Perfect Balance or the lack thereof

A version of this appeared in The Deccan Herald's weekend supplement - The Sunday Herald on 25th September '11. The best thing to come out of this is various sections of my family, who have surprisingly taken the jibe directed at them in their stride, calling to tell me that I could have done a better job of being angry. This must be what it feels like to have an eccentric child. Sigh.

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One of the clearest memories of childhood rituals I have from the ‘90s, when I was growing up , is what I now refer to as the ajji checklist: a litany of conditions one satisfied to keep a formidable line-up of grand-aunts happy. This included wearing a bright pair of bangles, earrings, and a large red dot on one’s forehead. It was of prime importance that these custodians of our way of life be reassured from time to time. Any transgression on one’s part in these matters was dismissed off as giving in to the vile winds of change that had—without warning – begun to blow from The West. Understandably, you’d not want to be accused of hastening the death of a much eulogized culture. It was quite a serious lapse. Even for a 9 year old.

The real trouble started in the later years. When alongside allaying the fears of elders and assuring them that your homegrown sensibilities were intact, was the pressure to break free and mark your own territory, discover your own cultural and political interests; and more importantly, to know all the songs that played on MTV. It was in this time that my generation began an exercise in hypocrisy that we’re now all too familiar with – Self conscious lessons in Carnatic Classical Music and earnest imitations of lingo from American t.v. shows swirled and mingled in the cool Bangalorean evenings of then. The same evenings lent an ear to lamentations about disappearing identities and the general sense of loss that a previous generation felt in its twilight.

Perhaps more than any other time, it became important to pay homage to your cultural heritage  with every action. It was like we were walking with the burden of 5000 years of civilization and doing a shoddy job of transporting it to the waiting hands of posterity. This mixture of fear and insecurity is perhaps what gave birth to the swarms of bigoted, self-anointed protectors of all things Indian. It took terrorism from a foreign land for Americans to wake up to their identities. For us, it was the pleasanter affront that commerce brought with it in the new millennium.

This rabid fear of losing cultural heritage isn’t really confounding. Every society in every age has felt anxiety at losing its identity in a shrinking world. But the premise itself is quite dubious. Here is a citizenry that wordlessly accepted the political leftovers of damaging imperialism, prides itself in the mastery of modern technology, and happily embraced capital from the prosperous West, but fumes and wails at the suggestion of cultural exchange.

Even in this we exhibit delightful double standards. A friend recently pointed at a widely watched YouTube video of students at an American university sitting cross legged on stage at an arts convention, singing the compositions of Thyagaraja –none of them Indian. This found mass approval. Never mind the fact that the performance was wholly mediocre and would have been panned for its lack of quality had it been rendered by Indian artistes.  There is something deviously pleasing in knowing that men and women from the immoral West would want access to our arts. This kind of pleasure is a one-way street. For the same people who delighted in firangs singing Carnatic ragas would not have approved of an Indian band covering Def Leppard. However well.

The only legal thing to do with our arts and history seems to be to preserve it. As if culture could be pickled and carried around in glass jars. Then again, we’ve all found our own middle grounds. Sometimes comical – a friend who works for a European corporation is equal in his love for Irish pubs and the compositions of Purandara Dasa. Sometimes ugly – your writer was unwilling witness to a particularly scarring Bharatnatyam piece choreographed to the music of a Colombian pop singer. Two separate art forms desecrated by one horrendous idea.

This ambiguous middle ground is heartening as it is terrifying. To have access to one’s cultural roots and to also be allowed to experience the ideas and arts from other corners of the world is empowering. What have our traditions lost by the presence of foreign cinema, music or language?

It is only a natural response to want to preserve that which is beautiful. Cultural Protectionism, with its illiterate goon armies and nationalist cause is hilarious not least because of its wrong estimations of predatorial cultures but because they naively believe that they can enforce their mores on a country so as to ‘preserve’ the animal.

The genius in all of this lies in how something as vague and diffuse as Culture has been nailed to the sturdy axis of Morality. To wrong culture, is to betray your moral values. This is clear in depictions of Good and Bad in Indian cinema of a few years ago.  Much in the spirit of Orwell’s ‘Four legs good. Two legs bad’ all Heroism was Indian – Evil however came dressed in a three piece suit.

In all this, I’ve learned that Guilt is a handy instrument with which to deal with future generations. I have felt its force while revelling in the music of another land while barely comprehending the arts of my own. As if I was wrong to want to write in a foreign language; easily forgetting all the while that the good news is the opportunity to experience the outside world – a privilege that didn’t come easily to people before. In my grandmother’s time, crossing oceans stripped one of religious privileges.

Future generations will nevertheless be pushed into leading double lives without agreeing that Culture really is the collective result of many personal choices. Renaissance is a noble cause only when it isn’t stepping on the toes of personal liberty. Change has always been a bitter-sweet story. With the worrying news of disappearing languages and art forms is the happy curiosity in new ones.  Civilization will continue to discard and create as she pleases.

En