TOWARDS THEATRE POLICY

May 19, 2006.

1). Introduction

Sanjna: This has been something one has been trying to bring together for quite some time. A group of people who can start brainstorming on policy, and on policies that affect – or don’t affect, or should affect – theatre, in particular. Obviously looking at culture in the bigger realm, looking at India and the state and the global perspective, of course as nothing’s isolated. What do we wish to [achieve]… this animal that we are giving birth to today will hopefully be a vibrant and very active and beautiful animal. It’s not ending here – this policy forum is not the be all and end all. We hope that this is the beginning of something that will continue… a dialogue. Prithvi Theatre is committed to it for three years – and we’ve only put three years because that’s something we could put our heads to and say okay - the next three years, it may continue more than that. But what we mean by saying PT is committed to it is that weare happy to give our backend, our office infrastructure to helping make other such forums possible in other areas. However, we all at this table, we hope, will be actively involved in designing and creating your own forums for us in your region. At the end of this we hope that we will be able to – at the end of two years or three years – or maybe that’s too long … we will hopefully decide at the end of this particular forum,find out how long we may need to create a white paper that we could possible give out to the government, centre as well as possibly states. This is something that is open to debate and thought. Coming up with something concrete may be a good idea. However as well as that, another aspect which is as important is setting up a centre that is a communication system, which is a system of communicating to a much wider group of people across the country and internationally if possible. We have to have either a publication…. Whatever network we use, we have to have the ability to sustain it, to feed it and to let it reach as many people as possible. That is something that we need to do - on Sunday morning we hope we can brainstorm on practical levels on what it is we think our next steps should be, we [should] know that that is where we want to head to. I wanted to put notes together… Sudhanva, you were supposed to help! I’m only blaming him… to say a little more on all this but I don’t want to say too much right now because my brain is slightly fragmented. I was woken up at 3 in the morning. We are unfortunate that we won’t have Wolfgang Schneider with us, he was supposed to have arrived last night but he didn’t bring a visa so he was sent back, which is really sad. However we are trying to ask for his presentation to be emailed to us, it was an overhead projector presentation so possibly our German contingent here… these two actually is they stand close enough they might actually… you can wear the kurta? [laughter] Mr. Schneider I was told wears a yellow bow tie and he is extremely beautifully large, and I was wondering how large he is and how big his bed should be… large, really large! And so we went out and got him a very very large kurta… which is up for auction, if anybody wishes to have a yellow kurta! I tore the labels yesterday – I must take them out of the kachra ka dabba, they are still in the kachraka dabba … one day he’ll come? But that’s that… anything else? [toSameera/Sudhanva] You want to say something or shall we just dive into Akshara…. We’ve had some reading material that we’ve sent people, there’s lots more here. What we’re gonna have is in Room No. 4, which is my room presently… a little library set

up and a TV with a few DVDs on theatre or performance. That’s something you can come into at any time. I’m used to sleeping with people around me, so it can happen at any time. Don’t steal anything! Sorry, Indian theatre people are like that only!! If you wish to have photocopies of any of those papers there are these… what have we decided?

Sameera: Bijon is putting a list up with the names of the articles, so whichever article you want, just put your name next to it and at the end of the day he’ll go and get Xeroxes done.

Sanjna: Akshara. We’ve got bios in all our kits, so I’m not going to introduce anybody. So Akshara’s going to take us through the presentation.

2) On Entertainment Industry

Akshara: So I must thank you all and I should begin this with a personal note on how I got interested in this whole business of policy and culture etc. I am not an expert, I am not an academician in this field. I am a theatre practitioner working in a small place. So it was just out of …. It was inevitable that I had to get interested in this field because we faced these problems in our day to day lives. In 2003, in Karnataka, the government of Karnataka one day suddenly decided that it will stop grants to aid / 8 organizations in Karnataka, and my organization, Ninasam, was one of them. They were giving grants to Chitra Kala Parishad, which is a fine arts school, they were giving grants to Rangayana Repertory, Ninasam, Kannada Sahitya Parishad, which is the literary body, and several other organizations, Film Institute and they stopped giving grants saying that these organizations should become self sufficient. So that was the beginning of globalization for Karnataka and we had to face the consequences. Ultimately we fought with them and ultimately the status quo has come back but we had the threat that the grants will be stopped. So then I started looking at what is the budget of the government, how much the government is spending on culture, how much the central government is spending on culture and the state government is spending on culture, and what is their policy. Whom do they give money and whom do they not give money? And what are the other possible sources of income? What are the possibilities of getting non-governmental support? Even foreign aid, or corporate funding. We were looking into various possibilities. I was searching on the internet, and through this search and exploration, I started writing a paper in Kannada, I don’t write in English. I started writing a paper in Kannada and ultimately I gave two or three lectures and the final one was published in a journal, which my friend Raghunandana translated to English. So that’s how I got involved in this business. And by the time the paper was ready, I got into – it was an accidental thing – I got a phone call from Sanjna saying you know, we are establishing a policy forum and I immediately said that I would come and present this. That was in January. After January, I have continued working on this paper, I have gathered more data and I have hopefully gathered more experience also. I have been interacting with Raghu and several other people also and therefore my paper is now to be updated. What I am going to present, because you have the paper in your hands, what I am going to present is a slightly updated version in the form of notes. It is a PowerPointpresentation but it doesn’t have any figures, stats etc. I am basically using the PowerPoint as a scribbling pad, just to remember things in a structured way. We are

doing it as a joint presentation between me and Raghunandana but today morning Raghu has backed out saying that you do the presentation first and I’ll add later – so at the end of the presentation? In the middle of the presentation if you have anything to add, please stop me and add information. I may not be able to answer the queries because I am still working on it, but if you have more information – for example Anita has more information on some of the things I am presenting here… if you have more information or if you have corrections please feel free to stop me at any moment. This is a set of 36 slides, and I’ll run the next 30 to 40 minutes… I’ll just go through it and I’ll get back to the details when we start discussing it. So I have put together this presentation as a series of questions… do we have a crisis in our cultural policy is I suppose the first question. Do we really have a crisis or are we imagining a crisis? And do the following facts indicate a failure in the realm to cultural policy. The facts which will follow soon are not really from culture. I’ll give you 5 examples. The following events have taken place in Karnataka in the last twelve months with virtually no response from any political party in the large sector. A new thermal electrical plant is being built at Theggady [11.57] on the coast, the Konkan coast, the western coast. It’s a 4,000 mega watt thermal plant. And xxx [12.08]University offers an honorary doctorate to Mr Narayan Murthy of Infosys and requests him for a donation. The most popular TV serial in Kannada, Mukta, offers fictional interrogation of political scandals every week. And the government of Karnataka conducts a 3 day Hampi Utsav at an approximate cost of 3 crores every year , it’s a three day event, costs three crores, which is roughly 10% of its culture budget. The 3 crores for the Hampi Utsav does not come only from the cultural budget because the local government is involved so they pool in money from other sources but 3 crores is 10% of Karnataka’s culture budget. Is the crisis we witness in theatre culture partner of, or related to, a bigger crisis is the question, because these points lead me to that. I have identified the bigger crisis in four important symptoms. The first symptom is the advent of the entertainment industry. The details are in my paper, but I’ll just go through some of the important parts. We had not heard this word “the entertainment industry” until very recently. It was theatre, music, film, literature but now everything has amalgamated into one large business which has been named as the entertainment industry. I also came across this word very recently. So one of the sources to know about this industry was the Price Waterhouse Coopers’ report. PWC is an international financial consultancy firm and according to that report. Between 2004 and 2008, global capital we have spent in 2004 was 1.2 trillion dollars, I don’t know how many zeros in front… 12? In 2008, this investment is projected to be to the tune of 1.8 trillion dollars. Plus the compounded annual growth rate of this industry will be 6.3 globally. So there will be a 150% increase in 4 yrs in the global entertainment industry and as the next slide says, countries of Asia and the Pacific are expected to be at the forefront of this growth rate. In India and China, this growth is expected to be to the tune of 9.8% during this time. In sum, the industry will see considerably more growth in the countries of this region than elsewhere. So this is a new market. India and China, totally South Asia is a new market which the entertainment industry now wants to capture. So for capturing this new market they are devising several strategies, some of which are transparent and some of them are not transparent. We have to look very closely, I’ll come to the details later. Perhaps they are also trying through subsidizing education. So they are trying through various methods to capture this new market. Another aspect of this entertainment industry isthat the term “arts”, the term “entertainment” is redefined here. You don’t use the terms like theatre, film,literature, all those are old words. Now film becomes filmed

