Cultural harlotry: marketing the sonic margins

Originally created to commemorate the 2006 Delhi Film Festival, The Manganiyar Seduction was advertised as an aural and visual feast of ‘authentic’ West Indian ethnic music. The production grew in ambition and metamorphosed into a globetrotting event that has since become one of the most recent iconic productions of the world music genre.

In many ways, one could claim that The Manganiyar Seduction is not the first theatrical production to commodify ethnic practices; the discovery and marketing of the Manganiyars’ music began much earlier. Their unique sounds were first introduced in the 1970s by Indian folklorist and ethnomusicologist Komal Kothari, who painstakingly recorded and catalogued the cultures, customs and music of the Manganiyar communities. In so doing he formally constructed a cultural cartography in the absence of one. Specifically, the Manganiyars are a particular caste that reside in the Thar deserts of Rajasthan and are found mainly in Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Bamer. The word manganiyar literally means ‘one who begs’ (originating from the verb māngnā, ‘to beg’),Footnote ⁹ but this servile connotation no longer exists and the term is used to refer to professional caste musicians whose roles are those of ‘bards who keep and recite genealogies for generations’.Footnote ¹⁰ They are storytellers whose music retains and transmits the cultural memory and kinship relations of communities; they sing for patron families (jajmān) who ‘adopt’ them for various ritual ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. The manner in which the genealogy is made manifest out of memory is a shubraj – a fixed recitation of a particular patron's lineage and history.Footnote ¹¹ Though they share many similarities with another caste of Rajasthani musicians, the Langas, the Manganiyars play specific instruments such as the kamāychā and the pyāledar sārangi (and that is where their true musical virtuosity lies). Furthermore, the Manganiyars have a specific repertoire of rāgas (or melodic modes) that differ from north Indian classical music. Thus, more than just making entertainment, the Manganiyars have a rich history of being cultural mnemonics of a people, and in a culture where social standing is dependent on genealogical affiliation, the Manganiyars serve crucial sociopolitical roles. Through the musicalizing of ancestry, the families of the patrons are ‘given cognizance and respect in society at large, and the musicians contribute to their status in a significant way’.Footnote ¹² Such a tradition of patronage ensures the survival of the caste institution, and their cultural–musical roles cannot be belittled.

When transposed to a context of commodity entertainment, the essential role of preserving communal memory and relations is discernibly erased and the jajmani system is replaced by a global audience whose complex and cosmopolitan genealogies render these folk musicians ‘inarticulate’ and ‘unmusical’, particularly since patronage is now that of global capital. This is certainly reflected in the repertoire Abel selects: the songs performed seem randomly chosen and revised to exhibit the virtuosity of the musicians (perhaps oddly appropriate since the social contexts of the Manganiyars' performance that invariably determine the selection of songs have been removed), who underscore the exotic frequencies and perform ethnic–religious difference for a predominantly Western festival consumer. From a sufi song to a traditional song for newborn children (‘Halariya: The Birth of Lord Krishna’), and an amorous tune (‘Neendarli’), the bite-sized sonic entrées serve merely to tantalize appetites for difference. These religious and cultural songs, and musical customs and practices, thereby become further dictated by the demands of capital-driven entertainment. The production in turn reflects the problematics of staging ethnic musics, with distinct sociocultural imperatives, as ‘world music’ since the theatricalization and touristification of the Manganiyars' music transforms their cultural economy to a capital economy – a fiscal exchange of exotic acoustics for musical enchantment. Their essential role as genealogists is trivialized as market advertisement on programme brochures and erased as opportunity costs for amusement.

Perhaps the most explicit signifier of this transformation is the iconic mise en scène. The idiosyncratic feature that performance reviewers and audiences alike most readily identified was the velvet-draped, life-sized cubicles in which the musicians sat individually or in pairs. These cubicles formed four horizontal rows of nine, with each row stacked on top of the other, creating a skyscraping superstructure of the ethnic exotic. In addition, the circumference of each cubicle was framed by a series of yellow globe lights, identical to those that border a dressing mirror.

