Performing Bodies, Labouring Bodies?: An Understanding of Art and Work through the Lives of the Nachnis of Purulia, India

This paper proposes to understand how artists engage in cultural labour (Prakash, 2019) and how marginalised artists like the Nachnis of eastern India are stigmatised for their art which is often considered to be vulgar and not falling into the purview of ‘work’ because it is considered to negatively impact the moral and social fabric of traditional Indian culture and heritage. The Nachnis are ‘folk’ dancers who draw their lineage from the erstwhile court dancers that would perform in the courts of kings and princes in Bengal. In the present scenario, their profession or ‘work’ comprises performing in various villages of West Bengal at night with predominantly men in the audience. Due to the nature of their performance and their gender-caste positionality, the dancers' bodies are not considered fit to be part of the category of labouring bodies. However, I argue through this paper that performing bodies are labouring bodies. They put in fixed hours of work, sweat, exhaust themselves, provide service, and receive payment at the end of the work. The dancers put on a smile and dance for hours at end draped in bright, sequined sarees. They attract the attention of men whose gaze, a mixture of desire, disgust and fear, is fixed upon the dancer’s moving body. This project is a curious questioning of what entails work and why the Nachni’s moving body is not accepted as a working body. Thereafter, once it is rejected the status of a working body, what happens to the remnants of a ‘non-working’ artistic female body that is constantly living at the intersection of gender and caste? The larger question that this project aims to understand is the relation between art and work when it comes to vulnerable artistic agents living at the peripheries of society.