An Ideology for Life?
Although Jana Natya Manch’s working-class theater poses an ideological challenge to hegemonic creativity for neoliberal capitalism and Hindu nationalism, this chapter analyzes the historical, affective and political incitements and messy collaborations between ideological opposites. This middle-class troupe’s plays dedicated to working-class struggles confront the challenge and decimation of labor struggle through a life-long commitment to Marxian critique. Far from an ahistorical commitment, their ‘ideology for life’ responds to contemporary challenges, in part by memorializing the personal, subjective, and spatial deaths of ideal leaders and sites of worker struggle. Memorialization and nostalgia largely distances them from working-class lives, but it makes their politics and performance effective sites for contemporary constructions of progressive middle-classness in Delhi whilst generating an inadvertent embrace of creative economies discourse.