Sound, Space, and Sovereignty in Thakar Adivasi Intermedial Storytelling

This paper examines how Thakar Adivasi performers in Pinguli, Maharashtra assert agency through heritage tourism and audio-visual Ramayana storytelling. For centuries, these artists performed intermedial forms—chitrakathi painting, string puppetry, and shadow puppetry—within systems of hereditary patronage tied to the Sawantwadi court, where caste hierarchies structured performance conditions. Today, the Gangavane and Masge families have reoriented these traditions through heritage infrastructures that bring audiences into spaces they control and worlds they imagine. I argue that sound plays a crucial role in this transformation. In performance traditions where audience attention is directed primarily toward visual objects—paintings or puppets—the performers’ bodies are partially obscured. Yet the singing and narrating voice asserts authorial presence and embodied knowledge. As paintings, puppets, and video circulate increasingly as commodities within tourist and media economies, sound remains an embodied practice that resists commodification.