Amitava BhattacharyaIndia as a nation is united with the spirit of diversity. As Shashi Tharoor rightly points out, “In India, we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood”. While it is the rich cultural heritage to which India owes its diversity, it is the cultural embeddedness that gives Indians an identity and a sense of belonging. Being the oldest civilization and the largest democracy, India is an all-embracing confluence of religions, traditions, and customs. Indian heritage lies in the treasure of its art, architecture, music, dance, flora, fauna and the innate secular philosophy of its people and that is one of the major drivers of development, making the nation’s future promising and inclusive.
The importance of culture in development is no longer a myth today. UNESCO has 2003 convention to promote and safeguard the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) across the globe. 14 ICH from India has been listed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Heritage of Humanity till date. If we wish to categorize the selected ICH from India, we will see that while some belong to indigenous handcrafted traditions, others are representative of the performing arts domain and the rest belong to the category of customs and festivals innate to the nation’s identity.
In this regard, it needs to be understood that it is the cultural elements infused in the enlisted traditional practices that got recognized by UNESCO. For instance, Kumbh Mela and Durga Puja are religious festivities in India. Kumbh Mela (the festival of the sacred Pitcher) is the largest peaceful congregation of pilgrims on earth, during which participants bathe or take a dip in a sacred river.
Devotees believe that by bathing in the Ganges one is freed from sins liberating her/him from the cycle of birth and death. While Kumbh Mela has a religious significance in Indian context, it is the spirit of the festival in attracting pilgrims irrespective of caste, creed or gender and overcoming man-made boundaries that got recognized as the ICH of India. On the other hand, Durga puja is the annual festival of celebrating the home-coming of Goddess Durga. Although it is a Hindu festival, Durga Puja is seen as the best instance of the public display of art and culture.
The festival is characterized by large-scale installations and pavilions in urban areas, as well as by traditional Bengali drumming and veneration of the goddess. During the event, the divides of class, religion and ethnicities collapse as crowds of spectators walk around to admire the installations. Hence, just like KumbhaMela, it is the secular and cultural aesthetics of Durga Puja that got recognised as ICH instead of its ritualistic significance.
In a world which is moving towards standardization, segmentation and polarized power dynamics, it is the traditional cultural practices that uphold the ideal, philosophy and aesthetics of diversity, brotherhood, collaboration and symbiosis. The celebration of togetherness brilliantly manifests itself in Baul music and philosophy. Baul music is found in West Bengal, where the essence of Baul music propagates that god lies not in sacred spaces of worship but inside human beings. Giving a clarion call to overcome divides, Baul music’s celebration of humanity makes it music of tomorrow. Baul was also inscribed at UNESCO list of ICH by Bangladesh with a mention of West Bengal (pre 1947, both together were one state Bengal in pre-independent India). But in reality, in Bangladesh today, one hardly gets Bauls with traditional instruments, whereas in West Bengal there are more than 3000 practicing Bauls with traditional nuances and instruments.
Traditional cultural practices not only have the potential in giving birth to a world which celebrates its unity in diversity but is also able to attract socio-economic benefits, pride and recognition for the marginalized practitioners. Traditional cultural practices also play a critical role in enhancing artistic freedom of marginalized practitioners and accrediting in them a cultural identity. The only constant thing about culture is change. Since culture is reflective of time, cultural practices also change over a passage of time. In India, if we study traditional cultural practices closely, we will be able to track how they are changing with time by retaining their heritage components and becoming creative expressions of contemporary happenings.
Patachitra is a scroll painting done in parts of West Bengal using natural colours. While traditionally, mythology, tales of gods and goddesses featured to be the themes of Patachitra drawings, at present we can also see COVID issues getting reflected in the folk painting. Similarly, we can also see innovation in the performative ideation of Chau practitioners of West Bengal in their enactment of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Tagore’s Chitrangada, which can be interpreted as nothing but cultural expressions derivative of enhanced artistic freedom.
Our organization Contact Base (banglanatak.com) is an UN accredited social enterprise, working for the past 22 years to improve socio-economic prospects of marginalized cultural practitioners of India using culture as a tool. Our flagship initiative, Art For Life (AFL), is a culture based development model focusing on holistic development of marginalized cultural practitioners by making their traditional cultural practices the premise for inclusion and poverty alleviation, as well as strengthening art form and the process of heritage transmission to next generation. AFL promotes village, artist and art together, both individually and collectively, so that each when strengthened can work towards accrediting pride, recognition and visibility to the others. The premise of our work rests in our insatiable urge to transform traditional cultural practices from ‘fringe’ to ‘core’ economic activity and strengthen creative micro-entrepreneurship among cultural practitioners, so that they are themselves equipped to improve their life and livelihood chances based on their cultural pursuits.
Our work not only focusses on promotion of cultural pursuits and practitioners but also play a decisive role in safeguarding heritage components of traditional cultural pursuits and disseminating the same to younger generation. For more than two decades, we have worked across multiple states in India to provide practical evidence as to how culture can be a tool of development. Although we started our work in 2004-5, but the first major support came from the European Union’s Invest In People (IIP) initiative, where we worked with 3000 rural artists from West Bengal in 2009-11 and the success of the same subsequently attracted UNESCO and Govt of West Bengal to roll out the AFL model and now it covers 50000 rural artists.
In 2010, we have received Advisory Status to UNESCO 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention. Since 2013, we also enjoy Special Consultative Status with UN ECOSOC. Now the AFL model is also adopted by Rajasthan Tourism to strengthen ICH based Tourism in Western Rajasthan. In between, we also worked in Madhubani in Bihar and revived Madhubani painting & linked painters directly to the market.
India is the world’s largest democracy and it is only by incorporating the voice of all, the nation can have a promising and inclusive future. Recognition of traditional cultural practices and the practitioners has immense potential to incorporate the voices of different segments of the society and apply it as major tool for inclusive & participative development in many parts of rural India. As Martha Nussbaum says, “cultures are not museum pieces to be preserved at all costs, they are living things that effect real people”. Once we understand this transformatory and transgressive potential of culture, we will be able to transform our birth (somewhat without purpose) into meaningful life (with purpose).
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