entertainment, it could be film, it could be a filmed version of a cricket match, it could be anything. Anything that is filmed. So when entertainment industry enters in our market, everything changes its nature. You cannot have theatre, literature etc, everything is fused into one which can be sold. The TV channels and the producing of programmes, telecasting and the broadcasting industries, the audio and the video recordings, especially the newly arrived digital media, video games, internet broadband services, sports telecasting and even print journalism, book publishing and selling comes at the end of the list. And theater does not figure in the list at all. Live theatre does not figure in the list at all. Perhaps because for a firm like PWC, theatre was too insignificant a component to be accounted for. Because it doesn’t involve so much of money. The highlights is that the entertainment industry is bringing to the centre those media that can be controlled with the strings of sponsorship and is gradually pushing aside those traditional arts and vocational practices that refuse to be attached to these strings. Theatre is one of them. The industry is also trying to redefine the very notion of entertainment so as to suit this imperative. So this is basically about the PWC report. I must also add a note here. When I was coming to Bangalore on the train I met a senior economist friend who has also been working in the environmental movement in Karnataka. He asked me where are you going and I told him all these details and I told him about the PWC report and he said “I have read 20 PWC reports”. He said they have done a report in 2000 on retailing industry in India and they have forecasted that within four years the whole of India will be covered by these big marketing chains. But this is already 2006, and we have only one Wal-Mart Shop in Bangalore and it has not come to Karnataka. So the PWC report doesn’t really reflect the reality as such but it reflects the aspirations of the industry. That is perhaps a better way of understanding it. Corporate funding policies reflect this symptom. We all know that they push happenings to become events, for corporate funding, everything has to be big. You have to be situated in a big place first, then you have to do everything in a big way, so that they can put hoardings all over the place. It has to be a mega event in Bombay. If something is happening in Heggodu where I am, they are not interested. They compel you to brand yourself in a specific model. This is I think a very serious problem which we need to discuss in detail – I am just mentioning this point, but somewhere later in this meeting we have to discus this problem very seriously because this concept of branding to certain extent is useful for theatre. Because you get some amount of visibility and access to the people who can sponsor. But once you get branded, it’s like getting stereotyped. I have three examples. For example, the Bangalore Habba is the Bangalore festival in Bangalore, which during Vasant Krishna’s regime, they wanted to have one iconic festival in Bangalore, where all the bigwigs will be involved. So Infosys was brought in, Wipro was brought in, several other people were brought in and some of the most important writers and thinkers were also involved. But ultimately that turned out to be was a fairly mediocre festival, very bureaucratic, more bureaucratic than the government, so ultimately it did not really turn out to be the reflection of what could be very broadly called as the culture in Karnakata but it became another corporate event. Something like a Femina Miss India show. It drew crowds and a lot of money was spent, but I think the usefulness was extremely limited. The second example is Nrityagram, which is a private organization. I must make it very clear that I am not blaming these organizations, I am only taking their example, and I am not belittling them. I am only taking these examples to show how a certain kind of branding involves a certain kind of stereotyping in terms of our own art practices. Nrityagram has faced this. So Nrityagram instead of becoming a centre for the study of dance etc. has become a

tourist centre. So it’s only tourists who go there. They sit on the wide area, they eat, drink and they also watch dance. So that’s how the festival goes on there. And Rangashankara – I have a question. Even Rangashankara – is it heading towards that? I hope that it will not. I have lots of love for Rangashankara. It is a new theatre, very well built, but Rangashankara is already facing this kind of a problem. They really do not have an entry to different kinds of theatre practitioners in Karnataka, not only in Bangalore. So they are restricted to certain kinds of theatre and certain kinds of projects. For example I discussed with Arundhati a certain kind of project – I suggested a project supporting young theatre directors in Karnataka working in Kannada. Sponsor them for a show, and bring those shows to Karnataka as part of your festival. She said yes, but it’s very difficult to fit it into our scheme of things. Which is basically the brand. The branding that is imposed on you also brings in certain kinds of restrictions of what you can do and what you cannot do. I hope that Rangashankara will transcend the problem, but we have this serious problem with the concept of branding. Another face of the entertainment industry is manifested in the move, supporting creative industries; this is the Rajeev Sethi paper. I tried my best to get what is known as the Jodhpur Consensus. But that was not available. We should get hold of that document. In February 2005, that was last year there was a meeting in Jodhpur, organized by UNESCO and several other bodies, international bodies, and there they came to a consensus. Which is basically presented into an argument by Rajeev Sethi in two essays that we have received. This is Rajeev Sethi’s recommendation: “the very first step the government needs to undertake is this, it must reposition the largely unorganized micro industry and arts sector as the internationally recognized creative and cultural industries portfolio. This will entail the formation of a proactive, national policy on cultural and creative industries to leverage the attention they deserve”. I already see in these wordings the entry of entertainment industry. They have stopped calling it as crafts they are calling it as creative industries. So the word has, the concept has already entered in this view. Interestingly Rajeev Sethi seems to be very sympathetic to crafts persons. But ultimately – I’ll show it to you in the next slide –the prescription he gives is definitely pro-globalization, its anti-crafts people.

Pravin: [initial bit off mic]I think they are perhaps two different terms because the entertainment industry is what you associate with film, with Bollywood-Hollywood, whatever you call it, but this move to call it cultural industries is probably where we are affected, I think this is a new move.

Akshara: No, I am not saying that these two are the same. I am only saying tat the terminology has crept in, the concept has crept in, that’s what I am just implicating. The way to see things. For example, for the craftsperson, the crafts are a way of life. It’s not an industry. But for Rajeev Sethi, it becomes creative industries. That’s what I mean. We have more quotes from Rajeev Sethi. I call him a 21st century Orientalist because of this quote: “what you can’t measure, you cannot manage”. It’s not only Orientalism, its colonialism actually. “What you can’t measure, you can’t manage” that was the whole colonial project – evolving a uniform system of classification. I think they begin with census – census is the good example. Through census, India was mastered. So now a census of the arts has begun. Compilation and collation of a census data of cultural and creative industries specially those untapped and non-commercial household skills. These are raw material, they have to now be converted in commodities. And one of his quotes is, “if Bapu were alive today, he would

perhaps have made a global brand of khadi”. Which I find very funny. [laughter]. “While we may conserve the stone on inlays in the building of the walled city in Delhi, we are still unable to understand, or tap the potential of Shajahanabad’s living assets, such as its oral history repositories, performers, culinary artists and its host of unique professionals that more than support its tangible past”. So in the creative industry, these culinary artists, performers and oral history repositories – all this is included. So everything is amalgamated. In the same way, PWC report amalgamates arts into one unit. “All these homespun industries create content using creative skill, and in some cases, intellectual property to create goods and services with social and cultural meaning, and with huge booming market potential across the globe. They empower each other and explain India to Indians, to rest of the world, in a way none has”. So there is a dose of nationalism too, it is something that Indians can be proud of. Or in other words, what Rajeev Sethi is trying to do, is to make Indian arts measurable or priceable, to commodify culture, to nail down that the ultimate goal of culture that is to capture the market. So this is basically his argument. But if you read his essay, I have been slightly cruel to him, because if you read his essay, there are very kind words towards craftspersons. But the total argument is this. Rajeev Sethi’s views have now been almost accepted in an international meeting, the outcome of which is documented in the Jodhpur Consensus. Therefore we should be really concerned about this, because there were secretaries of government, there were the UNESCO representatives, there were two culture ministers – from Bhutan and one from Africa, it was really a high-powered, high profile meeting. Where policy-makers, decision-makers were involved, and they have almost agreed to this, to what is known as Jodhpur Consensus. So if we don’t take a step now, it is saying that we accept Jodhpur Consensus. Our silence would mean that. On a superficial level, it seems that it helps the poor craftspeople by enabling them to earn in the global market. That’s what Rajeev Sethi’s argument is basically. These poor craftspeople are poor because their craft is not valued. So if they enter the global market, they will get paid. But deep down, it is a strategy to integrate the Third world into the market. And through this, to enable the Western, neo-Imperialist, post-modernist lust to consume the third world by decontextualising it. So this is basically the larger frame. I remember the writer Zianuddin Sardar, who has written about post modernism, that post modernism is nothing but the continuation of colonialism and modernism. In colonialism the physical space was captured, in modernism the mental space was captured, and in post-modernism, all the arts, crafts, these are being captured. So it’s that kind of a development which is taking place. So symptom two of the bigger crisis – the inadequacy of the national. I have argued this in my paper in detail, so I’ll just give you the gist. If you look at the budget for culture, the Indian government budget for culture between 1990 and 2005, you see that defense is growing, space is growing, information & broadcasting is not growing in a big way, but culture has almost remained the same. Which means, that if you take inflation into consideration, there is a disinvestment in culture. So if they are spending more money in other areas, and they keep the culture outlay the same, it implicates that the money has been cut down. Rs. 19/- out of every 100 are spent on defence, only 16 paise out of the same hundred are spent on culture. The US has the lowest per capita government arts spending, only about 0.13% or $6 a person. That’s because there is a lot of corporate funding there perhaps. Germany by contrast, spends about 1.79% of its government final expenditure on the arts -, translating to about $85 per person, more than fourteen times the US per capita spending. So we have data on how different countries are spending on culture. This is one question we should address

some time during our meeting, whether the outlay for culture is enough is the first question, second, what is being given for culture – is it being spent correctly – that will be the second question. I come to the second question now. We have the white elephants. NSD alone gets 2% of the money that the government spends every year on fostering literature, music, dance, theatre combined. Something like 18 crores. This is where I began my journey into the realm of policy. Our theatre institute – we train 15 to 20 people every year, our theatre institute gets 15 lakhs per year that is covering salaries, scholarships, running costs, everything, that is the grant we get. NSD is a bigger organization, it’s a 3 year course, so if we get 15, an NSD gets 50 I can understand. But if we get 15 lakhs, and NSD gets 15 crores, then that is something really unpalatable to me. So that became a point of irritation for me then I started looking at what’s happening, what’s happening. In the period from 1990 to 2005, the budget allocation for NSD has risen from 2 crore and 22 lakh rupees in 1990, to merely 16 crores in 2005. When I was studying in NSD during 80-’83, we used to spend 4,000 rupees per each production. Now I was told that last year, one of the productions was something like 13 lakhs? [someone answersoff mic] 16 to 20 lakhs for Midnight’s Children. For one production. For the cost of NSD’s producing one production, you can run a theatre institute. Because our budget is the same. 16 lakhs. And you have mega events.

[Indistinguishable discussion off mic – 36.48]

Raghunandana: [initial bit off mic] whereas in the Marathi commercial theatre that is not accounted for, whereas in the 16 lakhs sum that has been put, the carpenters, the painter that is extra, because the carpenters are permanently employed with the school, so they get a salary. If you take in all that, it will come to about 30-35 lakhs.

[More questions off mic – 37.55 ]

Raghunandana: I’ll say that, because I know this, the average would be about 6-8 lakhs per production. At the NSD. Some productions tend to spend more.

Sanjna: How much more?

