Lecture | COGLOSS
Transforming Caste: Circus and Body Politics in Colonial Malabar
- Date
- Thursday 19 October 2023
- Time
- Series
- COGLOSS seminars 2023-2024
- Location
-
Gravensteen
Pieterskerkhof 6
2311 SR Leiden - Room
- 1.11
On Thursday, 19 October from 11:15, Dr. Nisha Poyyaprath Rayaroth will give a talk about her work on the circus business and its relations to the caste system and body politics in modern Malabar. The title of the talk is 'Transforming Caste: Circus and Body Politics in Colonial Malabar'. The session will take place in Room 1.11 in Gravensteen Building, Leiden.
Presentation abstract
Malabar province in South India has provided acrobats, managers and entrepreneurs to Indian circuses for the better part of the twentieth century. Women, children, men - mostly from the subaltern communities - trained in the ‘circus kalaris’ found an adventurous livelihood in circus companies around the globe. The compound word, 'circus kalari' itself refers to a peculiar historical confrontation and negotiation of the 'modern' and the 'traditional'. This could help us look at how colonial modernity and indigenous traditions constitute the structure of circus acrobatics in the sub-continent. Another crucial aspect is how this process undermined the system of caste when 'lower bodies' made a claim over the 'traditional' upper caste space of Kalaripayatt with a modern enterprise, the circus.
Speaker
Dr. Nisha Poyyaprath Rayaroth is currently a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). She received a doctorate in history from Delhi University and has been a fellow scholar in various institutions and locations from New Delhi to Lund and Yale. In 2020, she published a monograph with Oxford University Press on circuses in India, entitled Jumbos and Jumping Devils: A Social History of Indian Circus.