India’s Non-Policy towards the Diversity of Arts and Culture

 

As defined by UNESCO, an arts and culture policy encompasses governmental actions, laws and programs that regulate, protect, encourage and financially support activities related to the arts, such as dance, music, literature etc., and culture, which may involve further actions related to language, heritage and diversity. 

 

India ratified the UNESCO Convention 2005 on 15 December 2006. It calls for the protection, promotion and dissemination of the diversity of cultural expressions and is based on the guiding principle that culture is a driving force for sustainable development (article 13). The government has agreed to report continuously on main achievements in implementing the objectives set out in the convention. In fact, India’s first - and until today only - report was handed in on 29 April 2015, almost ten years after the ratification. It shows that India’s institutional set-up - the first and foremost condition for promoting, facilitating and disseminating cultural diversity and creative expressions - has not changed in the last decade. 

 

 

Institutional support for arts and culture has been delegated by the Ministry of Culture to autonomous institutions, attached or subordinate offices and zonal cultural centers (a kind replacement for the non-existent ministries of culture at state and territory level). Furthermore, 26 grant-in-aid schemes are distributed to cultural organizations or individuals engaged in the promotion of arts and culture in the form of financial assistance. Together, this model of sponsorship and network of institutions constitute India’s unofficial or unstated cultural policy in terms of agenda, objectives, measures as well as financial, structural, and human resources. They are solely financed by the government and act at arm’s length for the federal Ministry of Culture.

 

At first glance, this current institutional infrastructure seems reasonable. However, there is general consensus by Indian artists, arts managers and cultural entrepreneurs whom the author interviewed that it has actually led to four major shortcomings and challenges:

 

 

This regrettable state of affairs was already confirmed in July 1990 (!) by the report of the High-powered Committee, also known as the ‘Haksar Report’. It stated that the institutions have no identifiable influence on Indian arts and culture. The state cultural organizations are "passive” and "dysfunctional” - a fact that was highlighted time and again by the interview partners of the author.

 

 

State control over the institutions was supposed to be minimal. However, members of these institutions and their committees, responsible for making decisions on programs and sponsorships, used to belong or still belong to the Ministry of Culture. This jeopardizes the independence of these supposedly ‘autonomous’ institutions and possibly opens venues for censorship and corruption. (Hampel 2017, p. 92, 131, 157) 

 

In addition, according to many Indian cultural operators, artistic quality plays no role in the selection process for public sponsorships. Transparent public principles that define eligibility for funding as well as a related necessary evaluation do not exist. Arundhati Ghosh, Director of the India Foundation for the Arts in Bangalore (IFA), highlighted already in 2013 that the funding scheme does not seriously engage with the infrastructural needs of India’s art scene such as professional trainings or spaces for rehearsals and exhibitions. This is the very approach that would be necessary to eventually improve the accessibility of arts and creative activities for citizens and to promote artistic, musical, ethnic, sociolinguistic, literary and other expressions for everyone.

 

 

The national cultural sponsorship scheme neglects non-traditional art forms relative to traditional arts, handicrafts and the protection or maintenance of the national cultural heritage. One of the many underfinanced contemporary art projects is ‘Tifli’. This international theatre festival for children in Delhi receives very little support from the government, as explained by its initiator Imran Khan in The Indian Express in May 2018. And with regard to India’s external cultural relations and outreach, art which does not belong to the genre of classical dance and music and which is not perceived as being in conformity with Indian culture typically associated outside India - such as Buddhism, Bollywood, Yoga and Ayurveda - is neither supported nor presented. 

 

As formulated in the UNESCO Convention 2005, the role of culture is that of an agent of national integration and social development. This clashes with the Indian government’s national ideology of "celebrating ‘Indian-ness’ rather than engaging critically with India’s present-day realities […] being tribal, feudal, modern and post-modern all at once”, as analyzed by Anmol Vellani (2006), founder and former executive director of the IFA. 

 

The consequence is that the contemporary art scene in India lacks infrastructure, for example in the form of professional development opportunities for artists and cultural actors or spaces for rehearsals and exhibitions. Also, there are hardly any permanent institutions that are not financially dependent on a specific patron, according to Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective in New Delhi in a conversation with the author (Hampel 2017, p. 94). That way a diversity of cultural expressions, as formulated in the UNESCO Convention 2005, cannot be displayed. 

