Om is where the art is not

Let us look at the two grand festivals that this government has hosted during its tenure. One was the ICCR-sponsored ‘At Home in the World’ held last year primarily to celebrate V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize. Another, the ‘Pravasi Bharatiya Divas’ held earlier this year, to celebrate the achievements of the NRIs. Both these festivals were geared towards the West and the emigre Indian. In the first, the government was accused of spending taxpayer’s money wining and dining English language authors who live abroad and don’t give a damn about bharatiya sanskriti. The second celebrated the achievements of the NRIs and once again honored Naipaul. How curious that a ‘bharatiya’ government has not held a single nationwide festival on a similarly grand scale to promote Indian theatre, music and dance for a domestic audience. The government looks curiously un-bharatiya in the festivals it chooses to sponsor.

Ayurveda is another important aspect of bharatiya sanskriti and apparently one of the government’s chief concerns. Some vaidyas have been appreciative at the doubling of the budget for Indian Systems of Medicines. But a number of others have expressed outrage at this government’s treatment of Ayurveda. A reputed ayurvaid recently said that this government is not implementing any of the existing laws on Ayurveda to ensure that primary health centres have some access to it. All this government is doing is simply giving permission for more Ayurvedic schools so a huge number of ayurvaids are being churned out who have nowhere to practice! Vaidyas complain that the government is encouraging the export of raw material thus denying vaidyas here the chance to procure them and thus also aiding a hectic commercialisation of Ayurveda, thus making it inaccessible for common folk. Is this how a ‘bharatiya’ government behaves?

Let us examine the fate of Hindi. The life of the rashtra bhasha should be the primary aim of a government of bharatiya sanskriti, right? Wrong. Many Hindi authors say that the government is freezing Hindi into a dull administrative sanskritised tongue that doesn’t reflect the robust dialects of everyday use which keep language vital and alive. A Hindi writer has written letters to the prime minister requesting that a national commission for Indian languages be set up to give new energy to all Indian languages including Hindi. Yet in spite of promises, this commission has evaporated into thin air. The one writer whom this government repeatedly honours is the regional language-hating V.S. Naipaul. How strange! The government says it loves Hindi and wants to save it. Yet it keeps giving awards to Naipaul who thinks bhasha literature is trash.

So forget the pseudo-secularists. Now even Hindi writers, ayurvaids, the chairman of the Cattle Commission who recently resigned, and even sadhus eager for a dip in the Sangam are complaining that this government is not serious about ‘bharatiya sanskriti’. In fact, there are many reasons why this government will never be able to establish any kind of sanskriti. Precisely because it cannot, given its political needs, create a cultural elite. A cultural elite cannot emerge from a demented obsession with mother cow and the diet of the ‘Aryans’. A cultural elite cannot emerge if it becomes compulsory to forget that Sai Baba of Shirdi was a Muslim by birth. The insane desire to negate Islam, to obliterate the last 1000 years of cultural efflorescence makes this government culturally defunct.

Dhrupad is a raag that is Vedic in origin — it is supposedly linked to the Sama Veda. But you can’t mention Dhrupad and yet ignore that it has been protected for generations by a Muslim family, the Dagar brothers. The strains of ‘Babul Mora Naihaar Chchooto jaay’ break over the heads of so many early morning risers in middle India. When you think of Babul Mora you think invariably of Wajid Ali Shah, Nawab of Avadh who composed this thumri.

The reason that Hindi is becoming highfalutin Doordarshan jargon is because the government is eradicating Urdu from it. Thus the government is failing to create a creative community and failing to create cosmopolitan ‘Hindu’ intellectuals who can compete with people like Kamladevi Chattopadhyay or Pupul Jayakar or even Irfan Habib, who may have been partisan but who at least were talented. Habib may be justly criticised as Marxist. But at least the list of publications to his name are far greater than those of Prof. Makhan Lal.

A government without cultural thinkers can’t create a modern culture based on exciting re-interpretations of the past. At least the Congress had its Apna Utsavs and its festivals of India abroad. Today the so-called government of ‘bharatiya sanskriti’ rather than promoting culture is criminally neglecting it. It has dumbed India down by making us almost completely subservient to Bollywood, with special screenings of the latest blockbusters getting more attention from senior cabinet ministers than classical arts. Little wonder then that American Hinduism in the Kabhi Khushi, Kabhi Gham style is this government’s main contribution rather than any genuinely creative cultural progress.

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