Raghunandana: Four to eight crores generally. Without counting the infrastructural costs. Infrastructure that’s available.

Akshara: NSD bashing is not allowed. There are a few more points about NSD. The yearly Bharat Rang Mahotsav has a budget of about Rs.50,000,000/-. [question offmic – 38.48]. The NSD budget is slightly tricky. There is money coming through Department of Culture, there is money coming through North-East Welfare Scheme, etc. So they bring in money from various schemes. So the fund for North-East development also comes to NSD – part of it comes to NSD. And also out of this five crores, there will be some contribution from the government from Delhi. So the total cost, I mean approximately – nobody in NSD knows what is the total cost for Bharat Rang Mahotsav. I have tried it from bottom to the top, nobody knows it, they will just show you a huge bunch of files and say you have to find it out from over here. [Offmic comments – 39.40] it’s not allowed to the directors of NSD also that is the problem.

It should not only become only NSD bashing. The government of Karnataka is not lacking behind. Yearly, the Hampi Festival in Karnataka, costs nearly 3 crore rupees. And the allocation by the government of Karnataka for various festivals in the state –they do ten festivals at the moment; the number is growing every year. Every district wants to have a festival for example Uttara Karnataka district will have a Karavalli festival, another Kadamba festival, another Sahayadri Festival etc. etc. etc. The various allocations to festivals is more than the sum of it allocations to ten academies put together. The ten academies include academy for literature, academy for dance, academy for Urdu, academy for music, translation etc. etc. Symptom 3 – art as an instrument for development. This is another tricky area which has recently opened up. Another development which has taken place since 1990 to 2006 – parallel to the other symptoms is this. Processes facilitating community activity and social action and processes facilitating social and political struggle and agitation have been gradually co-opted and blunted into becoming instruments of social welfare and thus, rendered toothless. This is happening all over India and we have the example of… the symptoms are visible in the completely altered nature of street theatre. Many people here would be able to give more examples of how street theatre has been completely de-contextualised and the politics of it has been largely … there are still groups who still do valid street theatre. But by and large street theatre has lost its teeth. I take the example of KPTCL. KPTCL is Karanataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited. So that is the body that transmits power to Karnataka. What would they have with theater? But they decided two years ago that they would have street theatre plays to educate farmers to save electricity. Not to steal electricity and also to conserve electricity. So some of our past students, some 10-15 of them, Chandrasekhar Kambar wrote a script for them, 10 or 15 of our past students were involved in this project. They came back and the story they were telling was really revealing. In one place in North Karnataka, they were almost being beaten up. Because the farmers told them, don’t show this drama – give us electricity first! We don’t want this drama! [Laughter]. They were harassed, they were shouted at. So what KPTCL did actually backfired. But still this they don’t understand, other departments are doing it now. Because somewhere in one of the World Bank reports, it is written that development should have a cultural component. So the Indian bureaucracy is translating that statement into these acts. And proliferation of TIE and other models. I am not against proliferation of children’s theatre. But TIE as a model has several problems. TIE as practiced in England or in Germany, if you just import it to India and start doing it in Poona or in Bangalore, I don’t think that it’s going to work. Proliferation of children’s workshops, festivals, which have a brand. Even an institution like Rangayana, which has been doing this big desi children’s festival, where the children do various activities and you have a big jatra where things are sold, get eatables from north Karnataka etc. etc. So what Ziauddin Sardar is mentioning, is actually happening there. Everything is commodified. You can eat culture. Extensive use of theatre for literacy and other missions has completely blunted its edge, and it has become for the bureaucracy a money making method which is clearly reflected in the non-governmental funding. If the entertainment industry is connected with the corporate funding, this is connected with the non-governmental funding. Most of the funding agencies require some kind of a developmental agenda attached with any proposal. My question is, are Indian groups particularly non-urban, incapable of practicing Indian contemporary art? This is another point of irritation for me. Because I come from a village, when I introduce myself to a funding agency, the first question they ask: “you are situated in a village, then you should do plays about AIDS and

illiteracy. If I say that we want to do Kalidasa, or we want to do Shakespeare, they find it somehow out of place. So are we incapable of doing what is known as contemporary art practices? Therefore the problems include tailoring projects to suit politically correct issues, wording and constructing proposals in an internationally correct jargon, culture as instrument. An indirect result of this is a disparity in budget outlay between education and culture. This is one area where a lot of research can be done. I have not done more work on this, but if you compare data between 1990 and 2006, the outlay for education and the outlay for culture, if you compare it, you have a very revealing picture. The present picture is 4245 crores against 4145, which is 28:1. It looks politically correct and valid in a country like India where you are spending more in education, it doesn’t really seem dangerous. But I have an example. I live in a very small village, and there is a primary school just next door. We have a mid-day meal programme. The students are given the mid-day meal free from the government. And for preparing those mid-day meals, they have now built a new kitchen for each school. One kitchen for each school. The building which in my village actually had two rooms. There are only thirteen kids, and they can use one room for the class, and they can use the other room for the kitchen. But the government is not happy. Theyare building another building another room for the kitchen. Because the contractors have money. So it’s like the Narmada Dam. So the money that is going into education, a lot of it is going into this kind of … going into the kitchen! In the name of infrastructure development. It is basically the Narmada story. Therefore the irony of the situation is over spending on education especially primary and secondary education. Is the following the hidden agenda of supporting education in India in a big way – this is my question. To create vast multitudes of people, wit some simple level of literacy enough to make them profit generating consumers but also with opportunity to higher education and higher levels of cultural aspiration which would make them think and question the machination of the profiteers. My doubt is that in a multinational company, people who have a 10th standard or 12th standard education are very good. Because they can handle mobile phones, they can handle internet, in a consumer you need some kind of literacy. So they make you literate just enough to be a consumer and you cannot be a discerning consumer. So there is cut in the higher education. There is cut in the culture. There is a lot of money being pushed into primary and secondary education. So is the PWC agenda of capturing the Third World market, is it also coming through education? That’s my question. Let us not only abuse other people, let us also look at ourselves. Failures of the theatrical imagination. We have not really addressed questions such as how do we train actors and theatre people so that they do not end up in an industry. One of the topics which I and Raghunandana always discuss, is how to develop an acting system, which would make them which would make them good actors on stage and horrible actors on cinema and TV. [Laughter and comments off mic – 49.44].

Devi: Thambiran, who is founder of Thiru theatre and drama, He was a great artist on drama and he was a failure in cinema. He was a great failure. He acted in one or two movies, he was thrown out.

Akshara: Yes, but perhaps that used to be the case. Now the situation is slightly different. I was one of a batch of 25 people in NSD between ’80 and ’83, and out of that 25, 17 are in Bombay. Not doing theatre. Most of them not doing theatre. So that’s the situation. How do you produce plays so that the productions do not become commodities? It’s becoming more and more difficult because certain ways of using

music, certain ways of using visuals, certain ways of dialogue deliveries have been patented by these TV serials. So if you are really doing acting training in a classroom, it is such a hard task to put that out of the mind of the actors, it’s a real task. And I don’t think that the contemporary theatre has succeeded in that. Often in theatre, we end up making wrong diagnosis. Censorship, communalism as the root cause of central issues today. And instead neglect the crisis within our art practice. So we don’t give enough attention to the crisis within ourselves and we often blame the outside forces. Like communalism is an easy target. We can always say that because of communalism things are happening. But things are happening within ourselves. Therefore we easily fall into fashionable, politically-correct modes for the sake of form.Finally, what can the policy forum do in this context. These are just suggestions – I just wanted to round off my presentation. I’ll just read and we can discuss later. 1) Investigate, research each symptom. Symptom means what I have talked about earlier. Publicize the results, press for policy reforms. As Sanjna as earlier saying this white paper etc, this could be one part of the policy forum activity. This need not be the whole policy forum format activity. 2) To understand – this I think is a very important thing – to understand how theatre practitioners are coping with these problems. Ask, “how do you manage” not “what are your problems”. Despite globalization despite the entertainment industry, despite communalism, despite several other evils, theatre is flourishing in India. There is a lot of theatre happening, and how is it happening? How do people on a grass-roots level, cope with these problems? We must really understand. We must understand the way, the survival trick of the theatre. Otherwise we start feeling like experts sitting as if we know all the answers. But the answers lie there. We have to really explore those answers. Find successful groups, practitioners, study and research them. Actively explore, support alternative practices in acting training, production, conducting festivals, building theatres. For example, the one day seminar that I attended two years ago, at the LIFT, it was very revealing and a very useful exercise for me, personally. If you do such exercises, at lest the government of Karnataka, some people in the government of Karnataka can be educated, that there are other ways of doing festivals, other than just inviting five big names and then leave it to their fate. There are other ways of organizing festivals. There are other ways of building theatre buildings. Instead of these 5 crores, 20 crores, 40 crores buildings. We have a small theatre in Ninasam which cost us only 4 lakhs. And which is good enough for most of the shows. So if we have a bank of theatre plans which could be built within ten lakhs it would be a useful resource. Anybody could consult Prithvi for a theatre plan. Organise workshops for theatre groups and practitioners on the one hand, administrators and funding agencies on the other hand on alternative possibilities. This is also Prithvi can do because it is high-profile. In other words, can policy forum be a Medha Patkar of Indian theatre?

Raghunandana: I would just like to supplement some of the points he has made, very briefly. I’ll just make 2 or 3 small points. Akshara was speaking about the Bangalore Habba. There you mentioned that some important writers were also involved. To my knowledge, none of the really important writers, or other people doing significant work in their fields in Karnataka, have been involved in the Bangalore Habba. I can’t even think of one of not a high standing but even a middle-order standing being part of Bangalore Habba. Then there was Nrityagram for instance. You said that tourists…

What happen is that once a year they have Vasanta Habba, that is the only time they have a dance festival or something. That is turned into an all-night binge. So once a year you go to see these wonderful practitioners whether it is Chhau, or Bharatnatyam or Kuchipudi or whatever. It does seem to be a part rock festival, part dance festival and that is it. So it’s as if you are going to a holiday resort and you have an all-night festival like a rock festival so a dance festival is turned into something like that. That is one observation that I wanted to make.

