Table Of ContentHUMOUR AND THE PERFORMANCE
OF POWER IN SOUTH ASIA
This book critically examines the role and politics of humour and the performance
of power in South Asia. What does humour do and how does it manifest when lived
political circumstances experience ruptures or instability? Can humour that emerges
in such circumstances be viewed as a specifc narrative on the nature of democracy
in the region? Drawing upon essays from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, this
volume discusses many crucial historical and contemporary themes, including
dance-drama performances in northern India; caste and stand-up comedy in India;
cartoon narratives of citizens’ anxieties; civic participation through social media
memes in Sri Lanka; media, politics and humorous public in Bangladesh; the
politics of performance in India; and the infuence of humour and satire as political
commentaries. The volume explores the impact of humour in South Asian folklore,
ritual performances, media and journalism, and online technologies.
This topical and interdisciplinary book will be essential for scholars and
researchers of cultural studies, political science, sociology and social anthropology,
media and communication studies, theatre and performance studies, and South
Asian studies.
Sasanka Perera is Professor of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi,
India.
Dev Nath Pathak is Assistant Professor of Sociology at South Asian University,
New Delhi, India.
‘Perera and Pathak weave together a number of “serious” perspectives on humour.
Inaugurating a novel method to excavate the nuances of cultural politics in South
Asia, the book ofers useful insights that both refne and deepen scholarship in
South Asian studies. Edited by two prominent South Asianists, this book will proft
all social scientists who are willing to undertake serious adventures beyond the
predictable, formulaic and mainstream approaches. It is profoundly engrossing and
enriching – a must read!’
Ashok Acharya, Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Delhi, India
‘Humour expands the feld of politics at innocent moments, but to dissect the codes
of subversive energy inherent in humour is extremely challenging. A pioneering
efort at south Asian scale, here, the subversive politics, the hidden layers of the
embedded past of the region and the cultural nuances of humour all come alive
brilliantly. From Punch to stand-up comedy, and from Khattar Kaka’s philosophical
forays to internet memes, the book ofers an extraordinary canvas of humour and
its subversive energy in South Asia.’
Sadan Jha, Associate Professor, Centre for
Social Studies, Surat, Gujarat, India
‘In complete seriousness, this amazing work examines humour in social and
political relations in diverse contexts! What makes the book diferent and iconic
in some senses is the unravelling of laughter and humour in classical frames of
analysis. It opens a new mode of understanding social reality: a lens which is often
ignored because it is considered trivial or merely funny. By taking it seriously,
anthropologists Perera and Pathak have opened up novel avenues for research in
our eforts to unpack a troubled world disrupted by political instability, violence,
anxiety, trauma, and much else.’
Meenakshi Thapan, Former Professor of Sociology and Director,
Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India
HUMOUR AND THE
PERFORMANCE OF
POWER IN SOUTH ASIA
Anxiety, Laughter and Politics
in Unstable Times
Edited by Sasanka Perera and
Dev Nath Pathak
Cover image: Anoli Perera, The Joke, pencil on paper, 17x19 cm, 2021.
First published 2022
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Pathak; individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-0-367-54180-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-56401-8 (pbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549
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CONTENTS
List of fgures vii
Acknowledgements ix
List of contributors xi
1 Introduction: cultural politics of humour in South Asia 1
Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
PART I
Humour in literary and visual subversions 23
2 Colonial cartoons: Punch and vernacular Punch politics of humour
in colonial India 25
Divyendu Jha
3 Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism: a case of literary-cultural
politics of humour 45
Dev Nath Pathak
PART II
Folkloric worldviews: laughter as performed narratives 65
4 Tales from Assam’s tea gardens: when humour becomes resistance
in the everyday life-world of labourers 67
Prithiraj Borah
vi Contents
5 Dramatic Haryanvi humour: a case of subversion in jakari
and ragni 81
Monika Yadav
6 ‘A Sri Lankan Arrives in Hell’: a case of laughing at ‘Sri Lanka’
and the ‘Sri Lankan’ in a collection of modern folktales 95
Lal Medawattegedara
PART III
Mediated messages for laughing and thinking 105
7 Humour, criticality and the performance of anonymous power:
internet memes as political commentaries in Sinhala society 107
Sasanka Perera
8 Humorous masculinity: Nepali men in mediated Indian
male gaze 139
Sandhya A.S and Chitra Adkar
9 Politics of performance and performance of politics: analysing
stand-up comedy in the Indian context 156
Sukrity Gogoi and Simona Sarma
10 Humorous public in Bangladesh: an analytical reading of
mediated politics 178
Ratan Kumar Roy
Index 192
FIGURES
1.1 A cartoon by Gameela Samarasinghe, Pravada (July-December 2001,
Numbers 19 and 20, p. 132) 13
2.1 John Tenniel, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger,”
appeared in Punch on 22 August 1857. Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons
from Punch, Vol. 1–2. Published in 1895 by Bradbury & Evans,
London. Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library 30
2.2 “The New Year’s Gift” by John Tenniel, published in Punch in
1858. Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch, Volume 2. London:
Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library 31
2.3 John Tenniel, “Justice” appeared in Punch on 12 September 1857.
Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch. London: Bradbury &
Evans. Digitised by Cornell University Library: Courtesy of
Hathitrust Digital Library 32
2.4 “Baboo Jaberjee,” an 1895 Punch illustration of Bengali Bhadralok
parodied in The Baboo Ballads by the English, who found the idea
of educated Indians hard to accept. Source: Courtesy of Project
Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/fles/25129/25129-h/25129-h.htm 35
2.5 Lord Curzon ‘Propitiating Lord Ganesha’, a satirical response from
a 1902 edition of Hindi Punch. Source: Lord Curzon in Indian
Caricature being A Collection of Cartoons by Harishchandra
Talchekar, published in 1905. Courtesy of Public Library of India,
Government of India 37
2.6 “Elokeshi and Madhavchandra Giri,” Mahant ofers Elokeshi
childbirth medicine, to drug her before raping, ca 1880.
Folk art (Kalighat painting), author unknown. Courtesy
of Old Indian Arts: Historical Artworks of Indian Subcontinent
from www.oldindianarts.in/2012/09/kalighat-paintings-on-
tarakeswar-afair.html (accessed on 15 April 2020) 40
viii Figures
7.1 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan presidential election, 2019 119
7.2 ‘Pad Man’ meme 120
7.3 ‘Pad Man vs Van Man’ meme 121
7.4 Meme No. 1 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate,
Sajith Premadasa 123
7.5 Meme No. 2 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate,
Sajith Premadasa 124
7.6 Meme No. 1 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate,
Gotabhaya Rajapasha 125
7.7 Meme No. 2 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate
Gotabhaya Rajapasha emphasising nepotism and intra-family
competitiveness 126
7.8 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day 127
7.9 English-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day 128
7.10 Meme on Sri Lankan Health Minister’s Covid-19-related
public performance 129
7.11 Meme on Sri Lanka’s increasing debt to China 130
7.12 Anti-Chinese Sinhala-language meme in the context of the
COVID-19 pandemic 131
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has come into being through a number of stages, at each of which the
help from specifc people and institutions have aided in taking it forward.
The initial idea for the book came via the discussions generated at the confer-
ence, ‘Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter
and Politics in Unstable Times’ on 27 and 28 June 2019, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
This was one of the sabbatical period projects of Sasanka Perera. Without the intel-
lectual accommodation of the Board of Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences,
which gave its approval and leave from South Asian University, the conference and
the planning that went into it would not have been possible.
The editors are thankful to the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in
Colombo, Sri Lanka, for agreeing to host the conference. It attracted papers
from 19 researchers based on research in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. We
acknowledge our intellectual debt to all of the scholars who presented their work
for broadening our own knowledge and ideas on how humour works in South
Asia in unstable times. The fundamental set of questions we wanted to address
in the conference are captured in the following words from our concept note:
“What does humour do or how does it work when the political circumstances in
which we live experience ruptures or instability? Can we see humour that emerges
in these circumstances as a very specifc narrative on the nature of democracy in
the region?” We also noted at the time that “social sciences in South Asia – as a
collective enterprise” have not “posed such questions in intellectual terms so far.”
Moreover, “the basic premise upon which the conference [was] conceptualized is
that humour generated in these circumstances is not merely a matter simple ‘jokes’
with an inbuilt sense of liminality, but is meant to circulate over time with many
after-lives.” These initial ideas that drove the conference also continued to guide its
afterlife as this book began to take shape. In many ways, the book is an incomplete
answer to these questions and anxieties.
