For perfectly understandable reasons, handling the economy is arguably the most important priority for any government. Defence and foreign policy come next, and certainly grab the headlines. But India is not only a young republic. It is also an ancient civilisation. That civilisation, over a 5,000 journey, was noted for its antiquity, continuity, diversity, assimilation and peaks of unparalleled cultural refinement.
Culture represents a wide arena of achievement. It is not only about the performing arts, or the visual arts. Culture, in its widest interpretation, is the cumulative level of excellence achieved by a society in all the areas of creative and intellectual expression. That level of creative refinement constitutes the soft power of a country. It is now widely recognised that soft power is as powerful a tool of foreign policy as conventional diplomacy or military hardware.
In the not so distant past, this soft power gave India a much larger footprint than its geographically defined territorial limits. The impact of Indian culture, for over a thousand years in South and Southeast Asia amply proves this, and must count as perhaps the world’s only example in the ancient and medieval periods of significant cultural export without military conquest. From the 6th century BCE onwards, the tenets of Buddhism were taken abroad in Pali, a dialect of Prakrit which, much simpler than Sanskrit, was what the masses spoke at that time. Pali is still the language of Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Burma and much of Southeast Asia. From the Amaravati period in the 2nd century, through the Gupta, Pallava, Pala and Chola dynasties in the succeeding centuries up to the 12th, Hindu culture spread across all of South and Southeast Asia.
The largest Hindu temple in the world, and one of only two dedicated to Brahma, is at Angkor Vat in Cambodia. The epic Ramayana has immensely popular local variations in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma. The Champa dynasty, which ruled for over thousand years in present-day central Vietnam, was Hindu and followed the cultural mores and practices of India, including the Sakya calendar. Tamil is an officially recognised language in Malaysia and Singapore; and in Thailand, which is predominantly Buddhist today, the names of people and places are derivatives of Sanskrit. In fact, archaeological findings across the region, right up to the Philippines, show that Sanskrit, and its most important secular and religious texts, were part of local cultures. The Borobudur temple in Indonesia is a monumental example of the influence of Hindu philosophy and architectural principles; and the island of Bali is still a Hindu enclave in this overwhelmingly Islamic nation.
If culture can play such an important role, why do successive governments at the Centre treat it as almost an optional accessory? It must be understood that the impact of soft power is not some coincidental occurrence. When culture achieves a level of irresistible excellence at home, it finds a natural spillover overseas. When culture stagnates, or receives short shrift in terms of official patronage and opportunities of expression, even military might cannot guarantee its enduring export. Today, Indian culture does have a following abroad, but it is far below our potential, and far more the result of such non-government players like Bollywood and chicken tikka. It certainly does not reflect a concerted and defined cultural policy on behalf of the government.
There was an expectation, perhaps in some people, that a BJP government, which takes great pride in Indian culture, albeit in a selectively sectarian manner, would do much more for its promotion. But this hope has, at least on present evidence, been decisively belied. For inexplicable reasons, the United Progressive Alliance government did not have, for the longest period of time, a full time minister of culture. Culture was clubbed with the department of tourism. It is plain to anyone who has a sense of the potential of both tourism and culture that one minister handling both would do scant justice to either. Now, the BJP government has again made one minister in-charge of both these portfolios. Worse, it has thought it fit to give Sripad Naik, the minister so charged, only a rank of minister of state.
Almost all organisations associated with government for the promotion of culture are languishing. The National Gallery of Modern Art counts its visitors in thousands every year; the Louvre in Paris, or the Tate gallery in London get visitors in millions at a hefty entrance fee. The Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), created especially by Maulana Azad soon after Independence, as the autonomous arm of the ministry of external affairs for the export of our soft power, is headless and pathetically short of funds. Whatever little it can do is being arbitrarily usurped by the department of culture with no clarity about the role of either. Apex bodies like the Lalit Kala Akademi, the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi have become hot beds of sterile politics under the bureaucratic stranglehold of the department of culture. The Sangeet Natak Akademi is lying headless, as is the National Culture Fund, the National Archives, the Indira Gandhi Rashtra Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal, and the beauteous Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad.
The National Museum remained headless for months on end, and finally got a DG only in December last year. Art galleries are few, badly equipped, and suffer from a huge shortage of professionally trained curators. Except for a few institutions of true excellence, and most of these are so precisely because they are outside the purview of government, the cultural landscape is a barren wasteland notable primarily for its red tape and lack of political will and imagination. Some state governments, notably Bihar, have worked to revive cultural institutions, but they too are short of funds.
Culture is not about the imposition of a narrow ideology. It is about the efflorescence of ideas, of rejuvenation and providing a supporting infrastructure for creative excellence. Will our new government wake up to this fact?
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma has been recently elected to the Rajya Sabha
