Indian art's vanishing trick

Samyukta Bhowmick sits in on an India Foundation for the Arts meeting.

The India Foundation for the Arts had its annual board meeting at the Neemrana Fort Palace Resort last weekend. The philanthropic group has been around since 1993, and gives, on average, 14-15 grants a year to promising artists.

Its star-studded board includes people from all walks of life, such as the arts (Shyam Benegal and Chitra Visweswaran, for instance) and industry (Gurcharan Das, Simone Tata, MV Subbiah and Priya Paul, among others), and the Foundation is headed by theatre artist, director and one-time teacher of philosophy Anmol Vellani, who also used to be with the Ford Foundation.

The IFA has done much work to be admired over the last eight years; it has worked in 17 states, had a hand in over 125 projects, and donated a total of over Rs 6.2 crore.

It appears, now, however, to be getting restless, and this latest board meeting focused on how best it could expand itself from a mere grant-giving organisation into a broader resource for artists.

"We have made a concentrated effort not to be associated with any one type of art form," says executive director Vellani. "Our grantees are aged from 23 to 60, and they represent all kinds of arts. We've given grants to projects that range from the documentation of fading cultural practices to digital art projects."

According to one staff member, most of the grants (which range, according to Vellani, from Rs 80,000 to Rs 55 lakh, averaging at Rs 3-6 lakh for most individual grantees) go to individuals who are documenting disappearing traditional arts.

Two such grantees were present at the board meeting last weekend. Moushumi Bhowmick, a singer/songwriter herself, is documenting the works and lives of folk singers in West Bengal and Bangladesh, with particular reference to songs of 'biraha' or separation.

She gave a thoughtful, well-researched presentation that made clear how familiar she was, not just with the culture she was researching, but the people who made it up.

The other grantee was a filmmaker from Delhi, Gurvinder Singh, who has made a film about the wandering Sufi singers of Punjab. His film also offered a rare and at times touching glimpse into the lives of these artists, spent entirely in the realm of art.

These men spend years learning legends that are passed down orally from generation to generation, perform them at weddings and religious festivals, and then try to ensure that they are passed on "" which last is largely becoming a lost battle.

These presentations were the meeting place, both literally and figuratively, between the work at grassroots level that the young grantees do, and the removed world of the trustees.

At times this meeting seemed to be rife with misunderstanding, such as when well-intentioned trustees, horrified at Singh's statement that there were only half a dozen Sufi groups left in Punjab, offered various ready-to-wear solutions, such as a tie-up with fertiliser or tractor companies who would sponsor a group in exchange for 15 minutes of advertisements during one of their performances.

"Sometimes there is a slight gap in communication," admitted Singh, who looked a bit worried about how Punjabi folk groups might react to this kind of sponsorship, "but by and large these kinds of meets are beneficial to the kind of groups I am documenting. For instance, [Francis Wacziarg, co-chairman, Neemrana Hotels, and IFA trustee] offered to bring them to Neemrana for a concert in August. Now, if that happens, it would be incredibly helpful."

It is because the IFA believe in this kind of philanthropy, the kind that doesn't just throw money at causes, but stops to debate and discuss the direction it wants to go in and the larger impact it wants to make, that makes its work so important.

To the artists who benefit from it, at least, it is a crucial forum. "I think the IFA is doing a great job," says Bhowmick, "and it's so accessible. Most of my friends at college knew about it; it was just a question of writing up a proposal and sending it out. At the first stage, they even helped me structure my proposal before they sent it out to the evaluators. My grant is worth Rs 4 lakh, paid in two installments."

Although the IFA, like any good financial institution, keeps close tabs on exactly what is done with its money (grantees have to provide accurate break-ups of where it's all going), both the grantees seemed very at home with the staff, and both said that working with the IFA was like working within a family.

Further evidence of the IFA's commitment to the nurture of the arts beyond mere sponsorship lies in the course it teaches at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, called "Tracking Creative Boundaries", where it uses art and art history to teach students relevant skills that their business classes cannot quite reach.

"This course is anchored on the lives of artists," says Vellani. "Their personalities, the fact that they're mostly dissatisfied, restless, suspicious of accepted idioms and constantly reinventing themselves, can teach everyone a little bit about what it means to be creative. And this is a huge part of your job in business, the fact that you don't just need technique and textbook knowledge, but the ability to apply it to life."

The course is the second most popular in the entire university, and IFA has just started a similar course at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA).

Although at the moment, the profile of the IFA, at least outside artistic circles, is low, it is to be hoped that with its new plans of expansion, it will soon be more in the public eye.

For the arts in this country have somehow been relegated to a shadowy area outside of the mainstream, in practice (with a deeply restrictive snob value attached to many fine arts), in academia (most young students prefer to take courses in more 'practical' subjects), and in heritage conservation (it is largely believed that public funds can do much better work elsewhere).

But the IFA has brought together all these branches, and the work it is doing is important both to sustain our rich cultural past and to encourage our growing talent.

As Vellani put it in a speech he made in Bangalore, where the Foundation is based, in March 2003, "In a country like India, among the poorest of the poor are people whose livelihood depends on some form of cultural production. Enabling inherited cultural vocations to thrive and prosper is thus not just a matter of protecting our living cultural expression; it is a matter of sustaining livelihoods and lifting people out of poverty. It is also a matter of empowering people to live by their choices. Should private wealth and corporate expertise not be used to help give traditional groups of art producers an entrepreneurial edge while sustaining their knowledge base and skills?"

Given India's current stride towards development, this is a pertinent question indeed, and one that should be asked more often to our increasingly affluent industrialists by groups such as the IFA.

GRANT PROFILES

art research and documentation (for scholarly research in the arts)

new performance (for productions in performance arts, involving some form of innovation, for instance multilingualism, new media, or previously unaddressed subjects)

extending arts practices (for artists who want to extend their area of expertise, or challenge norms in their field, experiment or expand with a new art form or work with other artists, or work in a new environment)

special grants (mostly, but not exclusively, for non-profit art organisations or community-based art forms)

arts education (for individuals to research teaching practices and policies, or for institutions of education to expand their arts curricula)

For more information, visit the website: www.indiaifa.org