Clearly, reviewers had difficulty finding the right description for this strange yet familiar spectacle; metaphors and figuratives became the preferred approach. Steve Smith of the New York Times compared this megalithic structure to ‘a Hollywood Squares-like collection of boxed, red-curtained rooms’;Footnote ¹³ Carol Middleton of the Australian Stage described the set as ‘a huge edifice of four stories . . . lined in red velvet and lit like dressing room mirrors’;Footnote ¹⁴ and Irfan Kasban, who writes for the Singapore Arts Festival review blog site, termed these cubicles ‘four-storey pigeon holes’.Footnote ¹⁵ Few mention the visual associations with Amsterdam's red-light windows even though explicit comparisons were made in the programme notes.Footnote ¹⁶ In festival interviews and programme notes, Abel candidly admits that the show was inspired by the burlesque theatricality of the rapacious avenues in Amsterdam; it was designed to be a seduction of body and soul.Footnote ¹⁷ The scenography was an attempt to achieve a ‘dazzling union between the Manganiyars' music and the visual seduction of Amsterdam's red light district’,Footnote ¹⁸ where the sets seemingly fuse the structural concepts of the Hawa Mahal – the famous ‘Palace of the Winds’ in Jaipur, and the illuminated glass windows of Amsterdam's De Wallen district. As Abel explains,

Voyeurism indubitably underscores the performance philosophy of the production, but the romantic allusion to Indian women awaiting in palace windows remains little more than a remote imaginative; encasing otherness in red box frames inevitably evokes associations of harlotry and prostitution. The perspicuous framing of ethnic music (and musicians) as (re)versions of what are primarily white, blonde-haired sex workers is little more than a humiliating excavation of culture catered to titillate commodity senses.

Ethnic musicians framed as though for hire, to gratify the pleasure principle, the processes of cultural commodification and devaluation of cultural histories and social roles become further adumbrated. While the Manganiyars are formally appointed to particular jajmans whose genealogies they have been told to recite in order to preserve deep cultural heritages, Abel's radical transformation dislocates such fundamental acoustics and fractures these sonic signifiers; he renders the experience of the Manganiyars' music as little more than a sensory feast facilitated by a commercial transaction of cultural prostitution; the product was an aural ‘orgy’ marketed as an authentic seduction of an-Other's music.

By not intentionally distorting the musicality and performance modes of the Manganiyar tradition, the production seemingly preserved the ‘authenticity’ that ensured its marketability, but the restructuring processes of the musicians’ largely improvisatory and open musical structures resulted in a reframing of cultural form and function. In the programme notes, Abel recounts his difficulties with the Manganiyars, who were not accustomed to formal processes of rehearsals and set performances contained by a strict and regulated time frame. Manganiyar music is largely improvisatory and spontaneous – its adaptability is its musicality. While there are specific ragas that the Manganiyars abide by, such as the Suhab, Sameri, Birvas, Manjh, and Khamaychi, improvisation and melodic material can be added by good musicians even as they weave a single melodic line repeated several times to accommodate a developing poetic theme.Footnote ²⁰ The improvisatory quality is also evident in the way, apart from devotional songs such as bhajans, which follow a set bhajan text of poets that are fixed and learnt by rote, other songs are not bound by a continuing narrative. While most pieces begin with a non-metred couplet known as the duha, the geet (the main body of the song), which contains a number of duhas, is not determined and is left to the musical devices of the ensemble. The duhas within a song are, furthermore, not thematically and temporally connected. The absence of a fixed structure opens the space for musical nuance in Manganiyar music, and nuance is a vital feature that improvisation evokes. A listener who ‘knows the language . . . can appreciate the finer nuances’ and partake of the melodic praises and celebration that are beyond surface tonalities.Footnote ²¹ As such, the exploratory, open and improvisatory possibilities, guided by traditional ragas, characterize Manganiyar music and demarcate their musical virtuosity. Mass entertainment and mass culture, however, demand a mercantilistic order framed by form, structure and regulated rhythms. The sonically predictable is a necessary criterion for the staging of world music on the formal stages of cultural festivals. In The Manganiyar Seduction, the musicians were prohibited from improvisation; they played the same repertoire and incanted the same tunes. Beyond the mercantilistic exchange, the compromise advanced is an aesthetic one: framing Manganiyar music in a Western theatrical mode radically alters the music itself even as it performs a plasticized ‘authenticity’.