Sanjna: Is the quality bad?

Raghunandana: It is not what the quality of the dance there is you see, what happens is there is a certain mindset that comes into being there. Dance is not something that you go and see every other week. Or once a month. The context changes. You go to it like you go to a Woodstock show. And there it is done. It’s that kind of a thing. It caters to a kind of mind set of the ITPT community, which earns a lot of money. And the younger generation. For them it’s like having one of those pot-smoking, booze guzzling big festivals once a year and that’s it, it’s done, it’s that kind of a thing. Then when you mentioned the inadequacy of the national the example of the information and broadcasting industry – the outlay for that has been increasing and there’s a lot of private partnership also and we have for instance in Bangalore I think 6-7 FM channels, Bombay must be having more. The FM channels constitute a kind of culture of their own. And so what is doing to the sensibilities of the younger generation, is something that we also need to go into.

Sanjna: It’s the same for television, exactly the same for television, where the content is governed by commerce because it has to pull in ads. So there is no policy of setting about – saying that our radio and our television has to do this service to the nation. There is no policy of that sort. And that is essential.

Raghunandana: And lastly, my specific area of work – that is actor training, theatre training. What does one do, to train actors and thetare people in India to work in the theatre. And to see that they continue working in theatre what are the kinds of sustenance that this society, this country can give them?

Session 1 - Tape 1 (B)

Heiko: I have a problem with the way you are using ‘culture’. I think there are various meanings of culture involved. I didn’t really go carefully through what you quoted from that PWC study – I think there’s a paper only on Price Waterhouse as well, but it’s not only that they are leaving out theatre but also they are leaving out dance, fine arts, visual arts, museums, they are leaving out live music, orchestras, opera everything. So I think that I we look at a study that is concerned with entertainment industry one would really have to take that term ‘entertainment’ quite literally. Most of you who are involved in theatre here are hopefully also entertaining your audience. But that’s not your prime motive. You are raising issues, you make people reflect, you make people think and that’s across the board all these theories of culture that are not covered by this PWC study which may be true to many of them. So I think it’s a good sign that they leave out theatre, because it’s not considered primarily an entertainment practice. And then if you refer to Rajeev Sethi, he is mainly a craftsperson, that’s what I understood and how I understood his articles. He

is for many reasons interested in uplifting of the crafts industry in India. Of course it’s been commodified long ago. If you go to Rajasthan and see the tons and tons of traditional crafts products being marketed all over the world, it’s absolutely amazing. Many of the products in any German departmental store actually originate from India. I wouldn’t be able to tell tat because it may be traditionally crafted but it looks like a product from anywhere. So every now and then they have a huge mela of these products which are not sold in India but they are only sold abroad, and you see the products and you are just baffled because that this is made in Rajasthan you wouldn’t imagine. So it’s long been commodified and again, one would have to look at the terminology of culture, that’s definitely part of culture, education is part of culture, but if he is concerned about streamlining or giving more recognition to the traditional crafts that is something quite apart from what we are concerned about here, I would say.

Sudhanva: First of all I would like to thank Akshara for a very provocative presentation, as always. I’d like to make some observations on some of the points he made, and these observations are actually fairly disparate, so it’s not really one single point that I am trying to make. One is this whole question f why is theatre not considered part of the entertainment industry and so on and so forth. I fully agree with you Heiko, I think we should be grateful and happy that it is not featured in there and it seems to me that the reason could be that the entertainment industry is primarily concerned with reaching the maximum number of people at any given point in time and these people are constituted as consumers, or products and services and so on and theatre by its very nature, is unable to reach a very large number of people at one time, and so I think that is something we should be happy about. The question of branding is a little more complex and I think we need to think this through in the context of theatre, especially Indian theatre. What does branding mean? In economics, in the realm of commodities and so on branding has come to mean in practice, as I understand it, that there are products that could be produced anywhere in the world, that could be produced by anybody in the world, but they assume market value only after there is a brand that’s put on them. The sports accessories company, Nike for instance, does not own a single production unit anywhere in the world, including in the US. So all the Nike products that you buy anywhere in the world are actually never produced in the Nike factory itself. They are produced in sweatshops across the world – in Philippines, in India, in China and so on and so forth. And they assume value, only once they are branded with the Nike brand. In other words, the factory is not branded, the workers are not branded, so they are not Nike employees and so on, it is only the product – the finished product – after it is shipped wherever it has to be shipped, it is only once it is branded, then it assumes value. Now what exactly do we mean when we talk of branding in the realm of theatre and especially the Indian theatre that we talk about. I am not very clear on this.

Sameera: Just one more thing – branding in these terms also implies a certain standardization. In the sense that a Nokia phone is replicable everywhere no matter how its made.

Sudhanva: Sure. The question of Rajeev Sethi… the ubiquitous Rajeev Sethi. I think there is one important point that he makes in his write-up which should make us pause and think. You are right Heiko, in saying that the Indian crafts industry has been to a very great extent streamlined etc etc for export and so on and so forth, that’s nothing

new. In that whole process Rajeev Sethi has played a part but he has not been the most important or the chief mover of that entire process and so on, it in fact predates Rajeev Sethi to a certain extent. At the same time, I think the new point he makes in his recent articles, is this. He actually says what is happening. The country is moving ahead, liberalization, globalization, etc. etc are damn good things, they are resulting in 8% GDP growth and so on and so forth. I am putting his argument in my own words, but this actually is his argument. The country is doing very well, now unfortunately what is going to happen as a result of this kind of growth is that there would be some people who would lose out their livelihoods. In other words, there is going to be agrarian distress. And in that situation, crafts have an important role to play, because they provide an avenue out. Now to me that seems to be a very very problematic formulation because across the world, the experience has been exactly the opposite. The experience has been that agrarian distress has lead to the death of crafts, and here is an argument being made that agrarian distress can actually provide an opportunity for craftspeople to actually escape distress. Now it could be possible that a few craftspeople are able to escape this kind of distress, by integrating their practice into the global market sphere and so on, but I would be very skeptical if this argument could actually be generalized. I don’t think it has happened anywhere in the world. In the past in India, it has not happened. The question of disinvestment in culture which Akshara brought up reminded me of the 1956 drama seminar and its somehow fitting that we are meeting 50 years after that. Exactly fifty years after that. Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, in one of her very insightful interventions, she makes the point god forbid, if there were to be any ministry of culture tomorrow. She says that, and then she goes on to say, and god forbid if that ministry of culture were to be a part of the ministry of tourism. [laughter] And that is exactly what has happened, fifty years after those prophetic and prescient words were spoken by Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay. So I think, Akshara that there is a problem in counterposing figures spent on education with the figures spent on culture. I think the fundamental problem is, that even in the realm of education itself, the same argument is being made. For instance in the last ten years in particular, the government is saying that we don’t want to spend so much on higher education because it is primary education that deserves more attention and so on and so forth so let’s pull out from higher education and divert that spending into primary education. The point however is that never in the history of this country, has more than 0.7% of the planned expenditure been earmarked for any kind education. In other words, you are talking about what is already a very small pie, and within the very small pie, you start fighting about who gets what, and that to me is a fundamentally flawed argument. The preamble of the constitution had at one point said that at least 6% of the planned expenditure should be earmarked for education. In the first 5 year plan, it was I think 0.7% if I remember correctly and subsequently it has only gone down. It has never gone up. So that’s a fundamental problem. The other thought that came to my mind about branding, packaging and so on and so forth, culture industry etc etc is this strange case of how Kaavya Vishwanathan got a life and then lost it. Kaavya Vishwanathan – the 19 year old, American Indian author who wrote this book How Opal Mehta got a Life etc etc. So that whole thing. You see there are a couple of things to be kept in mind on that. One is that the editor who worked on her book, not at the publishing house but at the packaging house, which actually packaged her book, right? And it’s the packaged book that the publishing house bought. So there’s already an intermediary between the author and the publishing house which did not use to be the case earlier. So the editor who worked

on her book at the packaging house earlier worked on that same earlier novel out of which she is supposed to have stolen. That’s one fact which is known but which has never been talked about. The other very interesting thing is that there are service providers who help students from abroad get admission in these very prestigious institutions like Harvard and so on and so forth, and Kaavya’s book actually found a publisher because the agency which was helping her get admission, which is I believe a very expensive sort of service that you buy. So this agency actually prepares you so that you can get admission. And for this you pay, right. Now the person who was interacting with Kaavya Vishwanathan in that agency asked her what do and so on and she said “I write” and “what do you write” and so on, that’s when she got interested and said, maybe they can turn you into a novelist. And she passed on her contact to this packaging company, it is called a packaging company by the way, it is not my phraseology, it is called a packaging company – they package authors. And now what is more interesting is that Kaavya’s novel is actually – the subject of her novel is about a young woman who wants to get admitted to Harvard and she does not get admitted because she doesn’t have a life outside of her studies and so on, and how she gets a life and then she is admitted into Harvard. In other words, it is actually subliminal advertising for the company which provides services for the students to get admitted into institutions like Harvard. Now all of this happened. This is just a 17 or 18 or 19year old kid who is also being pushed by her parents and all that, then she gets this instant fame, $ 500,000 advance, one film deal, two book deals, etc etc and then, when the shit starts flying, everyone backs out. Everyone backs out. And from the first statement that she is made to give, which is “I greatly admire this author, I have read her so many times, I have probably internalized her” you can see that she is being set up for what is effectively a con job. In other words I am just saying that there are very very… almost sinister ways in which the entertainment industry, the culture industry works and operates. I think we need to be aware of them. Not to be overtly scared of them, to build a kind of a hype around it or any undue fear around it but at least to be aware of what these things are. And the last point I just want to make, Akshara made the point and I am not sure I understood him correctly, this whole question about theatre industry, why we should actively prevent it from becoming an industry and so on, it seems to me that in fact some of the most vibrant theater in India has happened because theatre has become an industry. On the Marathi stage, on the Gujerati stage. It is theatre that I personally admire a lot. There are many specific plays that one does not like and so on but that’s true across the board. There are also ways in which for instance the tamasha industry that works, and they are actually able to leverage precisely because they come to them not as artists, but as an industry. And that is an important thing to keep in mind, I think it’s very important for us as theatre people to understand what is it that will move the government into taking certain steps and so on. So if you’re asking for entertainment tax exemption, if you’re asking for clearances of various kinds, etc etc, you know all that, you are more likely to get it if you are able to demonstrate to the government and the other powers that be, the economic and other advantages or spin-offs or at least the level of economic activity this involved in this whole thing. So it’s not necessarily something to be scorned at. And I just thought that I should bring this in because I am not sure that you meant it in exactly this manner.

