Pothikkettu is a monthly editorial that ‘wraps up’ the issue for our readers.
Hello Readers,
This issue carries Rajasree’s article on folk dances in Kerala’s Arts Festivals, along with a commentary on The Svadeshabhimani’s editorial on religious rivalry spread by print media in the early 1900s.
Through ethnographic and archival research, Rajasree takes us to the world of the government-sponsored annual cultural arts competition of Kerala–the kalolsavam. School and college life in Kerala has come to revolve around these festivals which are a huge part of the government’s investment in arts and culture. The rush and competition around the festival constitute a significant part of the cultural imagination of education in the state. Focusing on nadodi nrutham (folk dance), which has been part of the competition since its inception in 1957, Rajasree throws light on forms, narratives, and performances that have come to constitute this cultural category which draws in huge crowds. However, as Rajasree argues, savarna aesthetic and performative benchmarks that rule the festival determine and condition the category. Rather than folk dances, what gets represented on the stage are savarna interpretations and ideas of folk culture and oppressed caste groups. Rajasree’s brilliant unveiling of the caste politics that shape the common sense of an event which has a huge impact on the Malayali sub-culture encourages us to think about the caste-gender order that is subsumed under the culture-label even today. Just last month, Ala published Shilpa’s detailed commentary on the caste and gender concerns surrounding theatrical performances in twentieth-century Kerala. Reading the two together allows us to think about the caste-gender continuities that distort performative arts.
Ala is continuing its series of commentaries on the recently digitised archives of the early twentieth-century newspaper, The Svadeshabhimani. In the last issue, we published a commentary (mentioned above) on two editorials that charted the emergence and expansion of theatre in Travancore, while looking at the issues of caste and gender that remain hidden. This month, we look at the editorial titled, “മതസ്പർദ്ധ” (Religious Rivalry), published following the legalisation of the Press Act, 1910. But rather than an analysis of the impact or significance of the Act, the editorial is a criticism of a contemporary newspaper’s article that spread seeds of religious rivalry and Islamaphobia while commenting on the Act. The editorial calls out unethical journalistic practices and the spread of propaganda through mass media, offering us a historical lens to assess and understand our contemporary world of post-truth and parochialism.
These commentaries may help us understand how a newspaper presented the happenings of a dynamic century that changed and challenged some of the existing orders while cementing others. Additionally, they are also intended to offer us tools to make sense of our contemporary.