Between past and future, between sight and sound

Writing of the erosion of culture due to the commodification of life and the insatiable need for entertainment, Hannah Arendt maintains that mass society often ‘seizes upon’ cultural objects as part of a ‘life process’ that characterizes modernity's consumer culture.Footnote ²² In so doing, culture is often quite literally consumed, eaten up and destroyed. Culture invariably becomes threatened ‘when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present of the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need’.Footnote ²³ While The Manganiyar Seduction aptly exemplifies such a process and is one among many such culturally commodified forms of entertainment,Footnote ²⁴ Abel's success, evident in many reviews, is predicated upon an offering of exotic pleasure through a process of reframing, quite literally, the strange, distant and unfamiliar with the iconic and the recognizable. In this way, the ethnic, religious, temporal and musical margins are made palatable when placed on cosmopolitan altars. The experience of Rajasthani folk tunes is packaged as ‘art’ for the festival market – removed enough to be different yet close enough to be consumed.

The mise en scéne that frames the Manganiyars exemplifies this process of sanitization, for De Wallen is perhaps among the most ‘bourgeois’ red-light districts in the world: it is sterile and safe, with all the predictable, almost archaic, titillations. As an infamous tourist destination, the sex workers of De Wallen entice with their foreignness that is yet contained within clinical security. This containment is reflected in the ways the musicians are segregated physically by the red frames that literally segment the ensemble into discrete objects of voyeurism. The cubicles are akin to holding cells that place the Other within firm barriers and, similar to the objects of sexual fetish on the streets of De Wallen, the Manganiyar musicians become paraded for the audience: the spectator scrutinizes their musical instruments, singing styles, movements, gestures and idiosyncratic performance behaviours, and their individuality, as they would through the ‘looking’ glass. While the performance preserves a sonic holism that seems to bind the musicians in their respective cubicles, mediated by the presence of a conductor figure that seemingly orchestrates them, the scenography carves sharp distinctions, literally, and in so doing reifies the exotic as the production that occurs between sight and sound. While the music engenders a mechanical aura of authentic Rajasthani folk music, the foreignness of their being is confined, contained and kept sanitized as an object of cultural fetishism.

Abel's introduction of ‘conductor’ Daevo Khan also reifies this containment of the foreign in the familiar. Playing the castanet-like instrument known as the khartal, Daevo emerges shortly after the opening chant and takes his place centre stage. He then directs the additional singers, who join in the chorus in a rhythmic entourage.Footnote ²⁵ While the performance begins with a single kamāychā and solitary voice, in the absence of musical direction, the proxemic interjection of Daevo renders his semiotic role primary. As the song progresses, musical control and direction shift from the independent ensemble to Daevo, whose khartal begins to dictate the tempo of the dhol and dholak drums. While clearly not synonymous with a maestro of Western classical music, Daevo's presence, framed by the order of commodity entertainment and the context of a proscenium stage, replicates one; its mimicry is distinct. The remainder of the performance sees Daevo play a dominant role of structuring the rhythms of the performance even as these musicians seem wholly familiar with their musical entries and exits, having been accustomed to the ensemble-styled improvisations and intuitions that characterize their music and musicality. Attention is predictably placed on Daevo, whose body in motion, rapid taps of the khartal and musical direction designate him the lead performer and leader of the pack; Daevo's central presence becomes a conspicuous visual signifier of control, regulation and dictation. The theatrical gesture, clearly a means of ‘visualizing’ what could have been an alienating aural experience, excavates distinct associations with Western modes of classical music performance and becomes a performative strategy of framing the foreign within the familiar. At the end of the show, Daevo receives special applause, with the occasional audience member giving a standing ovation, when he appears during the curtain call. This reciprocal act exhibited by the audience further reifies Abel's accomplishment in marketing the exotic alien as that which is not so distant since such a conventional gesture of appreciation indicates a willing complicity of consuming the acoustic spectacle as that which can and needs to be appreciated in a cognizant way.

