Abstract
Jana Natya Mandali (People’s Theatre Troupe; henceforth, JNM) was a popular revolutionary cultural organization linked to the banned Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War, now the Communist Party of India (Maoist), also known as the Maoists or the Naxalites. After the demise of the people’s theatre movement in India led by the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) by the 1960s, JNM was one of the few political theatre organizations in India which had a widespread reach and influence across diverse social sections. The organization flourishes under the dynamic leadership of Gummadi Vittal Rao, popularly known as Gaddar. What D. Venkat Rao terms the “radical heterogeneity” of Gaddar and JNM’s audience included landless laborers, farmers, students, adivasis and Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), making it popular across the classes and the various sections of the communities.
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- 1.
The CPI (Maoist) is officially recognized as an outlawed political organization in India. The political organization came into existence after the merger of two Maoist political organizations, the People’s War (PW) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in 2004. Before the merger, JNM was associated with the People’s War.
- 2.
The movement draws its name from Naxalbari village in the Indian state of West Bengal where the movement started as an uprising against feudal landlords in May 1967.
- 3.
Gaddar is a popular balladeer and one of the founders of JNM who emerged as a legendary artist in the contemporary history of cultural movements in India. Now in his seventies, he survives with two bullets in his body.
- 4.
Adivasis is the collective name used for the many indigenous communities of central India.
- 5.
Venkat D. Rao, “Gaddar and the Politics and Pain of Singing,” Performers and Their Arts: Folk, Popular and Classical Genres in a Changing India, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2007, 201.
- 6.
Telangana is now officially separated from Andhra Pradesh; the movement was stronger in the Telangana region.
- 7.
Andre Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” TDR, Vol. 57, no. 4 (2013), 13–27.
- 8.
Ibid., 23.
- 9.
Dwight Conquergood and E. Patrick Johnson, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013, 267.
- 10.
Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, Gurgaon: Three Essays, 2012.
- 11.
Brahmanism is the principal religious practice of the Brahmins, and consists of aspects of Hinduism as practiced by the Brahmin caste of India. Brahmanism comes from the word Brahmin, which is an Anglicization of Sanskrit (or vernacular variants thereof). It was introduced in 1816 as Brahmenism by George S. Faber (OED). Current spelling variants are Brahminism as well as Brahmanism (Eds. note).
- 12.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, eds. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- 13.
G. Aloysius, The Brahminical Inscribed in Body-Politic: A Historico-Sociological Investigation of Effective & Enduring Power in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2010, 20.
- 14.
V. Rodrigues, “Untouchability, Filth and the Public Domain,” ed. Gopal Guru, Humiliation: Claims and Context, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, 108–123.
- 15.
Ambedkarite philosophy takes its inspiration from the works and writings of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956). Ambedkar saw the caste system not as an effect of Orientalism, but of Brahmanism, which he made it his life’s mission to dismantle. While most Indian philosophers have been upper-caste and have taken their caste standing for granted, this was not the case with Ambedkar (Eds. note).
- 16.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, eds. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 144.
- 17.
Gopal Guru, “The Idea of India: ‘Derivative, Desi and Beyond,’” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 46, no. 37, 2011, 37–42.
- 18.
Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” 9.
- 19.
Erin B. Mee, Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007, 312.
- 20.
Peddy Ramarao, Theatre of the Marginalized: Politics of Representation, PhD Dissertation, University of Hyderabad, 2003.
- 21.
K.P. Sunil, “Songs of Revolution,” The Illustrated Weekly of India (Mar. 25, 1990).
- 22.
Dhanadhanadhan refers to the sound of the tambourine. This local instrument is commonly used by the Dalit caste Madiga in the Andhra Pradesh region.
- 23.
I would like to thank Antara Dev Sen, the editor of the Little Magazine for granting to use the songs for this publication. The songs ‘aagadu aagadu aagadu’ and ‘Vandanalu vandalammon’ were translated from Telugu into English by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao and Antara Dev Sen. The traslation appeared in The Little Magazine, Vol. 8, issue 3&4. www.little.mag.com/security/gaddar.html.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Gaddar quoted in Rao.
- 26.
Rao, Epics and Ideology, 134.
- 27.
Rahul Pandita, Hello Bastar, New Delhi: Westland, 2011, 82.
- 28.
Anant Giri, “Interview with Gaddar,” New Quest (July–Dec., 2008).
- 29.
V. Ramakrishna, “Literary and Theatre Movements in Colonial Andhra: Struggle for Left Ideological Legitimacy,” eds. Simon Charsley and Laxmi N. Kadekar, Performers and Their Arts: Folk, Popular and Classical Genres in a Changing India, New Delhi: Routledge, 2008, 188.
- 30.
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 10.
- 31.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quantin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith, New York: International, 1971, 418.
- 32.
Kidd quoted in Srampical, 1994, 42.
- 33.
JNM’s aagadu.
- 34.
The Bhakti movement refers to the devotional movement in medieval India which challenged the hierarchies of institutionalized religions such as Brahmanism and Buddhism.
- 35.
John W. Maerhofer, Philosophies of Confrontation: Aesthetics and Political Vanguardism 1917–56, PhD Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2007, 206.
- 36.
Guru, “The Idea of India: ‘Derivative, Desi and Beyond,’” 42.
- 37.
Kancha Ilaiah, “The Bard whose Song is His Weapon,” Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism, Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2004, 45–46.
- 38.
The allegations labelled against Sai baba include sexual abuse, money laundering, fraud and black money.
- 39.
JNM “Chor Chittar”.
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Prakash, B. (2018). “Dangerous” Choreopolitics of Labouring Bodies: Biopolitics and Choreopolitics in Conflict in the Act of Jana Natya Mandali in India. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_10
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