Performing Heroic Laziness

Abstract

This paper theorizes a concept of performance of everyday life at the intersection of performance theory, history and philosophy to posit the everyday as a world-historical stage on which subjects enact forms of historical consciousness. It takes as its empirical ground two historical iterations of a social club known as Thalua Club (Idlers' Club) that took shape in Banaras (Varanasi) – an ancient commercial and Hindu pilgrimage centre and currently the nerve centre of Hindu nationalist politics in India. The idea of a Thalua Club first finds expression in a satirical work from 1928 of the same name, in which the author, Gulab Rai – through the character of 'Devotee of Laziness' (Alasya-bhakt) – affirms the performance of 'uselessness' as a way to resist the 'tumultuous storm of usefulness' that capitalism augured. The club itself, which Rai is believed to have founded in Banaras in his time, was re-established in 1961 by the next generation of Banarasis on the new world-historical stage of postcoloniality and state-sponsored industrial modernization. However, in its second iteration, Thalua Club captures a particular historical anxiety of the Banarasis that stems from the peripheral role that Banaras is accorded in the project of modernization and nation-building as compared to other metropolitan cities. By analysing the two historical iterations, this paper problematizes extant postmodern theories of everyday life that conceive of performance of everyday life as merely individual, arbitrary acts of a subject imbued with agency, thus failing to grasp the specific ways in which it is shaped by history. In contrast, it calls for theorization of performance of everyday life that is not only deeply rooted in empirical history but is also impelled by an objective, world-historical consciousness that transcends its cultural particularity.

Notes

1 This article was completed with the support of a writing fellowship at the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political: Comparative Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century’ (ICAS:MP), an Indo-German research cooperation funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). All views expressed here are solely those of the author.

2 All translations in the text are mine, unless otherwise mentioned.

3 See Dalmia (1997) for a deeper study of this speech and the broader role of Bhartendu in the emergence of a Hindu nationalist consciousness.

4 Gandhi’s specific brand of politics is in fact exemplary of the concept of ‘performance of everyday life’ as a politics of resistance. Through the 1920s, his noncooperation movement, which called for a boycott of British cotton in favour of the indigenous homespun yarn, mobilized everyday fashion to attack the commercial core of the Empire. Similarly, later in 1930, Gandhi spearheaded the salt satyagraha, by inciting the masses to make salt as an act of civil disobedience aimed at the British monopoly and taxation on a basic ingredient of everyday food. For a closer analysis of the performativity of Gandhi’s long march and his gesture of picking up the salt, see Bharucha (2014: 153).

5 I mean expressions (ausdruck in German) here, drawing from Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and not consequences of objective material conditions in a traditional Marxist sense. It is not a causal relationship implied by the structural determinism of the latter, but is rather an aesthetic mode of historiography, one that is rooted in language (that is, philosophy and art) rather than in scientific rationality and that takes as its baseline politics in the present.