Akshara: I must respond to these two questions. I must clarify, I am also very happy that theatre is not included in the PWC report. I also feel that theatre is spared from that kind of industry. But we should also make a distinction between what is meant by

industry in PWC. The way Marathi theatre is organized, that is not an industry for PWC. Because PWC doesn’t even include Broadway and West End. It excludes even Broadway and West End. That doesn’t come into PWC picture at all. What I am trying to say is that there might be a time when our performance may also be judged in the index of that industry. Which is happening in TV today. So that time may come for theatre. So if that tie comes, then we have a problem.

Heiko: You may have a problem but you may also have a chance. They are understanding that the cultural industries are a part of the modernization and globalization of the Chinese society, I just recently read an article where it was pretty well explained that now the Chinese authorities are now going much more into supporting the arts across the board. I don’t know if in itself it is dangerous to be considered as part of entertainment industries if it makes government agencies support these industries. From my experience with government cultural ministry in Delhi I would be careful to say that they really understand what the arts are all about. Theywould have to turn to people like you and others to be really told and that is a learning process which will eventually take place – they are taking the decisions out of their own whims and limited understanding of the arts and that they would go into the field. But if that happens then of course then things… last year there was an initiative in Bangalore to launch something like a Delhi Biennial for the fine arts. This is something that could be an important event for the city in marketing the city as it were, which does not include on the contrary that there would be substantial meaning for art from across the world but still its something important like in Venice its an important event to market the city – the city has enormous advantages but still it’s a meaningful exercise for artists, the same thing goes for film festivals etc. That’s something where you could easily include meaningful arts practices into the entertainment agenda and maybe get resources from government and municipal agencies.

Alan: I think that what you’re getting down to now is the tension between the entertainment industry and art. And the way in which they are constantly in tension and they way in which they both have to be watched. That’s the big problem. When you look at the Price Waterhouse listing,,, those are all for-profit enterprises. The ones that are left out are the ones that in order to be able to thrive, must have subsidy and in the whole history of art, not of entertainment but of art, subsidy has always been a part of it. And in fact the very nature of the governmental policy in terms of subsidy of the arts says a great deal, has a great deal to do with the identity of that larger culture. Which is why it’s so low in America. But what happened in the history of this that I can talk about from the American point of view is that when the theatre was decentralized from New York, the for-profit theatre was decentralized by government policy really with the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, you suddenly had theatres, serious, professional theatres, subsidized by the government in every community. And the idea was that it would be serving that community and the theatre itself would have an identity in terms of that community and would serve that community’s identity as well. That was all dandy in the beginning till about the sixties. Then something began to creep in that should become cautionary for what you’re talking about now. What started to happen was that these theatres, the not-for-profit theatres that were creating community suddenly also became recognised by investors as incubators for the for-profit theatre. They – private money – would start to support individual productions with an eye to, guess what, bringing it to New York.

So that the process began to reverse itself and in fact the connection with community began to disappear – or bean to dissipate. Because suddenly they were looking over their shoulders to somewhere else. Initially the idea – oh look at this – we have a whole new kind of private subsidy happening – turned into a new kind of artistic impulse and you’ve got to be wary of that at all times because its too easy and too seductive to suddenly find that what you were really looking for all along was validation by something else rather than yourself and it can happen, particularly from what I’m learning about Indian theatre practices, the huge differences in the different cultures that need their own celebration through the arts.I want to make another point about education. One of the great difficulties is that education has to, in any society I think, has two objectives. One is to educate, the other is to socialize. And unfortunately you can’t do one without destroying the other. So we are caught in a constant paradox with that and what then becomes is that education becomes socialization and its not education at all and I think that’s what you were talking about.

Akshara: I didn’t quite get that last point, could you elaborate on that? On the education versus socialization.

Alan: I’ll try. When the experience – my experience of education which I’m constantly going back to and figuring this out is that I was sent to school every day – a public school in which I learnt to read, barely learned to count, I learned history, some of the sciences, all those things you learn from K to 12, right? What I didn’t realize is that I was learning a way of being in the world as an American. And that it was both parochial and puritan. That it gave me certain assumptions, particularly when you’re beginning at six, seven, eight, nine years old, certain assumptions about the way I was supposed to be in the world, which is the socialization part of it, the way I was supposed to be as a boy, the way I was supposed to be as an American. And it wasn’t until I really became educated by myself that I began to question these things. And when I began to question them actually, that’s when I really began to develop as an artist, because I always had these dreams of going into the entertainment industry. Because in the entertainment industry you make money and if you make money, ten you’re validated, right? So I really had to work against the socialization that I had gotten from my education to really take ownership of my own education. Obviously the pubic school is not going to do that. They can’t. They can’t afford to. And you can’t afford to go to the private schools where maybe they take a stab at it. Because that’s only for the elite who have a vested interest on the system as it stands.

Raghunandana: From what we see at least in the realm of higher education in India, the opposite process seems to be taking place. Where you have young people who are going to engineering colleges, colleges that teach medicine, other technical courses, where they seemingly get a technical education. But then they are dissocialized effectively because the courses they take up are so demanding they create a world of their own. By the time they finish their studies, they are already in the placement exercises, they get appointments in big companies, go abroad, this is across the board, from the medicine and engineering colleges to the MBAs and other technical courses. Where apart from becoming consumers of the commerce industry, of the entertainment industry as we have it TV, cinema etc, they have no idea of what constitutes good art, relevant art, in that sense they are dissocialized, their education de-socializes them. And I am sure that that also happens in places like the USA?

Alan: It doesn’t so much desocialize as decontextualize them.

George: Thanks, thanks for that presentation I think it’s been really thought-provoking for me. It seems to me that one of the problems that your paper is addressing is the problem of an especially weak adversary, if you see the PWC report as the adversary. In some sense it’s a very weak report. While it seems to suggest the way forward in terms of the entertainment industry and what processes different kinds of practices have to go through in order to become an industry it gives you precious little about what that process means, outside of trillion dollars or whatever. I think part of our problem is to see what would be the strongest articulation of the PWC position. Because that in a sense is the real problem. PWC thing is I think a veil, and there is something of a problem beyond it. And to me this is complicated by the fact that while you’re talking of the PWC report, you then go on to talk about the problems of state funding. And in our case you know you have the state actually commissioning bodies like the PWC to do their work for them. So where does the state end and where does a body like PWC which is actually a body that is set up apparently to serve corporate interests and apparently to serve the interests of the market, when say the Government of Maharashtra via the world bank asked the PWC to tell it how to plan the future of Bombay when there is already the MMRDA which is a body which is set up to do this which in fact also receives its money from the world bank. It becomes an especially complicated situation. And I think partly the confusion is reflected in the report. The report is serving many masters. It is trying to be a instructor from whatever I could glean from what you’re saying and especially the pertinent point is what happened in the film industry in India. Industry status is what the debate was all about over the last five to six years, with the Ministry of information and Broadcasting. There would be representations made to the ministry saying recognize us, recognize us as an industry. One fine day the state turns around and says you are an industry. And that’s why Sudhanva’s points are extremely important, what does it mean. I mean government turns round and says you’re an industry and then the film people don’t know what to do.

Session 1 – Tape 1 (3)

Devi: Andhra Pradesh has the great advantage of having so many festivals already conducted. Almost every big city, town has its own festival. My question is as far as I know, when you go sometime back; you will see that festival is something people celebrate. That comes out of their needs or their happiness or their sadness. Not something that is imposed to serve corporate needs. Every festival I see is conducted to serve some kind of industry. Not to people. So you can’t impose festivals on people. And you can’t ask people who created their own folk art forms to celebrate their own happiness to come and perform for corporate happiness. Whatever it is, happiness or sadness, you can’t ask them to come and perform there like puppets. And also, one more important factor about these festivals. I don’t know much about how they celebrate in other areas. You bring a folk art form that is actually rooted in a village that is, its roots are cut off as soon as you bring them to a festival and it becomes a lifeless plastic plant. Which has no khushboo, nothing flowering, nothing natural. So it dies. So it’s a process of death for the folk art forms as soon as you bring them to the festivals.

Akshara: this is clear in the history of the names of festivals. Earlier it used to be Diwali festival, Ganesha festival. Then it started having nationalist names. Chalukya festival, Pulkeshi festival, Sahayadri festival. Then you have the Hutch festival or the Surya festival, the corporate festival. So the nature of – if you study the changing names of festivals, you have the history there.

[Off mic comment – 2.55]

Devi: No, I feel that if there should be a festival in Bangalore or Hyderabad, there should be a festival of people who brought all the folk art forms, maybe cut off, to the bastis. And they are still doing something whether singing about their village or singing about their lost dreams. Let them come and do their own festival, about the city where they live, or about the aspirations they seek to, in the city. But not to this kind of puppetry.

