Another Creative Economy?

This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyond the terms of hegemonic neoliberal and Hindu constructions of creative economy. It argues that Budhan Theater provides a glimpse of such a creative economy born in the crucible of ongoing betrayals in their pursuit of rehabilitation from criminalized histories. They find ways of making their creative practices overcome the deadly inseparability of the ways in which the police and governmental patronage of Chhara survival continues to patronize Chhara stigma. Budhan Theater this chapter argues, finds a line of flight that refuses the divisive sectarianism and the violent, hegemonic patronage systems within which the conditions of survival for the urban poor and the politics among the oppressed has become contained in India.