Abstract
In May 2022, the non-governmental organization Jagori Rural Charitable Trust (JRCT) welcomed guests from throughout India for the inauguration of its Swara Mountain Arts Festival. The now-annual festival hosts four days of educational arts workshops with nightly open-gate concerts at JRCT’s scenic campus in the Western Himalayan foothills, culminating in a final evening of performances at Dharamshala’s Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts by headliners of national repute. JRCT finances the festival with support from One Billion Rising (OBR), a global campaign to end violence against women, for which JRCT serves as India’s national secretariate. Likewise, JRCT affiliates the festival with OBR’s contemporary feminist vision, billing it as “an inclusive festival celebrating multiple creative expressions” that encourages all, particularly those most marginal to patriarchal structures of power, to join and “rise for freedom.” Drawing on feedback interviews with a dozen of the festival’s organizers, artist-facilitators, and participants, alongside my own experience and audio-visual documentation of the festival’s 2023 edition, this paper investigates the discursive interplay of regional, national, and transnational fields of force in the festival’s bid for emancipatory artistic expression. Following my interlocutors, I interpret JRCT’s turn to festival hospitality in light of its emplacement in the Kangra Valley as well as its roots in the national women’s liberation movement of the mid-1970s. I argue that the Swara Festival completes a transformation in JRCT’s instrumentalization of cultural production toward a secular-liberal conception of the arts, the cultural and historical specificity of which local modes of performance serve to remind.
Presenters
Christian JamesStudent, PhD Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—The Art of Hospitality
KEYWORDS
Diversity and Inclusion, Transnational Feminism, Culture as Resource, Critical Ethnography
