Cultural Practices and well being of marginal communities

The articulation of a liberatory praxis around ‘culture’ warrants sensitivity and empathy to perspectives of the marginal communities, for whom culture is neither a luxury nor only a value but relates to the totality of all practices and experience embedded in the material reality of their everyday existence. In fact we prefer to use the term cultural practices rather than ‘culture’ alone as it allows us to move beyond the restricted sense in which ‘culture’ is usually deployed as ‘high culture’, ‘heritage’, ‘individual excellence / creativity in art/ craft’- and bring into focus rustic and earthy notions of cultural practices as ‘concrete and real philosophies of life’ of not just individuals but better understood as belonging to communities as a whole. In fact it is this notion of community traditions that is sought to be invoked in many articulations of sustaining ‘living heritage’ of folk / tribal communities. But since most of these articulations predicate on an understanding of culture as heritage, and not as practice rooted in the material reality, they tend to ignore the holism and dynamism of these cultural creativities and end up freezing them in museum boxes or representing them as essentiallized genres.

‘Culture’ as embedded in this context of ‘practices’ is the site of local knowledge based on and nurtured by everyday practices of communities. It is this epistemic inventory that is the source of resilience for survival- expressed differently as to inherit; to adapt / adopt invent- demonstrated by the local communities to negotiate new challenges of life. Such a perspective conceives of the relation between humans and nature as a complex web of inter-relationships, a ‘community of beings’ worldview- the fuller meaning of which is intelligible not only through rational cognitive abilities alone but through experience (having deep veneration and a ring of spirituality) as well, ecological practices in this worldview become bio-cultural regenerative practices in the genuine sense

Although this cultural capital is conceived as part of capability, one of the key concepts on which sustainable livelihoods approaches are based, in practice, it has been often observed that “…the implications of the role of culture on capability have not been fully appreciated”. Sustainable livelihoods frameworks do not explicitly integrate the exploration of cultural variables, such as worldviews, beliefs, traditions and the historical experiences that shape people’s livelihoods.

Cultural practices are not easy raw material to be tailored to market needs. At the same time there is a critical need to engage with the realm of the ‘intangible assets of our living cultural heritage’ and its ‘incredibly diverse service providers’ in a manner as culture doyen Rajjev Sethi argues ‘to benefit the more than 250 million craftspeople in India in a meaningful and transformative manner’. In order that this passionate call for an engagement with the living cultural traditions does not degenerate into an elitist rhetoric, it requires transcending not only the dissipative bureaucratic dispensations but listening to and including the voices of the communities of rural creators as central to our planning processes.

A radical demystification of the framework for culture necessitates asking questions like what constitutes and reinvigorates creativity as a community practice, how is it related not only to enhancing incomes and opening market opportunities but equally to notions of well being, dignity and happiness; what are the processes that need to be followed for integrating the voices of the rural creators in constituting decentralized and self sustaining cultural / creative industries that situate their existence not as subservient to the logics of elite perspectives and market but to perspectives of realization of self rooted in local tradition and community; what is the potential and legitimacy of the meanings inherent in the cultural practices of the rural creators in not only generating knowledge from below but embodying it to constitute and represent empowering processes and institutions; advocating for the inclusion of oral testimony and voices of the marginal in understanding and constituting development practices and policies; how can the reality of multiple options of the livelihoods cycle of the marginal communities in the rural areas be understood in a holistic manner to facilitate planning of interventions that have an integrative rather than a dissipative logic, trying to move away from simplistic ways of seeing reality of the marginal as divided into on farm and non-farm categories; how can the concepts of resilience, interdependence and diversity inherent in the holism of sustainable livelihoods approach be integrated into our development practice with reference to the marginal communities.

Read more on cultural perspectives on rural livelihoods, position paper

Photo Credits:

Shaitan bhat displaying his skills,Nagore, Rajasthan, By Swasti Singh

Culture as heritage and Commerce of Culture

India’s ‘nationalist’ intelligentsia in effecting the transition from a British colony to a nation-in-making imbibed the Keynesian postulate on the ‘seminal necessity and effectiveness of public intervention in managing the economic system’. These ideas laid as Sukhamoy Chakravarty points out, “… the foundations of a ‘strongly interventionist and reformist nation state’, whose primary aim …was acquisition of economic strength and …grow much faster to bridge the initial gap of per capita income… to avoid neo-colonial domination”.In underdevelopment’ as the cognitive foundation of signing a ‘tryst with destiny’, the Indian bourgeoisie had to invent traditions, forge symbols and construct creation myths for the new nation.

The chosen few, especially those who as Kapila Vatsayan points out, “…went through the long, arduous and devious journey of being steeped in Western civilization only to travel back to their cultural roots, richer and deeper…” were entrusted with this task of crafting what could be presented and patronized as a legitimate version of Indian culture. This concern for creation of a package of national culture / past to ground Indian national identity selectively drew from a repository of cultural continuity stretching back to five thousand years ago, was at ease in placating the feudal cultural paraphernalia of different princely states, duly acknowledged the debt of the colonial masters in their efforts at ‘discovery of India’, was cautious enough in creating meta-narratives of Indian history with syncretism and pluralism as key values, was astute enough in integrating Khadi as a nationalistic symbol and the living traditions of folk / tribal art / craft were appropriated as ethnographic curiosities or handicraft exotica in the national wonder cabinet that had foreign exchange value. Culture as heritage was to play an important role in foreign diplomacy, in representing the ethos of the uniqueness of Indian civilization in creating and maintaining relations with other countries.

