‘Nobody Is Speaking About The Appropriation Of Dalit Material In The Arts’

Shilpa Mudbi is an artist from the Dalit community who has grown up watching the folk forms of northern Karnataka. Among these is Yellammanaata, an epic retold across ages, using music and theatre. These arts are a part of Shilpa’s memories of the songs co-worked generationally by her grandmother and the many neighbouring lower-class communities. 

The retelling of the epic of Yellamma, a revered goddess of the region, is a part of the collective memory of caste-marginalised communities. In October, Shilpa found that these songs, unique to her community, were used in a Marathi play without due credit, sung incorrectly, and miscredited to a theatre collective Shilpa was formerly associated with. She alleges that there have been at least four instances in recent years when stories of and from the community were appropriated for big-stage productions without credit or context. “The appropriation, misuse, and damage outnumber genuine love or appreciation for the folk music I came to perform and popularise,” she wrote in a post.

The Yellamma legend ritualises the tale of Renuka (the mother of Hindu God Parashurama) and her transformation into Yellamma. Its plot varies across castes and sub-castes, but the story is performed in an interactive setting during overnight plays. Caste-marginalised Hindu communities across north Karnataka seasonally put up these Yellammanaatas around festivals like Dasara. It is largely performed by jogathis (trans women) and devadasis, who consider themselves the “disciples” of the goddess.

Shilpa, along with partner Adithya Kothakota, in 2015 started the collective Urban Folk Project (UFP) to revisit the songs and stories surrounding Yellamma’s story. Shilpa and Adithya visited her native place in Karnataka’s Bidar district and crossed cultural borders to discover her Dalit Bahujan ancestry. They met, lived with, and continue to work with several trans women families in Bellari who have shared their love, culture, and knowledge with them.

In a series of conversations with BehanBox, Shilpa talks about the cultural cost of appropriating knowledge. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Excerpts below: 

In your TED talk, you asked who owns folk music in the age of the market. How did you arrive at this inquiry?

I was working with a Franco-Tamil director who wanted to put Renuka’s story in his play about the Sri Lankan civil war. This version felt a little disjointed. I had memories of seeing the play growing up. We have made several trips back to my village to rewatch the play since. In 2016-17 was the first time I was viewing it as an actor. It opened a Pandora’s box of questions: Why is Renuka Yellamma of Karnataka being connected to a play about the civil war in the 1980s? Why was I playing a part in this vision? How do I connect to Yellamma or Tamil history and identity? 

It didn’t make sense for me to work with my cultural context in the play this way, and I never went back [to the production] after I started looking for Yellamma. There was a goal for me to understand my own caste identity, ancestry, and how I’m connected to all of it [Shilpa traces some Devadasi elements in her ancestry]. I started researching artists who were telling the Yellamma story and found two families, one in the Ballari district of Karnataka. They taught us many of the songs we sing today and shared their ideas and thoughts about the music. 

When we started looking at folk forms in Karnataka initially, we couldn’t tell what makes a certain form sacrosanct from the other – it was all so fluid. There is a clearer divide between the arts performed in cities: It is either music or theatre, folk or classical. But you can’t make clear divisions with folk, and we have struggled to figure out what it is that makes this distinction so water tight. 

This is an extremely murky space to navigate with everything we know now. There is nobody who’s speaking about appropriation of Dalit material in theater or cinema that has been happening for decades. They’re not even using the word ‘Dalit’ – they’re using ‘folk’. But what is folk? 

There is hardly any resolution and there has to be a space for dialogue. But what we’ve realised is people cannot, with their access, continue to earn without realising that communities who have generated this art over generations do not benefit equally. And more importantly, they cannot continue to add to the decontextualising and erasure of ‘histories of resistance’. 

“We have to ask how we deal with these complexities, and how it’s not just about giving back, but asking how much loss of context has already happened.”

In the Marathi play [‘Tujhi Aukat Kai’], you pointed out your songs were used and actors who played jogathis didn’t come from that sub-caste. Why did this feel like Dalit art appropriation? 

If you look at Yellammanaata, it is a myth, a theatre practice, a ritual – it is all of these things, and it’s derived from the communities’ memories. There are different Yellamma stories because every community’s experiences and expressions are different. In our version, we’ve also used my grandmother’s songs because these were in the sounds I grew up with.

Ajji as a Madiga woman worked with other Madiga women (leather treating community), along with the Holeya, the Muslim, and the Lambani women (pastoral communities) – this was her clique. Some of the songs she taught me were those she sang during work, while she and her ancestors co-worked this music generationally with communities who lived in the periphery of the village. 