Much like the other hypersimulations of authenticity that Abel employs as dramatic strategy to market the sonic margins, the exotic that rests on the interstice of the foreign and familiar is framed with a musical universal – rhythm. In marked moments of hypertheatricality that occur within the first song, and where the narrative is momentarily suspended, Daevo engages the dhol and dholak drummers, and other khartal players, in rhythmic conversations that become a display of metrical dexterity and proficiency. While the Manganiyars are known for possessing an ‘evolved sense of rhythm’ and are extremely accomplished in their rhythmic improvisations,Footnote ²⁶ these sequences are distinctly an exotic appetizer for the cosmopolitan palate. Such rhythmic interjections serve little more than to showcase the rhythmic playfulness divorced from the religious significations and musicological contexts of ‘Alfat un bin in bin’. These rhythmic climaxes are frequent, with another noteworthy example being Daevo's rhythmic banter with the morchhang – an iron Jew's harp that produces a distinct ‘twang’. In the opening sections of the second piece, ‘Halariya: The Birth of Lord Krishna’, Daevo plays a series of complex rhythms on the khartal and pauses as the morchhang responds with a melodic variation in a similar tempo; both then flow into a harmonic confluence on an accented cadence which further inspires the audience to clap along the structured downbeats. One can infer from these metrical theatricalities that such acts serve to showcase the Manganiyars' musical genius, yet, framed in the context of commodity space, they serve little more than to thrill and delight the foreign ear with a sonic experience that needs little contextual or cultural comprehension. The hypertheatricality of these sequences encases unfamiliar sounds produced by the ensemble of foreign instruments with the familiarity of rhythmic climaxes and pulsating affect.

In the space between sound and sight, against the crimson ascetics of the mise en scène, Abel conceals, even as he exposes, foreignness and inaccessibility. This double signifier accentuates the difference acoustically just as a lifeline of familiarity is cast through a visualization of this oral tradition. The peripheries of cultural distance are framed even as the production brazenly prostitutes itself as cultural commodity for global consumption. The performance satiates a consumer fetish for difference in the face of cultural homogenization and its accented quality of the exotic preserves the illusion of cultural difference in a double bind. Consequently, one can claim that the appreciation of the Manganiyars is not of their unique musical tradition or cultural distinction but of their virtuosity as foreign skins playing alien instruments, producing rhythms that one could recognizably clap along with yet comprehend only as bodily affect. As Harvey O'Brien writes in the Irish Theatre Magazine, the performance was wholly alienating and lacking in context or grounding. The alienation, according to O'Brien, also stemmed from the absence of surtitles; ‘the average non-Muslim listener was just a listener in the broadest sense’.Footnote ²⁷ The erasure of surtitling can be regarded as a gesture of the impossibilities of translation, the slippages and gaps in cultural semantics, and also as an intentional performance of exoticizing. The exotic, after all, can only remain so when there is a degree of non-understanding and of referential distance. While rhythms seemingly speak a universal language, the chanting voices and their alien enunciations engender a staging of the exotic that is distinctly an interplay of the recognizable and bizarre. The ‘exotic’ becomes ‘a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillate[s] between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity’.Footnote ²⁸ In this closed loop of dialectical signifiers, the foreign, culturally different and extraordinary become, as Stephen Foster purports, domesticated such that ‘the phenomena to which they . . . apply begin to be structured in a way which makes them comprehensible and possibly predictable’.Footnote ²⁹ Exoticism, then, is ‘a control mechanism of cultural translation which relays the other inexorably back again to the same’.Footnote ³⁰ Yet such an assimilation into the ‘same’ is not whole, for while it ‘describes the systematic assimilation of cultural difference, ascribing familiar meanings and associations to unfamiliar things, it also denotes an expanded, if inevitably distorted, comprehension of diversity which effectively limits assimilation’.Footnote ³¹ The exotic must, therefore, be regarded as fundamentally ‘different’, kept as and at a distance, despite the simulated attempts of embracing that which is the ‘same’.

