The past and the distant always have an appeal, albeit an antique one at times. We cherish and preserve old memories, old forms and substances not necessarily because they are extremely valuable, though that would be probably most of the times, but also because of nostalgic, emotional feelings or -what is called in a manner of speech- simply for the old time’s sake. But this adherence to the past and the historic may very well turn out to be an effort aimed at preserving and protecting ways of life so anachronistic in the present. If we are contented to have made these cultures or art forms representing different ways of life of our distant past some antique pieces just as one likes to keep antique furniture in one’s house, then the dichotomy between one’s present lifestyle and these myriad past ways would never cease to make our engagement with these cultures and art forms a banal exercise.
There seems two most important dangers in the cultural self-affirmation efforts of our civilization. One concerns with the radical ultra-religious groups trying to reclaim, in the wake of western dominance, the supremacy of our old civilization through fundamentalist propagandas in the name of religious preaching of morality and values. The exhortations to masses, to abandon everything western, be it food, language, music, clothes and instead adopt anything having name Indian, hide under the garb of cultural nationalism a desperate attempt to cover the cultural defeat, handed by the west, through re-affirmation of our cultural dominance catalyzed by isolated blind pursuit of shallow ideals of our historic past. They want to counter western dominance either through native form of eastern dominance or through re-aligning east to the characteristics of the west so as to preempt it and, as it were, defeat it at its own game. They like neither the traditional, semi-literate villager who acting out of his ignorance does not participate in the conflicts of the modern times nor the burgeoning bourgeoisie who is too busy in gormandizing and naval-gazing to care for such issues. They want polarized people with polarized agendas. Their distorted interpretation of religious texts, myths and pasts, in order to create newer myths and pasts, help them create such polarization in the masses for short political gains. What it does to people of the civilization is to make them live a life of confusion and animosity, and demolish their faiths and myths which helped them to get on with their ordinary everyday lives.
The second concern is with the tussle between the classic and the folk. This tussle has great cultural consequences. As elaborated by Robert M. Pirsig in his transformative book Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the dualistic split between form and substance, the classic and the folk, object and subject, reason and feeling, sanity and insane has created irreconcilable divide in the human persona. Hard-minded, objective, rational, scientific reasoned and logical approach, after a point of time, is bound to create emptiness and alienation. On the other hand, if one is governed by only emotions, feelings or irrationality, then it leads to romanticism or obscurantism which is mostly irrelevant. When our soul is totally in sync with the object of work, when our way of life is not threatened by but in harmony with the instrument of operation, then only we feel real satisfaction and then only all tussles disappear.
Unfortunately, hierarchy of cultures exists when there should not have been any. The classic is considered, among culture-savvy, a higher form of culture, as it were, as it involves tough mindedness, defined set of rules, a lot of hard work and a coterie of people. The undiluted, pure, scripture based art forms quickly find currency among state-sponsored and elites backed patronage. The true appreciation of these arts requires sophisticated intellect, only possessed by high class experts and professionals. Folk, on the other hand, is considered the delirium of light minded, ignorant, low class people just wanting some entertainment out of art and culture so that they can carry on with their already unimportant futile daily lives. Well, the hierarchy might be less brazen and more subtle than described here, but there is no denying of it. This class based stratification of culture undermines the definition of culture as a way of life. The redemption of traditional folk theories of life representing tolerant, simple and truthful worldview is as much necessary as the revival of these dying classical art forms. It would be appropriate here to quote, which is rather a long one, from a lecture delivered at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1983 by the renowned political and social psychologist and one of the foremost intellectual thinker of our country, Ashis Nandy.
“The culture-oriented approach assumes that culture is a dialectic between the classic and the folk, the past and the present, the dead and the living. Modern states, on the other hand, emphasize the classical and frozen-in-time, so as to museumise culture and to make it harmless. Here, too, the modernists endorse the revivalists who believe in time-travel to the past, the orientalists to whom culture is a distant object of study, and the deculturised to whom the culture is what one sees on the stage. Such attitudes to culture go with a devaluation of the folk which is reduced to the artistic and musical self-expression of tribes or language groups. Ethnic arts and ethnic music then becomes, like ethnic food, new indicators of the cultivation of the rich and the powerful.
Culture, however, is a way of life and it covers, apart from ‘high culture’, indigenous knowledge, including indigenous theories of science, education and social change. The defense of culture, according to those who stress cultural survival, is also the defense of these native theories. The defense must challenge the basic hierarchy of cultures, the evolutionist theory of progress, and the historical sense with which the modern mind works.”
Farther the culture, better it looks to keep it in a museum. But culture is much more than the art forms, music and dance. It is the whole way of looking at things and living a life. Though we can try to find inspiration from the different artistic forms, these would be never be substitutes for the broader theory of life and culture that produced them in the first place. While we are busy collecting the debris of our rich cultural heritage, we can afford to ponder why is it that our present find it so difficult to produce those men or women of our pasts we can’t stop being proud of. We can go on to trade and barter whatever remnants we have of them, they are essentially going to lie in our memory as geniuses we do not have a capacity to even define. We do not have to worry because the culture that produced them would take care of them as they took care of their culture.
