Paper short abstract:

The Burhva Mangal, a boat festival featuring Hindustani music and dance in Varanasi was one of the central cultural events of the city publicly patronised by the gentry. Its original form as well as its current revivals will allow us to reconsider the ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ distinction.

Paper long abstract:

The Burhva Mangal, a boat festival featuring Hindustani music and dance in the city of Varanasi, was throughout the 18th and 19th c. one of the central cultural events of the city. The performances of the musicians and courtesans organised on houseboats possessed or hired by the rajas, landlords and merchants from the city and other nearby urban centres were central to the event. Thousands of people from the City and from the whole region gathered on the river shore or on smaller boats to witness this gentry's entertainment.

In the first decades of the 20th c., the Burhva Mangal collapsed, progressively abandoned by the city gentry and targeted by heavy critiques from the reformist-oriented local press, which considered it as an archaic and immoral practice especially embodied by the presence of courtesans. After several unsuccessful attempts, it was recreated in the 1990s by the Uttar Pradesh Government and also, during the last four years, by an informal group belonging to several local powerful families of music lovers and patrons.

From the cross-analysis of the written and oral sources and of the ethnography of its revivals, I propose to investigate how this festival, in its original as well as revived form, allows us to question the link between patronage patterns and power, thus reconsidering the 'elite' and 'popular' distinction. As an ambiguous apparatus of power and prestige, the Burhva Mangal will also help us by enriching the debate on how North-Indian elites use public cultural performances as a way to assess their place in the city's power relations.