Cultural Resistance and Art Production: Trends in Contemporary Maharashtra

How do artistic collectives engaged in resistance against Brahmanism and capitalism in the contemporary period produce new work? How do they grapple with questions of form, content, quality, authorship and individual talent in art, and how do these affect the productions of artistic collectives? This paper pursues these questions in a limited way via reference to two troupes from Maharashtra – the Bombay-based AvahanNatya Manch (1979-1997) and Kabir Kala Manch (2002-). It shows that the troupes worked consciously towards revolutionising the process of art production, as demanded by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay The Author as Producer.They rejected hegemonic notions that characterised artists as fount heads of individual creativity and genius, trained new members in writing, compositions, theatre and music, and produced new work collectively, in continuation with the collective production of songs in the IPTA tradition in the 1930s-50s. This rendered authorship ambiguous and at times, problematic. But it also unleashed tremendous creativity within the collective. Their process also resonated with practices of Left-wing cultural troupes across the country in the 1970s and 80s as well as more contemporary troupes in Maharashtra and other states indicating collective production was widespread in the scene of cultural resistance.