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