Appropriating Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Missing Empowerment?

Since 2010, when Kalbeliya folk songs and dances of Rajasthan were inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, Kalbeliya dance has been gaining more and more popularity. Tourist imagination, mobilized by multiple actors and shaped by the mark of contested stories, greatly contributed in shaping Kalbeliya dance and in promoting its recognition as Intangible Cultural Heritage, even if Kalbeliya dance, in its present form, is undoubtedly a very recent artistic product, an invented tradition. Tourists, besides acting as critics and consumers who created the artistic and commercial value of Kalbeliya dance, have become performers of the dance, appropriating both Kalbeliya art form and the caste’s most profitable livelihood. In the last ten years, Kalbeliyas, in fact, have been experiencing the more and more pervasive presence of foreign dancers performing and teaching Kalbeliya dance both in India and back home. While the importance of foreign tourists in creating Kalbeliya dance as Intangible Cultural Heritage has been widely analyzed, their role in transmitting it has not been wholly explored. The present paper will precisely discuss the way foreign tourists turned professional dancers have been transmitting and marketing the dance on a global scale, discussing, first, how the tourist appropriation caused a “re-population” of the artistic form. Subsequently, it will question whether the foreign adoption of the dance and its outward, exotic packaging (costume, make-up, jewelry, etc.) proved detrimental for Kalbeliya dancers, preventing their empowerment or, on the contrary, the artistic appropriation by members of a dominant milieu meaningfully supported Kalbeliyas’ efforts to improve their socio-economic status.