Between performance and reception: the political economy of the exotic

The naming of the exotic is symbolic of a voracious desire to consume the foreign. In this process of interpellation, foreignness is called into being yet its otherness must be contained and controlled through consumption. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks describes this consumption of commodity culture as a means of ‘eating the other’.Footnote ³² The ravenous imagery draws intimate associations of sexual and carnal appetites. From aphrodisiacs to phallic fare and nyotaimori (body sushi), the relationship between sex, pleasure and ‘foreignness’ is distinct; it is one that is located in sensuous desire and sensual craving. In discourses of Otherness, the foreign body is consistently perceived as an object to satisfy basal needs, and a ‘comprehension’ of this other is achieved through a process of mastication and ingestion. It is this process that placates external anxieties with pacification and assimilation. The sense of foreignness – that is, not only the acoustic signatures of the Manganiyars but also their corporeality – needs to be devoured with (sophomoric) understanding so as to sustain the material health of the global audience. This ingestion, similarly, satisfies the cravings of the culture industry for entertainment through the furthering of a celebratory belief in transcultural diversities. The production parades its own ‘Otherness’ and its exoticism is packaged as a quick and ‘ready-to-eat’ meal for harried global citizens, an instant consumption for the busy cosmopolitan spectator who wants an experience of the Other yet desires to remain safe, distant and at ease.

In The Manganiyar Seduction, the blatant commodification of cultural practices has meant that the consumption and ‘eating’ of the Other necessitates a complicity in the construction of the exotic spectacle. As much as the audience ‘consumes’ culture, it is the act of consumption that in turn produces cultural ‘meaning’ perceived in the performance. The acknowledgement and applause, the ovations and appreciations of cultural difference perform a recognition of an incomprehensibility that is, as much, an inarticulate and inexpressible ‘seduction’. These acts of conventional reciprocation, placed in the context of a performance of cultural otherness, accentuate and underscore the commodity value of the difference staged. In effect, the audience as consumer produces cultural meaning and cultural ‘reality’. Taking a materialist perspective on contemporary cultural theory, Stephen Tumino, citing John Storey, observes how it is the ‘consumer who in effect “produces in use” the meaning(s) of the culture’, and this ‘determines social reality’.Footnote ³³ Noting the ways in which the attention of cultural studies has shifted focus from wider social relations to a market theory of culture which ‘valorizes the excessive “uses” and “resignifications” of cultural commodities, and in doing so transforms the subject of labour into the subject of consumption’,Footnote ³⁴ the exotic spectacle and enchanting soundscapes of The Manganiyar Seduction are a consequence of global capital's ‘resistant’ desires and ‘rebellious’ acts of consumption;Footnote ³⁵ it is the post-colonial avarice for consuming the ‘resistant’ that determines the production of the exotic. As Pierre Bourdieu postulates, cultural production, as seen in such foreign spectacles, is ‘a complex process of legitimation negotiated through the interactions between the producers and consumers of symbolic goods’.Footnote ³⁶ The director and producers of the performance are merely one of several ‘agents of legitimation’; the audience encountered in the global festival circuit further legitimizes this cultural symbolic that is as much altered as it is alterity unto itself.

This legitimation is, however, not necessarily an active attribution and is often an unconscious validation. More significantly, the courteous affirmation of Otherness is a performance of one's own Other, an auto-exoticism that reveals a distancing of one's own from understanding and a realization of what one does not know. The appreciation, even admiration, of cultural alterity onstage is not just an inadvertent acknowledgement of what is not part of one's ‘being’ or ‘existence’ but also a recognition of what one fails to comprehend and may never. There is thus an extraction from self-certainty; the discomforting act of sensory dislocation from sensibility necessitates a struggle to contain and comprehend the foreign through consumption. Conceivably, this is the appeal of the exotic: it beckons us to recognize the absences within by tracing what is identifiable in what is an alien experience; it compels us to confront alterity only to ‘eat’ it up. Perhaps, then, Abel's dramatic strategy of ‘gorgeous velvet boxes’ is apt, for according to ABC Perth's reviewer Victoria Laurie these ‘make-up mirrors’ seemingly reflect the world back to us; the experience could be likened to ‘seeing a more beautiful (version of) me when I listened to them’.Footnote ³⁷ While it is undeniable that a performance of cultural alterity holds a mirror up to its audience, what is seen is surely not a charming version of oneself. If at all, these reflections exhibit the hollows, gaps, voids and spaces within.

