Learning from labour: the space and work of activist theatre

Abstract

Recent attempts to rethink labour history and contemporary labour struggles in India have variously memorialised the ‘lost worlds’ of industrial labour struggle and argued for stretching the terms of labour historiography, in part, by moving beyond the conceptual and political boundaries of the factory gate to take into account the complex configurations of labour, accumulation and struggle. This article contributes to this scholarship with a methodological focus on political theatre by three organisations in India. I ask what we might learn about labour and labour struggles when we look through the lens of cultural activism by the urban and rural poor. Drawing on Kalyan Sanyal's provocative distinction between accumulation and need economy, I argue that contemporary cultural work and activism both refuses and contributes to the market-based fetishisation of surplus-value as the sole purpose of work and as such it founds a view of labour and labour struggle that learns from labour and not just capital.