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VOL. XXIV NO. 12, October 1-15, 2014
Of culture & commerce
(by Indira Parthasarathy)

Art and commerce are strange bedfellows. And in India during the nineties of the last century, there was a sudden awakening. To put India on the world map of wealth and prosperity, we thought that we had to opt for gigantic consumerism, as in the rich Western nations, especially the US, and try aping their corporate cultural values and norms.

P.V. Narasimha Rao, India’s Prime Minister then, conceived the idea of a free market-oriented economy and Manmohan Singh, his Finance Minister, delivered it, paving the way for corporate moghuls. And there was this technological boom when every young person became a whiz kid, whose short and long range vision was money and making more money. Love of art and aesthetics for their own sake became the casualty. Every aspect of our living became related to the value of money. In a free-for-all kind of economy, with buyers and sellers, conditioned by bulls and bears, with very little breathing space for art and culture, corporate czars took over the business of art. Literature, theatre, cinema and fine arts acquired values determined by their market value in terms of money. No other critical yardstick as handed down to us by our traditional concepts of culture were necessary. In such an unhealthy environment of cultural confusion and decay, how can you expect the young of the country to be aware of their past heritage and withstand the onslaught of contemporary trends?

Look at our cultural institutions. Though they were established to integrate the various cultural aspects of this great country, they rarely collaborate with one another in organising integrated cultural festivals or seminars.

India is a synthetic fabric of many coloured threads with different regional cultural forms for which there is one well-defined fabric of what we have known from time immemorial as ‘Indian culture’, as the bottomline of this great concept. Have these cultural institutions, which have been in existence for several decades, succeeded in carrying this message to the youth of this country? Instead, the country is getting divided further and further into various claustrophobic cultural pockets distanced from one another. The National School of Drama every year stages hundreds of plays in different Indian languages in Delhi during its national festival. The Malayalam play is seen by the Keralites in Delhi, the Tamil play is seen by the Tamils in Delhi, and so on. Were all these cultural institutions created to perpetuate this division?

How did the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, though written in a language which is not the mother tongue of any single community in India, become an intrinsic part of the national and cultual psyche of all the regions of Bharat, where every region has adopted the stories befitting its own cultural genius but retained the spirit and soul of the epics as a whole? Was there a Sahitya Akademi or National Book Trust at the time to organise translations of these works?

The reason is not far to seek. There was free interaction between the people of various regions in this country in the form of pilgrimages, temple festivals, cultural and philosophical debates, music and dance melas, without the interference of a political government. This continued to happen till the 1930s and 1940s. There were individual patrons of art and culture, who promoted a national art consciousness among the various sections of the people, transcending the caste and linguistic barriers.

Secondly, the concept of classical and popular art never existed in those days. This division is an idea imported from the West which, during the period of industrilisation, the rich – having lost the feudatory privileges – created. The famous literary critic Leslie Fiedler asks, “Between elitism and populism, how would you rate Shakespeare? A classical poet or popular poet? The illiterate Elizabethan masses loved him as their darling. In the same way, we can also ask “Was Valmiki or Vyasa or Tulsidas or Kamban an elitist or popular poet?” The young people of today, having surrendered their taste to the worship of Mammon, do not ask themselves these questions and have become the children of a bastardised culture. It is the responsibility of the artistes and cultural activists to start a movement, as Vivekananda did for spiritualism, to reclaim our national culture, which is our due. – (Courtesy: Sruti).

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In this issue

Window opened on heritage
City pedestrian plaza being planned
Madras Landmarks - 50 years ago
Of culture & commerce
Bridge-building tales of yore
Catching a wave to the future
Growth of advertising in Madras
First days at Madras Medical
Lady with a diamond nose stud
Pioneering mobike production

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