Cultural twitter: a short burst of inconsequentiality

The exotic is, consequently, a product of a collaborative imagination between producers, performers and audiences. The spaces of imagination are filled by the sights and sounds of ignorance, misconstruction, decontextualization and profit-driven misappropriation. In The Manganiyar Seduction the global audience's complicity in reimagining the exotic through overt cheers and whistling, and the demonstration of a general inarticulacy expressed as standing ovations, animated applause and even uninhibited dancing (as was the experience of an Irish spectator recounted by O'Brien),Footnote ³⁸ reify the contemporary order of cultural simulacra that adversely typecast these musicians, their music and their cultural practice as exotic archetypes to be consumed as familiarity in strangeness. Perth reviewer Laurie describes her experience as one that is ‘a seamless segue into a percussion lesson, with every patron from stalls to upper gallery clapping complicated rhythms under the smiling tutelage of the clapstick-playing conductor’.Footnote ³⁹ She felt as if she had ‘just joined the most joyful religious congregation in the world’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Laurie further describes an unfathomable desire to text the short-message-service abbreviation ‘OMG’ to all her friends immediately after the performance. The inability to enunciate the experience exemplifies the surface consumption of mechanically reproduced exotic spectacles – moving, magical, but utterly unfathomable. In this absence of deeper understanding, one can conclude that the applause, whistles and ‘OMGs’ mask an ignominy and an apology for the unintelligible and the culturally inexplicable. Laurie's experience, possibly synonymous with many who experienced The Manganiyar Seduction, exemplifies Tzvetan Todorov's belief that ‘knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be’.Footnote ⁴¹

Apparent in this production, exoticism is, then, not merely a perception of cultural difference but one that is very much located in ‘the sympathetic identification with supposedly marginal cultural groups. Yet this urge to identify, as manifested in patterns of consumption, often comes at the expense of knowledge of culture [and] cultural groups other than one's own’.Footnote ⁴² This auto-exoticism is further evident in the epilogue of the performance, where Abel introduces his musicians and distinctly calls attention to a particular individual who is the only Hindu musician in an otherwise Muslim cast(e). The act of isolating difference within difference draws more zealous applause from audiences;Footnote ⁴³ the isolation of alterity in alterity becomes an act of marketing the marginal within the margins – an act that the audience in Singapore oddly celebrated with fervour.

A characteristic of the successful marketing of exotic forms and entities is exemplified by their replication and reproduction in the commodity market. The duplicative quality of market exoticism adumbrates strangeness through an extraction of cultural context and a relocation of its ‘thingness’ into the realm of mechanical reproduction (and, today, digital reproduction). In other words, an exotic object achieves ‘exoticness’ only when it inspires commodity copies. In these replications, there is always already an attempt at reconceiving and reappropriating the ‘authentic’ in a cultural order; the marketability of the exotic depends, precisely, on its reappropriation of the impossible ‘authentic’. The Managaniyar Seduction is an example par excellence, for it is in itself a reproduction of this impossible authentic, duplicated and replicated in each city it performs in. It in turn has inspired ‘virtual’ reproductions of itself, thereby spawning simulacra – fictional acoustemologies of the Manganiyars that in turn reify the mystical status of their cultural sounds.

In a bizarre imitation of the music heard in performance, a self-made video, by JonT2000 (otherwise known as Jon Townend), of adapted chordal patterns and distinctive sonic signatures was created and posted on YouTube by way of paying ‘tribute’ to the Manganiyars.Footnote ⁴⁴ Others followed with varied and even extreme interpretations of the performance, with one video entitled ‘Party-Rock Anthem LMFAO’ being perhaps the most creative yet possibly offensive of the ‘remakes’ posted on the video-sharing platform.Footnote ⁴⁵ The video, an advertisement for the Georgetown Arts Festival 2012, features an audiovisual pastiche of various Manganiyar musicians performing folk music, but manipulated, through careful editing, to move to the overarching tune of LMFAO's ‘Party Rock Anthem’ (otherwise known as ‘Everyday I'm Shuffling’). This most recently posted video, made and published by Darren Koay, exemplifies the precession of the exotic where the order of the duplicate precedes as it erases cultural authenticity. These carbon-copy examples underscore the problems of producing culturally authored spectacles for the festival circuit. Performances, removed from context and function, become shifting signifiers that in turn engender floating signifiers that circulate in an economy of capital consumption. According to Arjun Appadurai, the search to domesticate and attribute value to exotic objects depends on their removal from their original cultural and historical contexts.Footnote ⁴⁶ While, recognizably, such a view seems deterministic in considering the improvisatory and adaptable quality of cultural sounds, global capital disfigures such acoustics to become cultural ‘pop’. Such sounds, in turn, become reinserted into cultural repertoires that are now determined by these dislocated sonic ‘tweets’ – sound bites of hybrid sonicities that assume the responsibility of cultural representation. Like the micro-blogging platform Twitter, cultural performances conceived for the mass market are periodically updated and broadcasted as sample-sized fragments for mass consumption and entertainment; they are synonymous with what Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, defines this social media platform as – ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Arendt describes the effects of such cultural ‘twittering’ best when she writes of how ‘culture [becomes] destroyed in order to yield entertainment’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mass society, according to her, ‘wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Culture and their accompanying signifiers become commodities of the entertainment industry and are, therefore, no longer ‘cultural objects whose excellence is measured by their ability to withstand the life process and become permanent appurtenances of the world’.Footnote ⁵⁰ They become ‘consumer goods, destined to be used up, just like any other consumer good’.Footnote ⁵¹ Mass society ‘literally consume[s] the cultural objects, eat[s] them up and destroy[s] them’.Footnote ⁵²

