Acculturation, cultural resistance, or cultural rigging: A study of folk performances in popular films

Abstract

ABSTRACT While, popular culture like films has more generalized mass appeal and flexibility of evolution with spatiotemporal changing dimensions of reality; folk cultures are mainly indigenous, relatively inflexible and slowly resistant to change. Popular films like Agantuk (1991) by Satyajit Ray, Barfi! (2012) by Anurag Basu and Jagga Jasoos (2017) by Anurag Basu make citations of three different tribal folk performances of Eastern India namely ‘Santhali’ of Jharkhand and West Bengal, ‘Purulia Chhau’ of West Bengal and ‘Bihu’ of Assam respectively. The very enactment of folk performances in the films attain the forms of ‘cultural guerrillas’ when the heteroglossia of indigenous marginal and minor folk culture make its existence in the majoritarian popular cultures like films and a cultural negotiation happens between two diagonally opposite cultures. ‘Cultural Rigging’ is a term coined by the Bengali Dalit poet Manohar Mouli Biswas to mention the tendency of a culture being performed by another culture when it becomes ‘highly enjoyable’ (38). The article aims to analyze the very tryst of the popular and folk culture through three intertwining concepts: acculturation, cultural resistance and cultural rigging with a select study of the films and tribal folk performances.