Abstract
This brilliant book is packed with insights, is elegantly written and meticulously researched. Published in 2010 it was researched and written before the Communist Party- Marxist (CPM)– led Left Front government (hereafter LFG) in West Bengal lost power (to the Trinamool Congress) after three decades of unbroken rule. Da Costa’s account suggests that its unassailable power corrupted the LFG.
Da Costa argues that capitalism is, among other things, a cultural formation (p. 18). And thus it is cultural work that can provide ‘a lens into the relationship between processes of meaning-making and the continuing formation of multiple histories of power. Development Dramas documents the ongoing dispossession of meanings and reimagines development and political action by taking the labour of meaning- making seriously and assuming that there are multiple histories of power’ (p. 19). Da Costa tells us that her work ‘is founded in a method of historical and cultural sociology that asks how development and political action are constituted in places and at times when we are not looking’ (p. 19). By this she means those processes, places and times that we, as researchers, ignore, because they do not fit our normative assumptions about what constitutes ‘development’ or ‘political action’. This is where Da Costa’s stimulating book makes a huge contribution because, through its focus on rural political theatre, it convincingly shows how political solidarity and political action grow out of social interactions both on-stage and off-stage. In her methodology she is, of course, drawing on the profound insight expressed in the feminist aphorism ‘the personal is the political’.
Her book is about how one organization, the political theatre group called Jana Sanskriti (People’s Culture), ‘has contributed to revealing the formation of CPM’s hegemonic political society and its ongoing normalization of the market episteme that underlies prevailing notions of development in West Bengal’ (p. 5). Taking culture seriously, Jana Sanskriti (hereafter JS) seeks to provide ‘representational equality’ to the rural poor of West Bengal. Their rural political theatre has been practised since 1985, their ‘on-stage political theatre and off-stage political action feed[ing] each other to reveal the processes through which electoral success [of the LFG] and agrarian reforms benefitting the dispossessed have ironically enabled structural and subjective closure on alternate visions, dispossessing multiple and contextual meanings of rural futures, collectivity and social transformation’ (p. 5). Da Costa travelled through the villages with JS theatre teams in two districts of West Bengal – South and North 24 Parganas – during ‘multiple periods of fieldwork from 1999 to 2008’ (p. 28).
The first JS play that Da Costa discusses is called ‘Development’: focused on the recent explosive confrontation between farmers and the LFG at Singur, it portrays Tata (the leading Indian corporate) as a puppeteer who controls both the Chief Minister and the Industry Minister (p. 6). This play declares that the LFG has been ‘thoroughly compromised’ due to its embrace of a ‘neoliberal transition to aggressive capitalism’ despite being a popularly elected Communist government (p. 6). While the dispossession of land (as at Singur) is one concern of JS activists, their abiding concern in all their work is the ‘dispossession of meaning’ through which the ‘representational inequality’ between the rich and the poor works in West Bengal. By this Da Costa means the ways in which LFG propaganda supports neoliberal industrialists to argue that the sole meaning of ‘development’ is the future they propose, ruling out other ‘meanings and practices of life and livelihood’ as politically unthinkable and economically unviable.
This is where JS has found its role, asking, with some rural Bengalis ‘whether addressing material inequality has to come with displacement, deskilling and devaluing extant skills, livelihoods and life-worlds’ (p. 9). JS insists that alternatives are always available. Here Da Costa raises an important question, challenging the usual ‘development’ wisdom: Why should JS theatre activists who battle against ‘the constant normalization of a world of shrinking possibilities and social relations’ be regarded as idealists, ‘while those who acquiesce in neoliberal capitalism’s normalizations are considered realists? ’ (p. 9). JS refuses normative closures and insists on rethinking and challenging the cultural persuasion of capital and the ‘masquerade’ of the state (p. 10). It thus reimagines development and rural political action by sceptically interrogating ‘the ideological and hierarchical divides between “real” choices and “idealistic” visions of development’ (p. 10). Da Costa therefore views current neoliberal development as a ‘dispossession of meanings’ (p. 31).
As I have noted, it is in her ‘reimagining [of] political action’ (p. 31) that Da Costa makes a most significant contribution. She argues that it is mistaken to exclude cultural practices and cultural work, such as political theatre, from conceptualizations of ‘political action’. While this is a crucial insight into the profound political significance of many apparently non-political cultural practices – such as religious ritual – here Da Costa’s focus is on how rural people – including very poor ones – become actors and script-writers on-stage as well as ‘nodes’ that generate political activism off-stage (p. 32). Using Augusto Boal’s methods, JS seeks to transform passive spectators into active ‘spect-actors’ who are encouraged to intervene in the play, act out roles and change the play’s script (pp. 60–63). By these means JS seeks to ‘alert audiences to multiple possibilities and outcomes [and to]…dramatize the fact that there is no straightforward and [pre-]determined path to liberation’ (p. 92).
Da Costa argues that ‘political theatre must be recognized as the productive labour of meaning-making, refusing epistemic closure…Rather than defining productive labour solely as generative of exchange value…labour can also be considered productive because it constitutes and fortifies histories of power, practices of living and social formations that are devalued or dispossessed of significance and legitimacy within capitalist history’ (pp. 70–71). Here Da Costa reminds us of the power of ideology, for ‘the mechanisms, processes and judgements that separate [the] economic from [the] non-economic precede the separations themselves’ (p. 71). Through this methodology she seeks to show how viewing political theatre ‘in normal time, as a daily means of political action in a democracy…lifts the veil off state power’ (p. 71). This is because JS’ ‘theatrical work on-stage and political work off-stage dramatizes the ways in which some rural Bengalis have refused [the] LFG, and especially the CPM monopoly over political representation…’ (p. 76).
The play ‘Where We Stand’ (written in 1993) deals with murky trade union politics. An honest union member is murdered on the orders of a trade union leader who enjoys LFG protection (pp. 100–07). ‘Sarama’ (written in 1992) shows how ‘political society (including…Party personnel) collaborate to cover up and condone’ the rape, by Party thugs, of a brave woman who mobilizes her neighbourhood against Party thug rule (pp. 119–31). Deeply shocking, the play reveals how the local Party leader protects the rapists because he might need ‘mercenaries willing to use force on behalf of the Party’ (p. 126). JS theatre activists have not only presented a play called ‘The Bane of Drink’ but have also been very active ‘off-stage’ in resisting liquor producers (who enjoy government support). Da Costa lays bare the ‘patriarchal neglect’ (p. 224) by which the state disregards the trauma suffered on a massive scale by the impoverished wives and families of male alcoholics. This is an important analysis of a crucial social problem that is usually ignored – or at least minimized – by researchers. Da Costa, on the contrary, points out that women’s distress does ‘not count because they are messy for the patriarchal state that conceives of materiality through a male optic’ (p. 228). Da Costa adds, ‘The labour of reimagining political action in rural Bengal dramatizes the value of seeing domestic violence and liquor consumers’ wives’ livelihoods as a problem of material and representational inequality’ (p. 267).
In other words, inequality is ideological, it is not merely economic (p.268) and therefore the realm of ideology and representation is central to any struggle for social justice and liberation. Da Costa observes that her aim has been to show what it means to build a struggle around ‘means of representation’ rather than ‘means of production’ (p. 269). This book presents an eloquent and persuasive defence of this view, arguing that ‘[s]mall spaces of hope and reimagined political action’ such as JS’ political theatre, ‘can also be significant expressions and struggles against dominant epistemes’ (p. 269). In the current global context of a new scepticism towards capitalism, this book certainly deserves to be read for its thoughtful analyses and humane wisdom.