1st Edition

Creative Economies of Culture in South Asia Craftspeople and Performers

Edited By Anna Morcom, Neelam Raina Copyright 2025
248 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

248 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

248 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book explores the crafts and performing arts of South Asia through a focus on labour and livelihood. It brings to light little-researched angles of social and political economies of culture and the ways in which they have shifted and changed in different historical eras and different political, economic, and social formations up to the present. In particular, through this focus on labour and... Read more

Creative Vocabularies of Work and Value in South Asia: A Foreword, Nitasha Kaul; Living, Adapting, and Creating: Craftspeople and Performers in South Asia: A Foreword, Daniel M. Neuman; Introduction: Living, Adapting, and Creating: Craftspeople and Performers in South Asia, Anna Morcom and Neelam Raina; Chapter 1. Musical Unfreedom and the Drummers’ Dilemma: Cultural Labour and the Value of Music in Indian Caste Society, Brahma Prakash; Chapter 2. Uḻaippu: Performance as Labour in a Tamil Theatre Tradition, Hanne M. de Bruin; Chapter 3. Narratives of Craft and Power in Sindh, Pakistan, Seher Mirza; Chapter 4. Artistic Labour at Stake: The Case of South Indian Courtesans’ Changing Patterns of Professionalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, Tiziana Leucci; Chapter 5. Women, Crafts and Landscapes; Acknowledging Cultural Rights for Sustainable Development, Zahra Hussain; Chapter 6. The Performance of Payment: Differentiating Devotional, Erotic and Classical Performing Arts in India, Anna Morcom; Chapter 7. Materializing Insurgency: Walnut-Wood Carving and the Material Culture of Conflict, Nikita Kaul; Chapter 8. The Tawa’if in Colonial India: Changing Livelihoods and Emerging Technologies (1790s - 1920s), Shweta Sachdeva Jha; Chapter 9. Remaking Labouring Lives through Crisis: Artisan Weaponsmiths in Colonial North India, Amanda Lanzillo; Chapter 10. Court Music Outside the Court: Defining the ‘Professional’ Musician in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, Richard David Williams; Chapter 11. The Hand in the Song: Understanding Performative Labour, Gender, and Livelihood in the Arts of Chitrakar Women of West Bengal, Priyanka Basu; Chapter 12. Kashmir’s Crafts Women: Tacit, Embodied Knowledge and its value in Post-conflict Reconstruction, Neelam Raina; Chapter 13. Kanchipuram as Brand Value: Weaving, Marketing Tradition in South India, Arti Kawlra; Chapter 14. Drumming, Value, and Patronage in a Himalayan Village Economy, Stefan Fiol; Chapter 15. Globalities and Temporalities of Artisanship: Lessons from an Indian Wood Art Industry, Thomas Chambers; Chapter 16. The Gramophone, the Concert Stage and the Hindustani Musician as Commodity Fetish, Dard Neuman; Chapter 17. The Business of Kollywood Dance in Chennai, India, Kristin Rudisill; Chapter 18. Surviving Revivals: Or Why the Work of Resuscitating Indian Crafts Is Never Done, Clare M. Wilkinson and Alicia O. DeNicola; Index

Biography

Anna Morcom is the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. She studies the performing arts of India and Tibet from diverse perspectives analysing shifting configurations of social power and has published on courtesans, bar girls, queer performers, and classical musicians in India.

Neelam Raina is an Associate Professor of International Development and Design at Middlesex University London. Her grant-funded research focusses on conflict and post-conflict economic reconstruction, material cultures, indigenous knowledge, displacement, and gender. Her interest lies in intersectional inequalities and inequities in fragile settings.