@article{THESIS,
      recid = {4789},
      author = {Rimbault, Eléonore},
      title = {Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of  India's Big Top Circus },
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {253},
      abstract = {This dissertation surveys the disappearance of the Indian  circus as it unfolds in the Southern state of Kerala,  particularly around a town in the region of Malabar,  Thalassery, known locally as “the cradle of the Indian  circus”. I examine the ways people in this region remember  the circus as a cultural form, and how, through their  continuous recollection of it, they collectively produce  this cultural form as one which is disappearing. I evidence  that despite the prevalent impression that this decline is  accelerating, the circus’ disappearance is neither a new,  nor a quick phenomenon. In fact, archival sources suggest  that the circus has been disappearing in Malabar for almost  as long as circus shows started being produced in their  current, post-Independence form. I analyze the reasons why,  and the aesthetic choices by which, circus companies exist  in a gerundial temporality of perennial  disappearing.Disappearance, I argue, is a perspectival  phenomenon: it is only visible from sites where this  process is collectively meaningful, and at specific times,  defined simultaneously by the historical conjuncture and in  relation to one’s life course. In other words, it is a  phenomenon most likely to unfold when collective frameworks  of sociality encourage such conceptualizations of a  cultural form, and at a point in someone’s life when  looking back is subjectively meaningful. For these reasons,  the circus’ disappearance stands out the most in Malabar  because of the way it nestles into the lives of the  region’s retired circus professionals, and in the  biographical trajectories of their families, which have  sought to move on from the past circumstances that brought  the circus into their lives.

Disappearance ties the  ‘golden age’ of the Indian circus to the lives of ageing,  retired or retiring professionals, rather than to people  actively involved with the circus today – to whom,  tellingly, this anticipated circus disappearance is not  always apparent. Senior circus artists, managers and owners  once traveled with the circus show on routes much wider  than that of current companies. They performed in a  dispensation of the circus – involving spectacular wild  animals and child trainees – which has been restricted and  transformed since the 1990s by of a series of legal battles  about animal and children welfare. This arc of the circus’  decline serves as scaffolding for the biographical  recollections of former circus professionals. It  crystallizes such changes (the ban on animals, the rescue  of children trainees) as the frontier to an irretrievable  circus past, and condenses this past as an unmatchable  standard to which present shows try to conform, eliciting  nostalgia and disappointment from spectators.  Disappearance, then, places Malabari circus professionals  on the more respectable side of that divide and dismisses  current shows as a mere afterimage of what circus  entertainment used to be.

Combining ethnographic fieldwork  conducted between 2018 and 2021 in Malabar and in active  Kerala-based circus companies, and an analysis of the  historical record for circus events since the 1850s in  India, I trace the maintenance and transformations of the  circus’ disappearance. I provide insight on the ways  remembering, understood as a collectively sustained human  practice, is both continuously attuned to the present  context and (re)produces contemporary forms of sociality.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4789},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4789},
}