There is caste in every aspect: where you live, how you work, how you function, how much you can earn, what you can eat. The culture that comes from a certain community is intrinsic to how their lived experience and pain and histories have been recorded. That is why it’s way more problematic when an upper caste, especially a Brahmin person or someone with a feudal ancestry, engages in appropriation. 

[After the play, Shilpa says she contacted the director and explained the errors.]

I explained that if you are an upper caste artist who wants to voice a lower caste or community’s story, you should go and meet the community at least. If you don’t have courage to live with them, eat with them, learn more than some songs – truly try and understand the community, their values and struggles. 

What was more problematic is that these songs were not learnt from me. On asking why she hadn’t contacted me directly and merely chose to give an official credit, she said, “Legally, I haven’t done anything wrong.” 

My grandmother’s songs have been appropriated before. A noted artist contacted me, she was interested in doing something with Renuka’s story. I made sure the points aligned, did the homework, and when the show started, the director didn’t call me. There were big names  involved, including a completely Savarna team. Renuka’s story was a part of the play. They used the instruments, sang in their beautiful classically trained voices – but they never once mentioned the community or the context of where it comes from. 

[The Marathi play credits the Puducherry-based Indianostrum Theatre as a collaborator and names another person as an authority on the music. BehanBox reached out to Indianostrum for a comment but hadn’t heard back before the publication of this story.]

What makes UFP’s interpretation of Yellammanaata different from others?

There are certain rules when you do a folk play. Usually not much time is spent in providing context because everyone knows the story, and they listen to the same story again and again because it’s not just theatre for them, it’s kind of a ritual.

Usually a Jogamma, Jogappa, or a Jogathi – people associated with the Renuka tradition – can play Renuka’s role because they live her life. The way they dress is her life truncated into one year; it is performance on a very integral level. They’re also people who were not known to settle down. Even now, many trans women travel with their small matriarchal families from festival to festival and fair to fair, and settle down where business is good and they get to prostitute and/or busk… They really are a community that’s living with survival on their mind. 

The other thing is the fourth wall is constantly broken by the actor. In the play when Parashurama is born, four women from the audience get up, bathe the child and go back into the audience. They will sing the lullabies they know, and the play continues. You don’t know where the play ends, or where life ends and begins. 

Our production is nothing like the folk form itself. It has more to do with explaining why a folk performance doesn’t belong on a proscenium stage. The idea is to say this is not a folk performance, we are not folk artists, and the folk act belongs to the community; everything else is an appropriation.  

“We have drawn from people, but they will never earn as much as us, culturally or financially.”

This is why we talk about appropriation in our work. We have drawn from people, but they will never earn as much as us, culturally or financially. For us to break the story down without losing context, without exoticising and romanticising it, is our challenge. 

Your identity and that of Adithya is of people who come from a space of some privilege. Then how do you rationalise your presence in the folk art space?

I’m not from the devadasi or jogathi community, but I’m a Dalit person. What makes me feel like I’m still an outsider is my education, my convent-isation, my own Brahminisation and institutionalisation. Sometimes I wonder if I should be the one to make an inquiry…but people in my community and artists I work with have encouraged me because our voices are not heard and are not visible. Why I also feel justified to tell the Yellamma story is because within my family, there have been devadasi women who were initiated into the practice against their wills. Hence, my attempt is to reclaim the art form as a tool of resistance. 

I grew up in an upper middle class family; my father is more of an Ambedkarite than he’s a Dalit person. Which is to say he’s more politically open about speaking about politics rather than his own family history, which are often histories of shame and humiliation. So to leave home and find those stories propelled a sense of collective responsibility rather than a personal drive.

The trans women of Yellamma, for instance, opened up a different world for us…we witnessed how they live and how they belong in society at large. Manjamma jogathi’s house was an old age home, an animal shelter, also a daycare centre: all the labour women would drop their kids before going to work. If the hospital is too far, it’s also a birthing suite. This is how art exists in the fractures of life – it’s not just in all that makeup that they wear and perform on stage, but how their lives embody the oppression faced in the margins.

And it was only after Adithya and I met the jogathis and devadasi and understood the communities they came from…did we understand what makes these forms ‘folk’. Unless I continue to connect to my own Dalit history and culture, I don’t know if I’m justified to perform this story. 

Then the question is – who gets to tell marginalised stories?

