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“The ‘infrapolitics’ of art as activism:

beyond the binary of domination and resistance

Resisting Together – Art and the Artist in South Asia

Lubna Marium

South Asian Peace Action Network– 30 January, 2022

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How do we study power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful?’ (Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 1990: xii)).

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Introducing the premise

The subaltern response is the performative stance that is “infrapolitics,” which is ‘a wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance, marked by resilience, that dare not speak in itsr own name” (Scott 1990: 19)

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The very existence of resilient cultures betrays “a critique of power” while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct” (xiii)..

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THE CONTEXT

Introducing the project

My memorial is dedicated to the Masters of Sahaja, who have given the gift of ‘critical thinking’ to Bangladesh.

The Memorial will be a site where regular ‘shadhu sangha’, gatherings organized on the days of internment of the Masters, can be organized and will honor the eclectic beliefs of the Bauls and Fakirs. Unfortunately, in an Islamic country like Bangladesh, most of the burial sites of the Bauls, are appropriated and given the appearance of a ‘Muslim’ graveyard, in gross opposition to what the Masters believed in and how they led their lives.

1. The fakirs have iconic following from the

people of Bangladesh. Bauls reject conjecture inferred from textual belief systems, whether Hindu or Muslim, and base themselves on the ‘existent’.

2. However, with the rise of Islamization, they have come under attack from radical elements of religiosity, both Hindu and Muslim, because of their rejection of all textual religion.

3. Lalon Shai (1770-1890) , one of the leading masters, and his writings have been given WORLD HERITAGE STATUS by UNESCO. However, there are a couple of hundred other Masters whose followers are hard pressed to arrange the yearly anniversary of their death.

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RESILIENCE VERSUS RESISTANCE

‘By and large resilience and resistance are treated as binary concepts rather than processes. A relational approach to these processes clarifies that they are, in fact, engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. Furthermore, there is a simplistic conception of resilient subjects as apolitical subjects. This overlooks the ‘transformability’ aspect of resilience which in part, is about ‘innovating and sowing the seeds of transformation’

INTRODUCING

His play knows no end…�no telling what shape He'll take, and when…�How will you understand the Saain's Divine Play?��

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SANITIZING POLITICS

When we come ‘together’ are we even aware or conscious of each other’s politics?

Politics - not just between the dominator and the dominated, but our own politics? All the local categories of friction and tension: men and women, parents and children, seniors and juniors; inheritance conflicts among brothers; struggles of succession and wars of conquest between chiefs; struggles for primacy between religious sects; and on and on. It is the absence of analysis of these forms of internal conflict in many resistance studies that gives them an air of romanticism, of which they are often accused (for example, Abu-Lughod 1990)..

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THINNING CULTURE

Just as subalterns must be seen as having an authentic, and not merely reactive, politics, so they must be seen as having an authentic, and not merely reactive, culture. Indeed a radical reconceptualization of culture, including both the historicization and politicization of the concept, has been going on for at least the last decade or so in anthropology; The only alternative to recognizing that subalterns have a certain prior and ongoing cultural authenticity, according to subalterns, is to view subaltern responses to domination as ad hoc and incoherent, springing not from their own senses of order, justice, meaning, and the like but only from some set

of ideas called into being by the situation of domination itself.

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DISSOLVING SUBJECTS

The question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries the resistance problematic to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity. This question has taken a particular form in

debates surrounding, once again, the Subaltern Studies school of historians.

Creating a monolithic category of subaltern who is presumed

to have a unitary identity and consciousness (1988a, 1988b). simplifies resistance as does dissolving the subject entirely into a set of "subject effects" that have virtually no coherence.

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MISSING CONSENSUS

Consensus is crucial to resistance.

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Parvathy Baul (born 1976) is a Baul Folk Singer, musician and storyteller from Bengal and one of the leading Baul musicians in India.Trained under Baul gurus, Sanatan Das Baul, Shashanko Goshai Baul in Bengal, she has been performing both in India and other countries since 1995.

Parvaty Baul

Sufia Khatun (known as Kangalini Sufia; born 1958/59)is a Bangladeshi folk singer.

Kangalini Sufi

Aklima Fakirani Is a devout follower of Lalon Fakir. She comes from a long lineage of direct disciples of Lalon Shai. Her guru, Golam Jhorusha taught her everything from singing to her esoteric lifestyle.

Aklima Fakirani

The Powerful

Women

The Bauls are mystic minstrels living in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. The Baul movement, at its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now regained popularity among the rural population of Bangladesh. Their music and way of life have influenced a large segment of Bengali culture, and particularly the compositions of Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Bauls live either near a village or travel from place to place and earn their living from singing to the accompaniment of the ektara, the lute dotara, a simple one-stringed instrument, and a drum called dubki. Bauls belong to an unorthodox devotional tradition, influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Bengali, Vasinavism and Sufi Islam, yet distinctly different from them. Bauls neither identify with any organized religion nor with the caste system, special deities, temples or sacred places. Their emphasis lies on the importance of a person’s physical body as the place where God resides. Bauls are admired for this freedom from convention as well as their music and poetry. Baul poetry, music, song and dance are devoted to finding humankind’s relationship to God, and to achieving spiritual liberation. Their devotional songs can be traced back to the fifteenth century when they first appeared in Bengali literature.

LESSONS FROM OUR BARDS, THE POWERFUL WOMEN OF BENGAL

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‘I sit helpless, O Gracious one, while the sun sets on the shores.

Have mercy and take me across this river of strife, which is my life.’