 

 

However, according to an internal government audit, even this tiny proportion is not spent completely: Only 70 % of meager state funds assigned to culture are actually distributed, mostly benefitting traditional arts, whereas contemporary arts continue to lack the desperately required infrastructure. (Hampel 2017, p. 108 et seq.)

 

At the same time, the state remains the primary supporter of culture because of a lack of alternative funding sources. There are only very few other organizations - or individuals - devoted to financing arts and culture beside the government so far. Most institutions finance themselves through private donations from their immediate neighborhood (for example civil-society initiatives) or are supported by foreign cultural institutes or the cultural departments of foreign embassies, mainly from Europe. These external sponsors increasingly provide core funding sometimes for decades, even though such funding contravenes their official policy of merely providing start-up financing for foreign cultural projects. They are thus essential in securing spaces and strengthening professional training in arts and arts management, but only scarce resources for the future development of arts and culture in India. 

 

However, support from abroad is a two-edged sword. It creates dependencies on the ‘Global North’, which is sometimes accused of ‘buying up’ the creative potential of countries from the ‘Global South’. Many Indian artists have defined this phenomenon as a "second” colonization during the talks with the author. To avoid this post-colonial paradigm some artists and cultural managers instead invest private funds (Hampel 2017, p. 120 et seq.). This is possible through earning a regular income from other sources and co-financing and subsidizing the art with money from other branches. As a consequence, the professional practice by Indian artists is first of all limited to taking place on a voluntary or amateur basis and not as a full-time occupation with a regular income.

 

 

All these shortcomings limit the professionalization, presentation and spread of India’s cultural activities in the regional and international spheres. At the same time, the absence of any prospect of long-term financing limits artistic freedom and thus freedom of expression. A representative of the Goethe-Institute’s Max Mueller Bhavan - the name of German cultural institutes in India - and a renowned expert on the Indian arts and culture scene summarized in a conversation with the author: "India is […] rich enough to support its own artists […], but it is not a question of richness, it’s a question [of] attitude.” 

 

Such an attitude seems to be missing so far: The lack of government funding, the government’s censorship with regard to critical art interventions and its disregard for cultural practices, which marginalizes especially the contemporary art scene, stands in stark contrast to India’s pride in its cultural riches until today. 

 

 

In order to enable India’s art and culture scene to flourish and realize other forms of cultural expression, it is necessary to create new and multidimensional cultural policy frameworks that are the foundation for the unfolding of cultural activities, as stipulated in article 6 of the UNESCO Convention 2005. Defining and formulating a cultural policy in a country as religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse as India is a complex and many-layered challenge. 

 

However, all Indian cultural actors the author has interviewed have a clear vision of their country’s future cultural policy. They aspire to create and maintain an autonomous, sustainable and financially independent infrastructure for cultural activities and the creative industry, rather than - for example - organizing one-time cultural events without any impact on the cultural landscape. The latter was - again - already called for in the 1990s by the Haksar Report. 

 

Indian artists clearly strive for a reliable independent funding system. Once this is achieved, actors in the cultural scene who are certainly not lacking in creativity do not have to work any longer in a "vacuum”, as Jayachandran Palazhy, founder and artistic director of Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts in Bangalore described the situation in an interview with the author: "[Y]ou are not working towards anything. You are just responding or reacting [to the existing deficiency situation].” 

 

The central question, therefore, is not whether India is in need of a coherent cultural policy, but which cultural policy can and must be implemented practically considering India’s present-day realities and crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the growing nationalism and its repression of ethnic or religious minorities under the government of Narendra Modi. 

 

To discuss and define a clear-cut strategy towards artistic and cultural diversity necessitates a public and ongoing discourse on the appropriate structural frameworks with regard to cultural policy. Such a dialogue on cultural diversity and creative expressions has happened and is still happening in other parts of the world, for example in Germany. 

 

For India, participants in such a process - besides the Indian government - could be artists, arts educators and cultural professionals, amateurs and members of cultural and creative communities, as cultural policy advisers and experts from oversea partners as the UNESCO Convention 2005 envisages. To invest in arts and culture for the current government could in the long run help to markedly strengthen a still untapped valuable resource, inside and outside of India. 

 

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