Sadanand Menon: Cultural policy and its challenges

CRITICALLY INCLINED

The past year has seen a series of national seminars on the vexed issue of the possibility and impossibility of having a coherent 'cultural policy' in the Indian context. In most of these meetings that I have attended, one of the most problematic areas has been the complexities created by the confusions in terminology, inevitable in an 'old culture' trying to fit into the clothes of a 'new nation state'.

There are some infuriatingly stereotyped identity markers for 'tradition' and 'modernity' which have been inherited by the Indian state from its moment of infancy and which have caused havoc in the arena of cultural policy. One of the biggest challenges today is to work our way around the limiting notions of these stereotypes.

It is dismaying to encounter again and again, in the Indian context, the constant replay of Western descriptions "" the fictionality of what goes by the name of India as a place invested with some deep spiritual and cultural certainty. On the other hand, I imagine 'identity' more as a constant process of loss and recovery, which simultaneously accommodates the erasure of normative differences and boundaries, even while reasserting them.

In the Indian context certainly (and in many other Asian contexts), there is a battle around the notion of 'tradition-as-identity' and who speaks for it. As the leading Indian historian, R Champakalakshmi has explained, "Colonialism played a critical role in the identification and production of Indian 'tradition', devalued under conditions of colonial modernity." She further says, "The extraordinary burden of knowledge and responsibility was arrogated by the coloniser, in order to regulate knowledge, by fixing tradition." The point is this was, in turn, gleefully endorsed by the Indian elite.

One of the obvious reasons for this may be that the category tradition represented a power bloc. All those for whom the newly invented concept of tradition came as a boon were part of the nascent westernised, urban elite for whom aligning with tradition was a means of self-inscription into the body politic of an emerging nation-state, something they had been marginal and peripheral to in the earlier monarchical system and, against which, they had connived on the side of the imperial power. Now to proclaim you were traditional meant you could legitimately claim power in the present, due to your endorsement of the past.

However, tradition is not some undifferentiated, homogeneous, unitary thing. Take the case of the south Indian dance, Bharatanatyam, and how it was adapted in the late 1920s/early 1930s from its earlier version as sadirattam, performed by the socially ostracised community of devadasis. When the dance transited from the 'low-caste' dasis to the upper class/caste Brahmin community in cosmopolitan Madras, it also resulted in a bowdlerising and sanitising of the form.

The American scholar Deborah Jakubs has noted in her treatise on the 'History of the Tango' (1991), how "the upper class's distinct taste for fundamentally taboo cultural forms, is a recurrent phenomenon." In most cases we will find that dance forms originating in subaltern classes or non-dominant communities present a trajectory of upward mobility during specific phases of nation-building, during which these dances are fumigated, de-odorised, gentrified and de-eroticised. Often, during such clinical de-sexualisation and domestication of the forms, as they cross class/caste/race boundaries, we also encounter a distinct difference and transformation in body-usage as the erotic charge is sublimated within false religiosity.

In the case of Bharatanatyam in particular, the disenfranchisement of the devadasis from their hereditary artistic capital was swiftly achieved, in the space of a few decades. The instrument for this bloodless transfer was the gratuitous agency of tradition which, in the hands of the elite, merely justified such plunder by extrapolating on to it some sort of divine sanction, thus effectively distancing itself from all modernising (and, therefore, critical) tendencies. If you called yourself a dancer in the India of the 1940s, you risked being dubbed a prostitute. Thirty years later, this very dance became the flag-bearer of cultural heritage and national pride. Today, another thirty years later, the notion of dance-as-culture is being redefined by dancers of the Indian diaspora.

Similarly, 'modern identity' too has nuanced connotations. The late choreographer Chandralekha, who played a critical role in radically contemporising Bharatanatyam, repeated at several forums that, "For us modernity does not mean aping the West; we need to modernise on our own terms." My own contention is that integrationist, secular, modernist tendencies were witnessed in Indian sub-continental forms a good 2,000 years ago "" around the time most of the treatises like the Natya Shastra and similar secular texts on body, breath, music, movement and grammar were compiled. This was accompanied by an unprecedented sweep of ideas, ordering of material, listings, terminologising, computing, auditing, objective theorising and tracking of origins. So too the astounding investigative, descriptive work on breath and breath-control, body and healing practices, grammar and etymology, visual arts and issues of space and scale "" and on the integration of all these "" was happening at a time which predates such modernist concerns by millennia.

The new Indian state, by consigning all these knowledge systems to the realm of 'tradition', committed one of its most damaging vandalisms in the area of cultural policy. It is a self-damage it has not been able to recover from. In fact, one of the biggest policy challenges is to try and reverse the paralysing effects of this in the performing arts.