Folk dance/vulgar dance: erotic lavani and the hereditary performance labour

Abstract

ABSTRACT Performed as hereditary labour by women artists of lower castes largely for male entertainment, the erotic dance of lavani seems to occupy two different bifurcated worlds. There is a licit world of festivals, television dance shows, and urban revivalist cultural shows where lavani is performed in its vernacularized codified form, and valorized as the folk art of Maharashtra. The nostalgia of the urban cosmopolitan middle class for the indigenous and rural, and the concern of the regional state and elites for cultural identity undergirds this folk world. The other world is of a range of subaltern cultural spaces from local performance houses (kala kendra), to stage shows and orchestras, where the erotic dance of lavani is performed for livelihood, and is castigated as vulgar, ‘just sex, no art’. While the cultural labour of this ‘vulgar’ lavani is performed only by the hereditary women artists, they have only a nominal presence in the folk world of lavani. This paper seeks to unpack the politics of folklorization that rests upon the exclusion of vulgarized but an organically thriving performance of lavani. It further interrogates how the hereditary cultural labour is central to this process of folklorization.