‘Lathi’ or stick as a vibrant discourse: Re-configuring indigeneity through ‘lathi-khela’ or stick-play in nineteenth century colonial Bengal.

Abstract

My paper would like to problematize the ‘choreopolitics’ (Lepecki, 2013) of lathi-khela in colonial Bengal, through a range of textual sources(newspapers, pamphlets, journals, fiction), visual materials(printed ephemera, posters, sketches and notations) and ethnographic surveys and memory-mapping of current practitioners in West Bengal. I seek to understand this practice as an avowal and (dis)avowal of coordinates of the body bound in the intra-cultural aesthetics and politics of culture along intersections of gender, race, class and caste, that needs a re-configuration of existing frameworks to decolonize the ‘indigenous’ in South Asian performance.