The Battlefields in the Extracurricular: From Performance to Litigation

This discussion traces the interfaces of education and popular culture by examining the sites of the “extracurricular” in school life. From a range of extracurricular terrains in educational institutions, the focus here is on the dynamics of cultural and artistic expressions and performance enacted in the state sponsored School Arts Festivals in Kerala, the south west coastal state of India. At the core of this account is the dialogue between popular culture and schooling—imbued by political and economic factors—and importantly, the emergent legal dimension in the conduct of the festival.