Sameera: There’s a reality here though, which is part of the reason things get convoluted and corrupted. Part of my research was working on Teejanbai. I was looking at her work and performance in her context. And one thing I found -Chhatisgarh Pandavani, I love the form, I think its beautiful, I think it has inbuilt incredible satirical political strength, social political strength. The reality is that Pandavani also has become, for the Madhya Pradesh or right now the Chhatisgarhgovernment, a fantastic bearer of identity – a brand, in a way. And let’s not forget the realities – the problematic realities of culture on a rural level. It’s not pristine. It’s not Gandhi’s rural India and the imagined rural India, it’s a very different animal than the reality on the ground. It’s as complex as anything else. In Chhatisgarh, women were not allowed to perform Pandavani. It’s a folk form, but it’s not an old folk form. Even though once you see somebody in a tribal costume, you assume that the costume has been there for 2000 years. In fact Pandavani performers did not perform in a tribal costume before. They performed in kurtas. In this situation you have Habib Sahib whom I respect dearly who starts working with Pandavani artists and the first time a tribal costume comes in happens when a Pandavani artist gets exposure to an urban and then an international audience. There is a whole process in which a Pandavani artist is told you have a wonderful heritage, why are you keeping that away from the stage, why are you not using that as your identity? This is a process that the urban and international audience likes. And the monies that we are talking about – and the social acceptance – Teejanbai did not have social acceptance in Chhatisgarh, she was thrown out of her own village. She was physically not allowed to perform, let alone social boycott – she was not allowed, right. Here you move to another space, and that is the whole contradiction in this situation – you have other things holding you back. In this case, you go out, you make much more money than your village gives you – you village is only paying you in kind – you get cash, you get applause, you get acceptance. You suddenly become aware of yourself as a carrier of cultural identity and acceptance. Today Teejanbai, when she speaks, will say “I carry, I stand for” the cultural identity of this country. And she means it, she believes it and she is right in acertain way, she is not wrong. Younger artists have come after her. She has opened the way for female Pandavani artists. Ritu Varma has come after her. They will not perform in villages. When villages invite them they say minimum Rs. 5,000/-. Village can’t afford that, they don’t want to perform there. Can you blame them? They live in slums. These are called villages – I was shocked because I had my own pristine idea of a village. And when I went to see Jhaduram Devangan I walked through beautiful

fields. Ritu Varma also lives in a village which is basically an urban slum. It may be cleaner than Calcutta slums or Bombay slums but it is a slum. Can you blame her for not wanting to go to the village? And for saying, “I will go to Delhi and I will go to Japan, I will make so much more money and why the hell should I waste time”. A fundamental problem in all this is the break with the community. And to tell the artist you must keep in touch with the community when you can’t make a livelihood of it, is not fair. So where do we address these problems because for me, the only way I see government or corporate or anybody else seeing value in theatre is if theatre is fundamentally committed to its own community. And if people want it. The minute people want the performance people will give you money. They will give you funds, right? Coming back to Avignon, and the other big festivals that happen in Europe. The city makes money out of that festival. You have the main performances and you have small performances happening in the homes or the gardens or the garages of people. And they get rent for it. And the entire city benefits. They benefit in terms of identity, in terms of celebration, in terms of economics, in so many ways. Because somewhere the connection has happened. We can criticize whatever we want. So that’s just a reality, no matter what we talk about them its constantly happening on the ground. Just one more point – economic reality. In Tamil Nadu, and I’m sure its true –Pravin you can talk better on this, but the special drama problem. There is tremendous performance happening, you have nine months of performance happening, you have troupes, you have circuits, you have invitations, the way the economic structure is happening its been changing, but you perform. But yet, every single actor is in a huge debt situation. Which keeps building year after year after year. So it doesn’t matter if the producer is making money – what about the artist? And then when we start talking industry we have to start thinking certain processes and systems and all of these things which protect the artist otherwise the artist is obviously going to say, my son will not be a performer.

Heiko: Let me just add to that. Right now the Bonn Festival is taking place, which hosts a lot of Indian theatre and dance groups. And Habib Tanvir is going to close the festival this weekend. Or beginning of next, or something. What I just understood from what Sameera just said is that of course, this discrepancy between culture and in this case, theatre happening in cities and theatre happening in the countryside is simply not there in Europe. At least not in Germany. I don’t know in other countries… I don’t think there is. When one would think about city marketing and suggesting to municipal authorities to support not only festivals, festival is just the peak, but across the year, the work of theatre groups and other cultural ensembles, it definitely only works in cities. Whether small cities, big cities, Bonn is not a very big city, but it is a city that is benefiting from being on the cultural map. The festival itself, right now this one that is taking place, is not making money, they are spending money, but somehow, the city benefits. And that, the authorities understand. But still without municipal support to the festival itself it would never take place.

Pravin: [initial bit off mic] I suppose, if they need money, the municipal authorities are happier to spend money on the festival.

Heiko: Maybe someone will be sitting there and calculating the costs and the benefits, but it’s I think more general. They understand that its important to not only have cities on the political map – Bonn as the capital of West Germany but there’s an economic map like Frankfurt is the banking center, but also on the cultural map.

Because all the big corporates they are looking at the entire climate that the city offers.

Sophia: It’s what we call a ‘soft factor’ in Germany and it’s I think a fundamental thing in German subsidies, not only festivals but also theatre subsidies etc. That culture is a fundamental thing that adds to everything. It’s not just measured in economic terms that’s why they are spending so much money – they’re not making money. I just wanted to put this forward – I think that explains a lot when this figure pops up, why is Germany investing so much more in culture than America is. I have 2-3 remarks. I am very confused about India in the sense that I have traveled a bit in the last year and it is so hard to say something because whenever I see, it has such a different social and economic setup. I go to Kerala I see that temples are paying for performances, so suddenly it is religious economy that is giving artists a living, and then I hear about Marathi commercial theatre and I say, wow it works, people get paid! And then I see people working on the Ford Foundation grant and I see people doing street theatre, I don’t know how you finance it, it seemed wherever, everytime I seemed to find a completely different reality, and a completely different audience as well. And a different system happening. So I’m like in awe of how you can speak about everything, because I look round and everytime I turn around I see a completely different system at work but one thing I found everywhere, is that people are not willing to pay enough for theatre. I think that is a huge problem. In Delhi everything is free, which I think is terrible, and Prithvi is only charging a hundred rupees which is great but also terrible and I don’t think the culture’s there that people are willing to pay a certain amount of money to see artists at work which then gets to the artist because they then have to work for free which ends up with them being able to commit to do shows which ends up to the point where you can’t do regular shows which ends up at the point that there is no regular audience at some place. That’s what I feel coming from a very organized German theatre system. I think – I have worked for a very large theatre festival in Germany – international one, and I basically think it’s not a good idea. I mean the festival worked really well, it was basically in the region of Stuttgart. But it worked because there was an audience that had been builtfor a hundred years, you know. The theatre which hosts the festival had been doing work for over 12 years to build an audience. And this is the basis of the system; I mean the festival worked only because the community was there to watch something else. I think a festival only makes sense, whatever kind of festival, if you have already built an audience by the community theatre there, which is ready to watch something else. Otherwise a festival is completely a waste of money for the artist and for the audience, which comes back to the point that Sameera made that theatre is fundamentally connected to the community. And that’s why it’s a wonderful form because it’s live and it’s for the community. And this why the whole festival idea is largely problematic on every scale, even on the what - Bharat Mahotsav - something? I always forget the word. This year it was all sold out, it was amazing, I was there and almost all the performances they were all sold out, yeah almost full. So that’s good but I think that also happened because they were largely publicizing it. And it’s been there for a while.

Alan: Let me add something to that. I think you’ve made a really important point. When we’re talking about a festival we are talking about a time out of the ordinary flow of life. And as soon as you begin to connect theatre with this thing outside of the normal flow of life, you are already placing it as an exotic in some way. The question

is how do you integrate all the arts into the daily fabric of any community? And that’s a huge problem now – didn’t use to be but now it is a huge problem.

Raghunandana: I’ll take your permission for a slightly extended ‘minutation’ on certain things that have cropped up in this last half an hour. Firstly I think, briefly I’ll just mention a few points then I’ll come to the major point I want to make, I think Sudhanva’s point about education and culture is very taken. I personally thought that’s a very important point. You see the money that is spent on primary education and secondary education, we need to spend that money more and we need to use that money more effectively. So that I think is a very important point. I don’t think that we should contra pose the money given to culture to the money that is given to education. We should be able to handle and solve our problems about the ‘how’, you know the problem that Akshara was talking about how the world economy wants to create consumers who are just literate enough to become consumers. It’s a task that we have in front of us; we must be to solve that problem. The other problem that Akshara was speaking about earlier, you know when he met the economist on the train and his friend said that we must take the Price Waterhouse Coopers’ report with a pinch of salt. Then you quoted the example of retail marketing? It is news to me that we now have a Wal-mart retail outlet in Bangalore. But apart from Wal-mart, you have any amount of chain-stores called the ‘Food World’, then you have what is called ‘Fab Mall’, all the provisions. And many middle class and upper middle class people are flocking to these malls. And you have them in every extension in Bangalore. In many extensions you have 2 or 3 outlets of Food World. And then increasingly we also see even green groceries you know, vegetables being sold. There’s a whole market called ‘Greens and Greens’ [? – 18.06] where you can buy vegetables, just fresh fruits and vegetables. These chains deal directly apparently, with the producers. So what happens is in the middle, all these hundreds of thousands of people who sell vegetables in the street are unemployed. And many of these middle class people do not buy from the man on the street. And that is an important. Which means that while we should take reports like PWC’s with a pinch of salt, I don’t think we can dismiss them either. We’ll have to take them very seriously. And reckon with them. We must take them as warnings. Then in response to what Anita was saying, in Bangalore for instance – I’ll be slightly autobiographical – in the past 5 – 10 years there has been a large influx of people from North East India to Bangalore and they are mainly migrant labour population. Because there is enormous construction activity going on in Bangalore, it’s the boom city today. Formerly you see, we had immigrants from Andhra or immigrants from Kerala or Tamil Nadu, who have always been there forgenerations. Now you have this immigrant population which is largely illiterate, they come here to work and its so painful to see them because an average middle class boy or girl who comes from another state, a Maharashtrian educated person, who is literate, can some day hope to rent a flat, buy a flat, build a house in Bangalore. But these hundreds of people who come, they can never dream of building a house or owning anything except sleeping on the pavements or building a small hut for themselves in some jaggir or colony. So what happens is it is painful to see these people displaced from their towns, from their villages, coming far away. Somebody from Andhra – who comes from the bordering districts of Andhra into Karnataka, it is only a matter of a few hours, journeying from Andhra or Tamil Nadu. But to see somebody from Bihar, or UP, or Bengal, or Orissa, and there are hundreds of them in Bangalore, its very tragic. Then they are denied all access to their cultures to their language to their home environment. That also needs to be looked into because, in a

