They sold our festival : transnational activism and contested public memory making around Telangana ‘state festivals’

In June 2014, after a prolonged sub-national movement, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated, and the new state of Telangana was carved out of it. Soon after, the freshly constituted government of Telangana state accorded two regional festivals – Bathukamma and Bonalu – the status of ‘state festivals’, emphasising their importance in the newly formed state’s cultural repertoire. This article locates the antecedents of the government’s move within three different sites of political mobilisation: (a) the diasporic mobilisation in the US where the festivals became (at times intense) sites for cultural contestation between Andhra and Telangana migrants, (b) the local revitalisation of the festivals through a regional political party’s cultural interventions in the last leg of the movement, and (c) the prolonged agitation among left-affiliated members of the marginalised castes for whom the festival became a symbol of resistance against caste atrocities. In this article, I argue that while these differing points of mobilisations clashed over the politics of representation, they also converged in their strategic use of festivals as cultural scripts to create (competing) public memories of the movement.