Professional Weeping: Music, Affect, and Hierarchy in a South Indian Folk Performance Art

This chapter examines oppari, a lament form in South Indian folk culture, as performed by professional men from Dalit communities. Oppari involves emotional song texts, wails, shrieks, and sobs that professional performers craft, deploy, and develop deliberately and strategically in performance. The chapter undertakes deconstructive analysis to expose mechanisms by which professional men’s oppari marginalizes women and their expressions and explores various double binds in which professionals find themselves as they perform. Struggling within the grip of double binds, he cultivates an aesthetic professionalism that allows him to successfully do his job while maintaining distance from death, widowhood, and genuine spontaneous emotions. Key to this professionalism is the assertion that his oppari is not spontaneous or personal expression, but a form of music—a performance art. To define oppari as music or non-music is to take sides in ongoing struggles of Dalit musicians over their status within Tamil society.