What remains of the Manganiyars' music in this production is a seduction of commodity culture; it is the lure of capitalist acoustics, a manufacture of sound bytes for the metropolitan centres framed as a celebratory festival performance which in turn becomes marketed as aural experiences for the curious listener who wants an hour's enchantment of mystical and spiritual Rajasthan. The performance is an excavation of cultural sentiments and a packaged product of simulated ‘difference’. As exemplar of many of such cultural performances of the ethnic, racial and religious ‘Other’ today, The Manganiyar Seduction begs an examination of the interstitial threads between culture and commodity. While such festival markets have, indubitably, created significant economic and financial gain that reciprocally keeps the tradition alive, I ask if this is the condition of cultural performances and the performance of cultures today. Can cultural difference be ‘accessed’ only as consumable products that satiate our commodity fetishism? Can culture be performed without the interference of the ‘exotic’ gaze or ear? Is cultural tourism the sine qua non of globalization and global capital? Does the economy of pleasure legitimize the continued existence of cultural tradition? How can we find alternative modes of cultural performativity at a global level without playing into pernicious exoticism? Can there be new strategies of representation and curatorship?

In Rajasthan, Rustom Bharucha and Komal Kothari converse about the marketing of Manganiyar folk music: Bharucha queries if recordings of the musicians sold as cassette copies would divest the songs of their ritual and religious significance. In response, Kothari notes how the cassette can help restore cultural memory as these recordings help new generations of Rajasthani people remember their musical traditions, now threatened by modernity's will to forget.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, it can be said that the cultural tourism of The Manganiyar Seduction helps to preserve the musical traditions of these communities as they become recognized across the globe: global exposure preserves local endeavour. That said, such decontextualizations and extractions of Rajasthani folk music erode the purpose of their songs and gradually shift generic etymologies to that of world ‘pop’ music. Speaking of a growing trend of ‘obscene songs’ – songs in a larger repertoire sung during marriages in Rajasthan which draw heavily on, and appropriate, folk repertoire – Kothari further notes how an arbitrary selection from a folk source can result in the loss of ‘larger meaning[s]’ when seen from a specific perspective.Footnote ⁵⁴ Likewise, these commodities of culture lose their ‘larger’ meanings in the compromise of mass entertainment. To this, Bharucha asserts that

Consequently, performing culture invokes an ethics of deep respect and a responsibility for the Other, as Emmanuel Levinas would call it. The recognition that should rightfully be accorded to these musicians is not a recognition of individual authorship – as it is with The Mangniyar Seduction, which has become synonymous with the branding of Roysten Abel, whose reputation as the founder of the Indian Shakespeare Company precedes. One inevitably needs to ask the Manganiyars involved in the production about issues of ‘agency’ and ‘voice’: do they have an opportunity to ‘speak’ or to talk back to the mise en scène that has framed them as exotic escapism for aural pleasure? Performing culture necessitates a comprehension of the cultural and generational value that these forms of mass entertainment and cultural exportation can yield. In the end, as Kothari reminds us, ‘we're talking about generations of folk artists and the future of their tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁶