The uses of the ‘folk’: cultural historical practice and the modernity of the Guga tradition

Abstract

This essay considers the multiple dimensions that animate a critical cultural history of folk practices and traditions as expressions of both modernity and its seeming other, the ‘folk’, in the context of postcolonial cultural production in India. Folk traditions have played a crucial generative role in postcolonial scholarly, artistic and literary worlds, representing a kind of response to colonial hegemony and modernity; at the same time, they represent a continuing subaltern cultural formation that at times resists incorporation by these same forces. The immediate concern of the essay is the epic and worship tradition of Guga Pir, a hero-deity popular across northern India for protection against snakebites, and which forms a part of a broader devotional landscape populated by heroic/martial and saintly figures across north India and contiguous parts of Pakistan. After describing aspects of the cultural formations of the Guga tradition, and particularly its manifestations in both elite and non-elite literary and oral epic forms, the essay turns to a modern Punjabi play, Baba Bantu, that draws on the Guga tradition to explore the enactment of gender and caste power. Written by Charan Das Sidhu and first produced in 1982, the play demonstrates the intimate relationship between the progressive commitments of modern Punjabi literary production and the cultural worlds that the Guga tradition represents. The play allows us to reconsider the spectre of the ‘folk’ in postcolonial Indian cultural production outside of a simple binary of ‘folk’ vs. ‘elite’, and ‘traditional’ vs. ‘modern’, with appreciation of the complex interface of these binaries in the constitution of these traditions, and in knowledge formation about them. The article thus examines how debates about folk cultures – as well as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ themselves – emerge in a critical cultural historical practice on a tradition like Guga’s, and the role of modern Punjabi literature as a form of that practice.