city like Bangalore what is happening is either you have Kannada theatre, or all the middle class and upper middle class immigrants from other parts of India, who come to Bangalore or do English theatre. And it is English theatre which is largely supported by the corporates. This is something that again and again comes up in our discussions, in these NSD committees or in Ranga Shankara also I have brought up this problem again and again. When we talk about language-based theatre which is based on an Indian language, we are not arguing that only Kannada must be given prominence. And I want to see a day when the Sindhi population of Bangalore have Sindhi associations and stage Sindhi plays. Tamil people stage Tamil plays, Malayali people stage Tamil plays, then it will become a true cosmopolitan city. What we have is Kannada theatre and English theatre. We have absolutely no Hindi theatre, no Tamil theatre practiced by people who have been living in Bangalore for years and years.

Sanjna: Maybe that’s what we need to start now germinating a little bit about various – when I say ‘policy’ I really do mean ‘visioning’, I don’t necessarily meangovernment policy only. So at Prithvi we have a problem, we don’t have a Marathi audience simply because of our location, our Marathi theatre is strong in itself but apparently it needs a home, we’ve started keeping two days per month for Marathi theatre. It’ll take 3 years for us to develop an audience, but we’re willing to risk a loss. We need to try and exercise our imagination to try and vision the other problems. We know there are other problems, we’ll have to vision the way we can fix it. If festivals are an issue, and we need to say, festivals need to community, otherwise they are meaningless, how do we do that? Firstly, festivals – do they play an important role? Celebrations do, I believe, we know that celebrating anything does play a role but what is that role? Let’s come to the crux of the philosophy behind the festival issue and let’s see what role there is to play. Maybe it’s our space to pay that role and maybe we need to say to the government and the State, no, you can’t play this role, it’s not your area.

Devi: See, I don’t know what policy, celebration, corporates and theatre is to me. I talk about completely the rural scenario of Andhra Pradesh. I came to know whether this discussion will help our rural artists in any way. Or we can do something about it. That is my main function, nothing more. Its okay you discuss all these things, my main aim is that. See in Andhra Pradesh we have many castes, who are craftsmen, have sub castes perform for them. This is a phenomena started in the Middle Ages. Every caste, every craftsman’s caste, has a sub caste which perform it. Nearly 2 lakh families continuously perform for their own caste. Now for the last 10 years, what happened? Even before that? The process was very slow, for the last ten years it has become very speedy. Governments never took care of these artists who performed for their own communities and castes. They survived continuously on the generosity of their own mentors or whatever you call them – sponsors, patrons, but not the landlords. The patrons were not always landlords or landed sections of the village. That is entirely different scenario again. Now for the last 10 years we see the land is eroded. No more are they paid. Means, these families divide villages; they say this part of district is yours, that part is mine, so the families continuously travel around. Now there are two things happening. One is, the agricultural seasons change, due to the commercial crops, or the drought situation or so many reasons. Second, village is no more dependent on a craftsperson for its agricultural needs. For the tools or anything. And second largest sector of employment, the handloom sector, is

completely gone in Andhra Pradesh. So the sub castes, the artists’ castes, who are dependent on these communities of crafts, what is their fate? We are talking about both the things. Crafts as part of culture, and performing arts. Actually they are singing of their craftsmanship. So now there is nobody to pay them, to call them, to make them sing. So now, these two lakh families, what do you suggest that we do? Do we call them to Bombay? Yes they came to Bombay to dig the underground network cables. They are in Bombay slums. They are in Hyderabad slums. They are in Ahmedabad slums, they are everywhere. So do we suggest for craftspersons, do we suggest the same for artists? Or as Sameera was pointing out children are no more interested in learning their own hereditary arts forms through the family. One more aspect is, for the last ten years, younger generation, they themselves are distorting the cultural forms. Making them into some kind of sexy, vulgar song. Making them into cassettes and cassette industry is flourishing. As Sameera said, we can’t stop them from doing it, because again it is their employment in question. And many artists or folk forms they come in government shows, they perform for ten minutes, they get the money and they go. And like the lady, he gets the applause. But what about the rights of the community which developed this art form over centuries? It is not his own thing. I think when we talk of policy and survival, why the government, [what about] theatrepersons? I am very sorry, I don’t know what you are doing? I am sorry if I hurt anyone. But I see, sitting in a town, we talk about policy we talk about getting the money; we talk about many things, but what about the village people? Village theatre? A right to see the art of the people. People have a right to see the art, live art. And also we get 16-17 hundreds of channels. But what about the villagers? They don’t get so many channels. They get only 2 channels in villages in Andhra Pradesh, and you need to have electricity at that time. And so many tribal areas don’t have electricity connections, which our government boasts. They don’t have any entertainment which they used to have. We never explore these areas. You ask how we survive? Yes, we survive on these things. Villagers, even though their back is broken, still give money. It is not as if people don’t give, they give money. I have seen that in Andhra Pradesh both amateur theatres and professional theatre – if it is, there is no professional theater as such in Andhra Pradesh – they talk all sorts of nonsense. Never relating to rural India or to the life. Never talk about their culture, never gives their idioms, their language, everything is neglected. We talk what we want to talk in our scripts, so why should a common person in Telegu come and pay for a ticket so that your theatre group might survive? So I think these things ought to be addressed. I want to know about these things. I want to learn, what you suggest [our organization do]. We demanded the government, what are you going t do about this, we asked our political parties, what are you going to do about these artists, at amateur level – we talked about everybody. Why don’t you take up the training or updating or skill development or any kind of survival skills to the existence of the folk art forms. It’s not sufficient you record them in your academies, you put them in your museum, folk art is not a museum piece. Many of folk art forms that survive were updated by themselves by the artists when they could understand the society. Now society has come up, a common folk artist, he is not able to grapple with what is happening. So it becomes very difficult for him to incorporate the changes as he used to do. So what are we going to do about it? What is the government doing? So I think when we talk about cultural policy, it is not something which is related to four walls of a theatre or a hall, it is more broad. And I think the most important aspect is whenever we talk, even in Hyderabad, it is from the perspective of the artists and performers. What about the

people’s perspective? It is a very important component. What about that? So I have more questions. Whenever I remember I’ll put them to you!

Prasad: I will try to respond to what she said and what I was hearing from the morning. Actually I fully agree with her last statement, whatever we are talking about we need to think about artists’ survival and people who are coming to see the artist. Since yesterday I have been hearing this Marathi commercial theatre is good. I would really like to make a statement about it that Marathi theatre whichever way it survives, it is in Mumbai. It doesn’t represent Maharashtra. It is only in Mumbai, not even in Pune. Sometimes they tour in Maharashtra, but that doesn’t mean that Marathi commercial theatre exists all over in Maharashtra. There is not a single group outside of Mumbai which creates a commercial play. A play which sustains the artist and pays on its own anywhere in Maharashtra. Audiences to a certain extent yes. In last five –six years it is becoming a difficult situation even in commercial theatre. When we think about policy I just remember another funny thing that the Maharashtra state government did. Last year they announced a package for Marathi theatre industrysaying that they would give financial support for new productions to the commercial producers. The amount varies from five lakhs to 15 lakhs. And it depends on the number of productions they have created in the past 50 years, 40 years. And it is all statistics. If you have done these many plays, then you get five lakhs. If you have done these many plays you get ten lakhs, irrespective of which plays, irrespective of how many shows, nothing. It is just the number. Secondly, in the last bit of Akshara’s presentation, there was one aspect of how do we train actors so that they do not end up in the industry. And sometimes we feel that can we create a system where can we create an actor that we train is a useless actor for camera. I really wonder whether we should do that. When we don’t have a system where the artist can survive on his own by doing theatre, by doing only theatre. I have been involved in artist training and I struggle with this question a lot, what happens when I am doing theatre training, do I really have to tell them that they should not go to the media? Is it appropriate? Would it be possible for a young person to survive by doing only Marathi theatre? Either in Mumbai or outside Mumbai and earn his bread and butter? And if it is not going to be possible, then can I help that person to get the advantages of industry. Which is entertainment. Television, etc. etc. I would really like Raghunandanaji to talk about it and respond to this question because this is something that has been troubling me a lot, and when I heard about the policy forum this is one of the questions that is really making me think. What kind of policy would generate the possibility of survival for theatre-makers? It is not just creating more theatre and doing more theatre and creating festivals etc. How they can survive by sheer doing theatre. I know there are some exceptions who can survive. I have never gone to the media. I consider myself as one of those lucky people who had to go in the television industry. I am deliberately saying “had to”, if you do it by choice it’s a different case altogether. Those who have to go, because they don’t have choice. Can we think of some mechanism where we create a survival system for theatre people?