A perusal of five- year plans suggests that ‘culture’ continued to be planned for as ‘cultural heritage’, which ‘had to be promoted by drawing up plans for the preservation of monuments and sites of historic and national ’. This was to be complemented by the ‘setting up of cultural institutions in the field of Archaeology, Anthropology, Ethnography, Archives, Libraries, Museums, Art Akademies etc’. The foundations of cultural diplomacy were firmly laid by setting up of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations in the seventies. Since 1970’s, culture as heritage was linked to education and attention was “…given to increasing the cultural awareness among the students by strengthening the cultural content of the curriculum at various stages of education…” to help in building up the cultural and social identity of the nation.

It needs to be pointed out that the meta- discourse around culture as heritage does concern itself with development as welfare of the ‘economically underprivileged’ and ‘illiterate’ communities, at best only in a tangential manner. Development has been a by- product of what has been called ‘commerce of culture’ to refer to the exports of handicrafts that go hand in hand with the ideals of cultural diplomacy and market interests of the rich. To the Handicrafts were added other ‘cultural products’ created with the raw material of the cultural practices of the marginal communities notably the performing arts.

The articulation of culture as heritage survives as a dominant refrain in development planning to this day. Most of the assumptions from the nation-in-the-making era have continued, although the defining context of much of the contemporary discussion is increasingly being dominated by market culture. The Ministry of Culture (GoI), defining cultural heritage ‘as a resource for growth and identity rooted in the past’ floated the National Culture Fund in 1996 as an innovation in the patterns of funding for cultural issues primarily for protection of historical monuments in India. The approach paper of the eleventh five year plan mentions ‘culture’ as “…a very important integrating force’ and stresses that ‘conservation and promotional activities of cultural heritage call for ensuring dissemination of our composite culture, promote all regional languages, to sustain the folk and traditional art, and to maintain, document, research and propagate dissemination of the intangible cultural heritage.

While communities are mostly seen as subjects of development welfare and political manipulation, they are seldom seen as human beings with creative potentials inherited orally through traditions that were generations old. What is unfortunate is that most attempts at documenting and constitution of knowledge on these performing communities continues to be impelled by folkloristic concerns or ethnographic desires having colonial and pre-colonial roots or sentimental nostalgic narratives about changing times from the idyllic and rustic rural landscape to urban metros, of tales of ‘vanishing traditions’ inscribed in tropes of inevitability of modernization.

Photos: Paradise Lost: The Palamu Fort, Jharkhand

Anada ram, a puppeteer from Nagore, Rajasthan (By Swasti Singh)

High culture and marginal cultural practices

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The bewitching and grotesque displays, laden with desires and fantasies, simulating mechanized copies with a pace matched only by the rapacious appetite for devouring commodities transmogrified into visual symbols characterizes much of the cultural hubris of the high culture of the rich. These dominant representations of culture claim exclusivity over the zone of aesthetics jealously proclaiming creativity as their own coveted domain annihilating, denigrating and co-opting the creative expressions of the marginal. This cultural logic is quite compatible with the cultural lexicon of the state which, having marshaled considerable sophistry since its inception in the heydays of Indian development planning, thrives on articulations of culture as heritage or creative expressions residing in art academies and galleries that are sanctified by the mandarins of culture well entrenched in the echelons of state power. In today’s post industrial age, to complete the gismo of celebrating the rites of culture as an elitist inventory of luxury, of cultivated tastes and pristine heritage, these high priests are joined in by professionals and representatives of corporate industry and media syndicates.

In sharp contrast to this, the age old exquisite collective cultural traditions of performing arts and crafts of the marginal communities have either withered away into oblivion or exist boxed as permanent collections in museums or patronized as individual excellence awards to folk artists and the ‘…majority of them are doomed to survive amidst misery and debt’. Thriving on the rhetoric of ‘heritage’ and ‘welfare’ many of these cultural traditions have been transmuted into casual wage earning and bare subsistence strategies as becomes evident in the manner in which these traditions are represented as commodities in the fairs and festivals that have proliferated in the urban spaces of metros, cities and even towns. Rather than basing themselves on ethical values of fair trade, on dignified relations of equality among the customer and creator, most of these show-windows draw on a weird mix of neo-feudal and modern paternalistic attitudes that perpetuate unequal relations where the rural creators are promised a speck of security from an ‘economy of tragic choices’. The ‘perennial potential’ for development of Indian crafts ‘remains only very partially tapped’. The millions of craftspeople who produce these goods “…truly get the ‘short end of the stick’ and most still struggle for the very basics of existence”. The penchant for exhibitionism by high culture devours the living heritage of exquisite techniques of handmade objects, rustic and passionate renderings of folk songs and ballads while the issues of dignity of these marginal groups are often reduced to symbolic snippets and interludes from tales of drudgery faced by the rural artisans or performing artists. The aesthetics of ecstatic tonalities and dexterous handwork of these bearers of living cultural traditions gets drowned in the shrill clamor of everyday survival as atomized beings, mere adjuncts to the derogatively titled unorganized or informal sector.

Photos:

Junagardh Fort, Bikaner by Guman Singh Soda

Poster at Sadiq Khan Mirasi Lok Kala Kendra, Jafli Kalan, Barmer by Rahul Ghai