Such contempt for culture and creativity spells nothing but doom

Hermann Goering, Adolph Hitler’s minister for culture and the founder of the infamous Gestapo, once said, ‘whenever I hear the word culture, I remove the safety catch from my revolver’.

Thankfully, our minister for culture in the Bharatiya Janta Party dispensation, Mahesh Sharma, has not yet repeated the fascist’s words, but he did want to ‘let the protesting writers not write’. He was referring to a number of anguished authors who had returned their Akademi and other awards in protest against the rising intolerance and killing of innocent scholars and people in India in 2015.

Around the same time when a World Hindi Conference was held by the government in Bhopal, the then state minister of Foreign Affairs, General VK Singh, was asked as to why he had not invited well-known Hindi authors to the event. He retorted,’ Why should we? They come, get drunk and leave.” In the same fashion, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi also took a dig at our renowned intellectuals like the Nobel Laureate Prof. Amartya Sen when, in one of his speeches during the Assembly elections, he said, ‘What is the significance of ‘Harvard’? What matters is ‘Hard Work’!”

The above incidents should not be insufficient to show the attitude the BJP-led dispensation has towards literature, language, scholarly pursuits, their practitioners and overall cultural atmosphere of our country.

Since our government, its ministers, and the organisations affiliated to its ideology hardly feel a need for good literature and books, good music and art, good theatre and cinema and good scholarship, they are least shy in disrupting the institutions which were built after Independence in order to uphold, enhance and enrich the fundamentally pluralistic, multi-dimensional, multi-lingual, and multi-traditional values that have given India a unique place in the cultural map of the world. It’s amazing to see the number and variety of the institutions in the field of literature, art, music, theatre, dance, and scholarly genres established during the first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru’s period.

For instance, Sahitya Akademi was envisioned as an all-inclusive national body which gave awards in all the languages that were recognised at the time. Its constitution was also devised in a manner that guaranteed a complete non-interference from the culture ministry and bureaucracy. Its functioning was also autonomously left to the head chosen by the authors. So much so that when in 1990, Haksar Committee on the affairs of the cultural institutions recommended certain changes, the then president of Sahitya Akademi, renowned author UR Ananathamurthy, happily ignored them. That was the golden era of Akademi and it was only during the Atal Bihari Vajpeyi’s regime that politicians of his ilk started making inroads in this institution.

What made a third world or a developing country like India shine culturally all over the world? What has been the identity of ‘Bharatiya Sanskriti’ as it was known to the people living in other regions? It was indeed a kaleidoscope, a rainbow of pluralistic social, artistic, philosophical, spiritual and linguistic behaviors.

The fact that India is a garden of hundreds of languages amazed the people who belonged to mono-lingual spaces and were unable to imagine the existence of so many languages in a single geography. This has been our biggest strength in the face of more affluent powers in the world.

Needless to say that culture is the highest value and the most obvious identity of a society. As Mathew Arnold put it long ago, ‘Culture is the history of human spirit’. People may not and do not carry money or other worldly things with them all the time, but they carry their cultural milieu forever. Remarkably, our cultural soul comprised of a great inclusiveness of everything that is good and this is what our forefathers who liberated us from the colonial dominance tried to preserve for long years after Independence. It was because they were multi-cultural people themselves. That’s what made Nehru say that culture was the widening of human mind and spirit. What is remarkable is that our cultural streams –mega or micro--enjoyed an equal space without the hegemony of any majoritarianism.

But now we have reached an era of the ‘narrowing of mind and spirit’ where our cultural plurality is being calculatedly controlled by the government and its constitutional and extra-constitutional agencies.

There are a number of incidents when activities in the field of theatre, art, cinema, literature, seminars and conferences were banned or disrupted by the powers that be. Scholars like MM Kalburgi and Narendra Dabholkar were killed and many more intimidated for the fact that they were not in line with the hegemonistic thinking being openly or tacitly promoted by the ruling dispensation.

Memory under surveillance

Even our memory and sense of history have come under surveillance and people are told to forget a certain history and remember some other. It’s a known fact that the BJP government wants to belittle the role of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawahar Lal Nehru in the freedom struggle, replacing it with the role of people like Veer Sawarkar. Controlling of human memory always leads to a mono-cultural ideology, and this is what has been happening in our society in the recent past.

Who can forget what happened at the Indian Film And Television Institute in June 2015 when Gajendra Chauhan, a third-rate actor of mostly B-grade and semi-pornographic films, was appointed as the head of an acclaimed institution which had seen stalwarts like Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalkrishnan , Shyam Benegal, UR Ananathamurthy , Girish Karnad and Saeed Akhtar Mirza as its heads in the past?

Chauhan’s only qualification for the post was that he had been the national cultural convener of the BJP and propagated party’s cultural ideology through cultural activities. Likewise, almost all the prestigious bodies that came into existence after the Independence were taken control of by the people who hardly knew about our cultural heritage or the contemporary culture. A cursory look at the resumes of the current heads of the institutions like National Book Trust, Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts and Culture, National Gallery of Modern Art, Film Certification Board, Children’s Film Society etc. will be enough to find out that these institutions are being run by those who do not in any way qualify for the work they have been assigned. One may call this state of affairs either comical or absurd, depending on the gravity, but what can be termed most tragic aspect is the structural disruption and destruction of these institutions which were built with a modern vision.

As a result, a civilisational lumpenisation is taking place in India and we are journeying from ‘culture’ to ‘deculturisation’. That most of the practitioners of art, literature, theatre, music and knowledge are opposed to this phenomenon is the only solace left.

The author is a well-known poet, translator, journalist and editor