This question of ownership has come to me after some very powerful interactions. One time the theatre group Kalakshetra Manipur came to Puducherry for a workshop, and I went with my chowdki to learn from them. The head of the collective looked at me and said: Manipur Kalakshetra has Manipur actors and you are not Manipuri. 

I was hurt. But I realised why it makes sense. There is politics, ancestry, upbringing in our body; the class and caste of the person you are, you carry that on stage. Over time we have realised every voice singing these songs doesn’t make it folk. It is this trans woman’s voice singing this song that makes it a jogathi song. 

As theatre actors, we play different characters and are cherished for this versatility. But that’s not how it works in the folk arts. Art has always existed in life around us…It’s only over the last 100 or 200 years that we have commodified art in a way that it exists inside your phone, at your fingertips. If I told my ajji that she is a folk artist, she would have laughed. She sang while she washed our bums and made rotis. She sang for herself and others around her to withstand fatigue, increase production, and record their memories of labour. 

With urbanisation, migration, and disjointed histories, who do these songs and who does folk art really belong to?

The whole idea of folk art itself is a bit of a conundrum. How do you define collective ownership, who gets to define it, and how much ownership does one have? If Radha bai [a folk artist] defines it differently, and Manjamma defines it differently, and I’m learning from both and creating my own work, what are the questions I should ask? This question is harder with folk songs because they come from lower-class communities. Equity is not something that you can easily put into place here, when folk art is so much about collective ownership. 

I’m not a traditionalist. I’m not saying these forms have to stay this way and only certain people should sing it. This exchange of knowledge is not caste based: it should not be that rigid, that only a Madiga person can be allowed to  perform a Madiga art form. That has not been the case – different communities have told Renuka’s story, and that is the biggest example of how sharing has happened. But when the jogathis busk, they get five rupees. When we do a show, we get way more. How do we justify that? And how do we create a framework where it is a fair exchange, or how do we at least begin to arrive at that exchange? 

It’s such a new place to navigate because we’re the first or second generation of Dalit Bahujan people who are coming into the mainstream and doing something contemporary. It’s going to be a while till we actually feel at home without questioning people as to what has been done with our cultural properties before this. But I want it to be a little more constructive. I want to find other Dalit Bahujan artists who are feeling the same way, and find ways to hold space for this dialogue. 

So there is no way to tell or engage with these stories without addressing the caste and community ownership aspect of it?

Absolutely not. I’m asking people to address the privilege which allows them to draw from folk forms that they don’t have in their ancestry or within their community. That’s why I am saying that I am a Madiga person, we used to make these instruments [like chowdki] in our own family, but I am not a devadasi, I have not been officially initiated into this culture. 

Chowdki has become the instrument for me. It is an extension of the artist I want to be in many ways. It irks me when I see popular Savarna artists use it, like they are holding a prop; they get the cultural capital of holding an untouchable instrument but they have not dealt with the history of shame around holding it. But when you use the same instrument to talk about your own community, about your own caste, it then becomes a tool for addressing that oppression. 

What would happen if every Dalit person were to come out and say I am a Dalit practitioner who performs art nurtured by my community? That’s how I think I need to claim and reclaim space.

One of the four things that I also suggested in the TED talk is co-working. If you’re telling a Dalit story and using songs, is it possible to employ people from these communities and bring their thoughts into the writing? We also need policy level changes, we need protection for folk music, as a preventive kind of act.

Another thing is: if you are going to draw from any folk…if aesthetically or thematically these songs match your work, take it. Take it from me, the jogathi, or the community…as long as you give them remuneration and credit, and add due context. Build a relationship. The next time you do a puja or organise a performance, call jogathis and find ways to integrate them back into our lives. Because we have to realise that they have certain needs. 

It really sounds like looking after your family. 

They are, and it’s amazing. We have known these families for so long; there is a loving entitlement which comes with these relationships. We send a link to them whenever we put out a new performance; Ramakka is the first one to comment. Honestly, the idea is to find someone who will fall in love with you as much as you fall in love with them. And that happened for us with Ramakka. Her validation is most important for me. And that validation is hopefully not temporary – it’s not as if she taught us one song and I can now sing it without her… I will still need Ramakka in my life to attest what I do with that material. I am only a medium, who is aware that the world cannot and will not give her as many shows and pay her as much as me. 

The maintenance is heavily needed. That is the price you should pay if you are benefiting from the cultural properties of a community. Be with the people you are drawing from, then you will know why it’s important to voice their voices. And the longer you maintain this commitment, your life will change. I know this.