peasantry, particularly the rural labouring poor; this probably ensured a longer lease of life to folk forms as well.

However, more than four decades later, the 1990 P N Haksar Report, on the work done by the three Akademis and the National School of Drama, sounded an alarm bell regarding the contours of State patronage in the cultural domain. 

The report was notable not only for its perspicuity, but because, in some ways, it proved to be prophetic. It admitted that since Independence, in the cultural sphere, the market had always been more active than the State. Indeed, the report pointed out that State-led patronage had sometimes even opened the way for the market; but it re-affirmed the original goal of intervention by the State as a “corrective” to market forces so that culture could retain its true objective of serving humanity. At the same time, it also reaffirmed the principle that those who run the State must not impose their ideology on cultural activities. We have found in the last three decades that when it comes to culture, particularly folk culture, the market — now a globalised one — has vastly overwhelmed the good intentions of the State. The warning on imposing ideology has also been ignored. 

Of course, there has been a change in government policy on culture since the Haksar Report. State interventions these days take place usually against the looming background presence of global intermediaries, including not only UNESCO and UNCTAD, but the World Intellectual Property Organization, Americans for the Arts, UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sports, and other organisations that actively configure the cultural industry through funding, grants, and policy-making. 

The cultural industry and the trade in cultural goods and experiences is taking precedence in less industrially-advanced countries. Folk artists are being encouraged to produce and package intellectual and cultural goods of various kinds for the global market. With its wealth of “traditional” arts and crafts, India has opened up for a global market, and though it is still behind China, its cultural goods export in this area was over $10 billion in 2013.

Folk Forms and the Market

It is expected that the more this market is catered to, the more employment will be generated to provide for folk artists, craftsmen and folk performers on the ground. A part of the profit made by global enterprises in this business will be ploughed back as foreign exchange for India, and greener pastures will be opened for cultural tourism. The Culture Ministry itself becomes an intermediary here and extends patronage with this purpose to the folk performative forms as well as the crafts. However, this patronage rests on two conditions, which seem to contradict each other and present an insoluble dilemma. 

Firstly, the product must be “authentic,” and secondly, it must be packaged to attract global investors. The severe crisis in our agrarian economy and massive dispossession of the peasantry has depleted the support folk cultural forms have traditionally enjoyed among the rural masses. The question of improving employment opportunities is fast becoming a question of life and death. But I doubt whether this crisis in cultural production can be alleviated by the patronage of a global market, even if we succeed in the “packaging” of “authentic” culture, as demanded by market forces. 

For one thing, the packaging necessitates the entry of intermediaries and the “bullion standard of authenticity” is of course set by them.  Scroll-painting is detached from narrative song and framed to fit a drawing room wall. The patua survives by applying his strong lines and colours to craft items like t-shirts, bags and lanterns for smaller buyers; the “authentic” patachitra awaits the big buyer, only having lost its living tongue in the process. A patua village gets transformed into a shilpagram, where such buyers can come and see an artist actually make a scroll for sale according to order. This packaging of the artist together with their artefact isolates them from the community, which is the soil from which their art form emerges and survives. 

The global market imposes the same reified standards of authenticity on whatever performative folk forms it picks up until the demand for that particular form gets exhausted. By that time, the artists become completely isolated from their world. The curtailment of performance time, the imposition of set patterns, proliferation of lighting and musical accompaniments, replacing the challenges of down-to-earth improvised verbal exchange by cloying religiosity for easy appeal, are some of the signs of the pressures that appear in marketed performances of Baul and Fakiri songs, pala-kirtans, and “tribal dances,” which are favoured goods. The proliferation of such curated  performances leads to their being duplicated in rural areas and pushes out folk forms that are less amenable to such modification. The “bullion standard” influences people’s demands too, with alternatives forced into the background. 

One way of looking at it is to see the introduction of global players into the agrarian sector, reducing peasants’ hold on land and means of production and causing massive migration and eviction, as an inevitable process of development. The State’s intervention into folk culture then can only be to speed up the process and transform it for a new set of consumers, as they are doing now. 

But if, as a secular, democratic republic, it is at all concerned about the forcible deprivation of the rural poor of their intimate cultural possessions, it would at least hark back to the Haksar Report and try to nurture the soil in which these grow instead of culling them away for global customers. That would necessitate some support for these folk forms on the ground, but also involve encouraging people’s initiatives to protect, nurture, and enjoy them on their own. This is the least the State can do for the true development of the cultural possessions of the labouring people.

Malini Bhattacharya is the former director of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, where she also taught as an English professor. She has also served as a Lok Sabha MP and was the former vice-president of the Paschimbanga Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre, a former member of the National Women’s Commission, and the former chairperson of the West Bengal Women’s Commission. She has also authored numerous books and articles on women, culture, and folk culture.