Tara Brahme is an MA Student at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg
It was the day before the annual festival of Holi, and children across the neighbourhoods of the Kathmandu Valley were armed from their terraces with water balloons, in anticipation. We had just attended the Jhijhiya dancers’ performance at the Echoes In The Valley festival and were making our way down the narrow lanes of Kathmandu to speak with them in more detail about their performance and the dance tradition that they practice while trying to dodge every noticeable water balloon-armed terrace. At the discussion venue, we sat in a large circle explaining and trying to understand the worlds and traditions of performance that we all came from and teasing out the similarities in South Asian performance traditions. What stared as a discussion, evolved organically into a sharing where we ended by singing songs to each other from the many different places we came from.
A street in Patan. Image courtesy of Tara Brahme.
I frame these final reflections on the question “what keeps heritage alive?” and the 2024 Spring School around this performance and the interactions with the artists and hope that this choice becomes clearer through the questions that I raise.
When I was thinking about the question, and project while applying to the spring school, the first question that struck me was even more basic than this one, and it was: “can heritage be alive?” And, “what does it mean to phrase something in this manner?”
More often than not, the tendency is to understand heritage as something static and frozen in time rather than dynamic. We see this in how “heritage” is explained as well. When we look at words like “legacy” and “inheritance” as words related to heritage, in whatever form they may take there is an underlying sense of something being passed down in its “authentic” form and the emphasis is often on preserving continuities with the past as an unbroken thread. Then when I think of heritage as living, I find that we must decentre the emphasis on the past and think about heritage as something dynamic and one that is constantly evolving. This presents a contradiction.
The second problem or challenge with a category like heritage and one that deeply concerns me, especially given the current political moment that a neighbouring country like India is in, is related to power, exclusions and who can make claims to heritage within a national or regional community. And consequently, who gets left out of the narrative when certain sites, objects, monuments, festivals and similar aspects of cultural and public life are assigned the role of representing the heritage of national and/or regional communities.
It is in relation to these two aspects – one of contradictions and the other related to power and representation – that I would like to bring in Jhijhiya as an example. Through the interactions we had with the artists two things stood out as broadly relating to my questions, concerns and thoughts.
Learning from the Jhijhiya dancers. Photo courtesy of Monica Mottin.
The first and perhaps the most obvious challenge to heritage as static and singular practice were the variations that emerged during our discussion with the artists, the translator and Dr Mottin when each of them had a slightly different answer to some of the questions we asked them based on their own practice in different locations and Dr Mottin’s research interviews with other Jhijhiya groups as well.
The second emerged when the dance form was placed in the social context of a caste society. And I think it is here that the potential of this form to illustrate what we have been contending with in this workshop lies. From my understanding of the discussion, what came up was that in some instances (not with this group) there is a difference between which caste groups perform in which settings. According to the translator, often it is the oppressed caste communities who perform in the ritual context while in popular context people from diverse caste background may be part of the performance. Thus, the dance form in these two spaces contrasts caste-based practice/ labour in the ritual context versus an access to wider publics which allows groups to perform in the popular context outside the ritual sphere.
What is interesting about this then is that Jhijhiya dance then challenges this vis-à-vis who can and does perform in which setting. The fact that oppressed caste women dance it in the ritual context and women from other castes dance it in the popular context complicates questions of who the dance “belongs” to especially if we were to look at the ritual context as a more “legitimate” sphere endowed with greater value, power and meaning than the popular context. Conversely, one could also argue that it is the performance in the popular cultural presentation context that keeps the form alive by introducing it to audiences who may not be able to access the ritual performance. And then in this instance the work is being done by those who have access to perform in these contexts who then can also make claims to the form. Therefore, I’m inclined to argue that it is perhaps tensions and contestations like these that keeps heritage alive because aspects of it are always being challenged and changed as different people and communities encounter it over generations.
It is also important at this point to go back to the spontaneous sharing session we had at the end of the discussion with the Jhijhiya dancers because of how central the participatory aspect is to keeping heritage alive. In conclusion then, this set of reflections has tried to show how central participation in the form of sharing is to keeping heritage alive and contesting the static quality that the label of “authenticity” ascribes to it and highlighting the inevitable dynamism of cultural heritage as performance.
