Urban life and the arts

Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART) is run by a team under the aegis of the India Theatre Forum and managed by Junoon Theatre and India Foundation for the Arts. Junoon co-founder Sanjna Kapoor, Nachiket Mor, the India director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Arundhati Ghosh, executive director of IFA and core member of SMART, discuss the importance of the arts in urban life

Sanjna Kapoor: Urbanisation is inevitable in our country. How can we create a vibrant and humane urban landscape across India? Of course, we have come here to talk about the arts.

Nachiket Mor: Urbanisation is perhaps the most powerful change. My understanding is that a human being needs a social structure and an emotional support system in order to survive. Fortunately, the family is still intact in rural setups. You take them to an urban setting, it’s an enormous challenge. And, one of the reasons why I have been a strong believer of the work Sanjna does is that I think theatre would be quite essential; we cannot imagine cities that are simply roads and drains and high rises. Very soon you will start seeing crime exploding, you will start seeing youth getting rootless because you are going to have to need them to do something. 

SK: How do you think that the arts could play a role?

Arundhati Ghosh: What urbanisation does is that it breaks the connection that an individual has with larger groups, be it family or community. The arts and culture — whether it is with Mumbai Local, which Junoon does in Mumbai, or Ringan in Pune, Addas that Vikram Iyengar does in Kolkata or what IFA does as Mathukathe in Bengaluru — are recreating that community life with like-spirited people. What the arts and culture can provide to a city is enabling spaces of shared experience of humanity. 

SK: What would we imagine as a few definite facilities that need to be put in place in this urbanised India?

NM: My understanding is modern cities are designed around sports facilities and arts facilities. I lived in Philadelphia for many years (in the 1980s). It was really doing very badly — crime had taken over, the inner cities were just unbelievable. The mayor led the revival of the city through art. Clearly, cities have to think beyond drainage systems and building systems and provide explicit capital not just to build infrastructure but to support artists. I mean, saying here is a tax budget for the arts, here is a tax budget for the sport. 

AG: But what is to be kept in mind is also that it is accessible. Often what happens is the way the arts are provided is discriminatory, in the sense that people who can access it are from a certain class.

The whole idea of SMART is the kind of theatre that you are talking about. It is for those groups to be able to imagine sustenance for themselves. What happens is a programme that enables a certain way of thinking that says we know that you are already doing great creative work but that alone is not enough. You need to understand the context that you work in and the problems that the context throws at you. So, you need to understand how to resource mobilise, how to build audiences, how to communicate.

What they do in the programme is essentially look at a three-year road map. There are thousands of organisations that come up and die an unceremonial death because they are not able to continue their work because of (a lack of) resources et cetera. In a country like India where CSR money goes to all kinds of causes, which are very vital causes, how do the arts then sustain? 

NM: It’s an important question. We in India, rightly, think about farmers as very important communities that need to be supported. Why is it that we do not think about artists in that way?

AG: In India, it’s a very peculiar schizophrenia that we have. The arts and culture are very much part of our everyday lives. From the time we are born, there are rituals and stories. Then there is this sudden shift where we start asking whether the arts and culture are integral or not. I think Western modernism has something to do with that. Traditional theatre groups never really thought of audience development separately from their work because they never saw themselves as different from the audience. The theatre group supported by the community. The Western idea is that that you are the artist and I am the audience. I have to actively participate to be part of it. It’s not integral. We don’t see them as integral when we are planning a city or even planning a business. 

NM: I think in a poor country, there is a belief that these needs come later; self-actualisation always seem to be the last idea. 

SK: Also persuade the artist community that we are part of this. We have to be persuaded about our value. That’s what SMART is doing. We are taking ourselves extremely seriously, in contributing to the nation what we believe needs to be the future.