India is a diverse country with various linguistic and ethnic influences and when we speak of Indian-ness we actually attempt to address the most important ingredient of it all – our culture.
What defines Indian culture today is the context in which we look at our history, traditions, folklore, customs, story telling and various cultural narratives, both historical and modern. Culture includes social behavior of the society. What we require today is a holistic approach as we argue the case for Indian ethos and its impact on society at large.
In the past few decades, culture as a subject has got trapped in the annals of power and lost in files. The debate around culture has also been torn apart by varied ideological differences between selfappointed cultural pundits. So, when we talk of state patronage of the “arts”, do we mean investing in the future of the country or is it an attempt to preserve a culture by turning it into a most watched performance.
It is high time an integrated and comprehensive policy on culture is drafted and implemented. All political parties should be brought across the table to decide upon a common minimum agenda on cultural issues connected with the Vedas, languages, folklore and tribals; joining the dots, bringing culture into contact with the ‘education revolution’, with technology and innovation, and with its role in binding the social fabric of the nation.
The British left us with a policy of doles and support to “ethnic tribal art” and sadly that has continued even today. This in itself is highly erroneous as a thought as it is distinctive only as an anthropological definition and not a sociological one.
What’s the responsibility of the state? Yes, it does have the responsibility to preserve and promote culture and all art forms alike, but the patronage does not have to limit to financial support alone. The state can go beyond providing mere financial support to cultural bodies, firstly, by introducing cultural education in school curriculum across the nation and thus inculcating in the young, impressionable minds a sense of pride about their roots and heritage. Secondly, the need is to take debates on dying arts out of seminar rooms and resurrect and preserve lost folk and ethnic forms by creating a narrative that is new, an idiom that can be understood by the young.
We also need to encourage and preserve institutes that undertake research and appraisal of both theory and practice of forms that face extinction – like languages – which have been lost over long periods. In a country where every thirty kilometres the language, food, customs and traditions change dramatically, it may sound like a tall order but then we also have the resource of those many millions that can become an asset value to this process.
As market economies make everything commercial, culture increasingly brinks on being hinged on state investment – both financially and structurally – making things more complex. The many grants that are given to various academies, culture centres and directorates need a review in context of a monitoring mechanism to make this support more meaningful.
In a globalised world, we tend to forget the beauty of the nuanced artists far away in a village of our vast country. So, what we need is a convergence of the patronage that culture requires or receives and the real situation of carrying forward the tradition that’s intrinsic to our spirit. Yes, the state will support it but so will the people if only we could bridge the gap between the performer and the viewer, after all dialogues will only occur between them.
It is said that when culture declines, art flourishes. Writers and artists silently revolt against the corrupt system through the medium of their art and attempt to bring about a cultural change. For any intellectualised society, varied and enriched social and cultural activity is an essential condition. This, in other words, means not only giving preference to societal intellectual achievement rather than the individual intellectual attainment, but also denoting an acceptance and admittance of plurality of ideas.
Intellectualising a society means the willing participation in various debates and discussions in an attempt to assess and evaluate the veracity and efficacy of traditionally-held opinions and beliefs.
This further means the evaluation and revaluation of a living tradition from time to time. Intellectualising a society also means the acceptance of the belief that social change is desired and that such a change is possible to achieve through human endeavour. It means increasing socio-cultural and political awareness by creating a public space for everyone in the society with a view to making one ultimately a responsible and concerned citizen of the society. Even philanthropy for public causes is part of that intellectualising process. Such awareness in the end results in creating and strengthening a civil society through previously-established as-well-as newlycreated organisations and thus, leading the society into becoming a civil society with a civic culture. A civil society with a civic culture generally results in the blossoming of public life in all its aspects. A policy on culture will surely ensure this. Or all we will be left with is, as said in theatre, “Between God and the audience no one knows…”