Political Patronage and Ritual Competitions at Dussehra Festival in Northern India

In this chapter, I discuss a case which illustrates how the passage from religious festival to cultural programme is the result of a historically complex process involving different actors and mediations at different levels of society. I focus my observations on a royal cult in the Indian Himalayas -- the Kullu Dussehra -- established in the 17th century by a local king. At the beginning of the 1970s, it was nationalised and promoted as a national, then even international, 'folk dance festival'. Like many other examples of heritage production, the case I present here is neither an anonymous nor a spontaneous process. It has been consciously selected and set up by political leaders and local notables, not without causing some tension or even confrontation between other members of local society whose disagreement had different motivations and took up multiple forms. I will retrace the history of this controversial process not only by locating the main actors and the ritual and political stakes which are behind it, but by contextualising this local event within the wider national cultural framework to which it is strictly related. My concern here is on local debates about heritage and tradition, and how they took form in a specific regional context. In order to do so, I draw upon a selection of newspaper cuttings, and on narratives of people who took part in the cultural promotion of the Dussehra festival.