Akshara: I’ll respond to this major question that you have put. One problem is that in India, during the modern period, we have actually destroyed a certain cultural policy that was there which was never called as a cultural policy which is implicit. I’ll give you an example. We went for a Sahitya Academi meeting in Trivandrium. It was called the young writers’ conference. Writers from five different languages had come there. From each language, they read poetry, talked about plays etc. etc. Nobody

could communicate to anybody else, outside their own language. It was a huge failure. So at the end of the conference (it was arranged in a five star hotel etc etc, very good food). So I asked Sachinanandan who was the Secretary of the Sahitya Academi, what is the use of it? How much have you spent on this? He said something like forty lakhs for the four day event. And I said what is the use of this? And Sachinanandan told me, you see earlier, this inter-linguistic exchange, or what Rustom Bharucha calls as intra-culturalism in India, it did not need the government support at all. During the 1920s in Kannada, there are people who translated works from Bengali, directly without the intermediation of English. But now we have already created a situation where that kind of a linkage is cut. The modern nation state has destroyed a certain policy, certain survival tactics etc and in that place is trying to institute a new one. We need a cultural policy today, because the earlier modes of survival, the earlier modes of exchange, the earlier modes of going about the world, they have been destroyed, and there are no new ways created. What is created is just a bureaucratic big operatus (?) but it doesn’t work. That is one point, and the other point about this, the whole debate about folk theatre we must remember, when I heard Sameera speaking, I have never in my life met any folk artist who calls himself a folk artist. He would call himself, “Kalakar hain hum”. He would never say, “Hum lok kalakar hain”. Folk theatre is an urban imagination. [Off mic comment - 40.26]. Ultimately it’s a feedback. I also mentioned in my presentation that there is a majority of theatre in India which is out of the festival circuit, majority of theatre in India is not subsidized, there are other ways of subsidizing theatre. For example, I did not mention about how theatres get support from the community. You have a large number of theatre events happening in Karnantaka. They get support from the local people, money, cash, voluntary work. Even my group bases itself a lot on voluntary work. Therefore a festival which would cost 20 lakhs in Bangalore, would be possible in 2 lakhs in my place because there would be a lot of voluntary input going into that. So that kind of patronage, the support, is already there. We must now open our eyes outside the industry, outside the circuit. We talk about the festivals because the festivals have the media hype. Outside there is a big world. So that’s where I support you.

Sameera: Akshara, sorry can I interrupt? Because one thing that Devi brought up was very crucial, in the sense that when you had a certain kind of artist who was performing not only a certain kind of form but there was a cultural history of what one sang about or performed about or whatever, and now you have that society, now the society is so complex it is no longer that easy to grasp. For those who don’t know, can you do the little bit about how you guys at Ninasam, from my point of view of what I understand you do, have tried to bring in that cultural component, so that a community is better informed. Because one of the problems that I do think theatre, not only in rural areas but everywhere, faces is a complete lack of knowledge in some sense. How do you speak put when you don’t know what you’re speaking to when you don’t know a larger scenario of what you’re speaking to.

Akshara: I don’t think that a group like Ninasam does have anything special about it. It is the same technique that is used by most of the theatre groups in India, if most of the theatre groups don’t have community support, any other support will not sustain later. If you don’t have that community support, it cannot happen. I said this to even Arundhati even when Ranga Shankara was being inaugurated, find something connection with JP Nagar, where it is situated. Find some connection with the population of JP Nagar; otherwise Ranga Shankara will be in a void. It will not be in

Bangalore. Every theatre group does that. But Ninasam is fortunate to have a history of 50 years of doing that, so we have slowly developed a history of expertise of how to harness the community support into a tangible project.

Sameera: I’m actually thinking about your culture course, at one level. Which is clearly there for a reason.

Akshara: There are two or three things. One is the voluntary input. When you do it in a small place, for example when Prithvi Festival is done, I am told that there will be something like 50 volunteers working. [Sameera/Sanjna answers 30]. Thirty volunteers working. Who are paid. [Someone refutes this; Sanjna (?) clarifies “conveyance”]. But even that conveyance is a big amount. When we do it, we don’t even pay them that. We just give them food. So you have that kind of a free input. From all the villagers doing all sorts of work. And you get donations in kind. Somebody donates rice, somebody donates something else. And actually have the resource persons subsidizing the culture course because sometimes we do not even pay the resource persons their travel. We request them, we want you but we cannot pay you. Then they come. So it has been possible because of the many years of working with people. For example, if Sudhanva comes for me to Ninasam, he brings a friend who we do not pay. But next year that friend will also come. So that way, we will also have to think about how to build a community in the contemporary sense. Caste, community no longer means as a village or whatever. A community can exist without that. Even this policy forum can be a community. So we can build a community here that draw the resources of the community and develop it into slightly tangible results.

Raghunandana: Further to what you were saying, I think the answer Sameera was expecting was on slightly different lines. I’ll try to answer that. As an observer of Ninasam, as a friend of Ninasam, one thing I have noticed is that people who come to the culture course (there are all walks of life who come to the culture course) now when they come and see the Tirugatha place for that year, the company that performs they stage heir first show – they see that, they take part in the discussions, they meet some of the best minds in Karnataka and from India then they are enthused. See it’s a revelation for them. And I suppose that some of them will begin to organize shows for Tirugatha in their towns and villages in the coming years. That is one fall out of the culture course. The other thing is…

[Off mic question – 47.02]

Sanjna: We have a laptop presentation that can be made later.

Raghunandana: There is another small thing. They have what is called the Ninasam Foundation. Subbanna when he got the Magsaysay Award he put all that money into the foundation. What the foundation does is, it has conducted hundreds of 2-3 day courses in all parts of Karnataka, in schools, colleges, villages, in different communities taking literature to the people. For instance, we have a great poet called xxx, or Gopal xxx, or a writer like xxx, now you go to a college, 2-3 literary experts come there, and there is a two day course in which some literary material, poetry, excerpts of short novels, is given to the students there. They read it, and then there are group discussions. A literary awareness, a cultural awareness is given to the people,

and that again contributes to the growth of theatre. The participants are college students, of a particular college. A particular college hosts the event for 2-3 days. Or it could be a community. For instance there is a town in Mandiyar [?], I was there when the foundation course was being held, it’s a small village called Nainamangala [?], so people from that village get together and organize it – young people, schoolteachers, housewives, farmers, government clerks, all people coming to the two day course and it’s a whole day thing. Where you pick up say, Anant Murthy’s short stories. Four short stories are given to them, they are discussed, then the entire oeuvre of Anant Murthy is discussed. So what shows is that theatre can’t work in a vacuum, so it has to take cognizance of a certain literary tradition, cultural tradition and that has to be discussed, that has to be kept alive, in a very modernist sense. That is another fall-out of the Pratishthan’s work. Now to answer Vidyadevi’s question and I will also react to what Devi said, because that is a huge area, the survival of rural theatre and the survival of rural folk art. I’ll come to that later because it is a complex question and we should all discuss that in the next few days. One thing I have always felt I that the crying need, need of the hour today is for professionalism in the organization of theatre, and professionalism in the training and in the performance of plays. That is an extremely important thing. Because we are faced with competition from the TV, from the cinema, even in your villages, where they have only two channels available. Constantly we are exposed to less than ten to fifteen TV serials. We are exposed to a constant barrage of film songs, programmes about film songs, film shows, antaksharis etc. Now when something is filmed, the actor is brought to the audience. The camera takes the audience to the actor. It’s very in your face, so what happens is that all subtleties evaporate. And then you are mesmerized by the screen. Those are drops of light in the screen and you are mesmerized by it. This is what actually captures the audience. You are a captive audience there which is mostly dished rubbish. Now to compete with that, to compete with the special effects, the gimmickry and the huge publicity industry that is attached to the TV and the cinema industry, the only recourse that theatre people and that other crafts have is, to depend on a certain skill. On a very high level of skill in what they do. And that skill will not come unless there is professional training. Unless that professional training is very broad-based, very imaginative training. And unless those people who are trained, also have an opportunity to also practice their art. So this is what has been missing, because in an average year, every year 20 students pass out of the NSD and as we all know, 19 of them come straight to Bombay. Increasingly this is happening even with Ninasam students. Though it’s less alarming than what is happening with the NSD students. Some of the students, who pass out of Ninasam work or 2-3 years in the Ninasam Tirugatha, some of them try to do theatre in their villages but after hat is becomes very difficult. Now there are droves and droves of them in Bangalore trying to get into TV serials.

Sanjna: How do we tackle that problem?

Raghunandana: Now we have to find ways of subsidizing the work, subsidizing it professionally, and sustaining the work. When I say this I may seem to be speaking out against the amateur theatre groups, putting amateur theatre on the opposite side and people who are rained professionally on this side, but the only thing is amateur theatre people, even in a place like Bangalore, I hardly work in Bangalore, because I cannot work for two hours everyday, or less than two hours and come up with a play. I need to work 8 to 10 hours. A minimum of 8 hours, every day for at least a month.

Sanjna: Raghunandana we have to see the chain right through to the end. It is absolutely very right, and in fact it’s a complete circle. A terrible tiring, difficult circle. But here is training, and what do they do after that? So it’s Catch 22. But maybe we need to think of something completely out of the box. And maybe we don’t need to think of a 3 year drama course. Maybe we need to think of much more intensive, excellent programmes that a Naseeruddin Shah, or you or a complete newcomer can possibly attend if they go through a certain audition or whatever it is. These are much more doable, much easier and we can have excellent trainers from across India or across the world come to such centers across the country to produce excellent instruments to carry on the work of theatre. But we also have to think of how that work is sustained. How do they perform?

Raghunandana: In terms of funding and subsidies, first you have the government, corporates and there is one huge segment to which enough attention has not been paid at all, what I like to call public institutions. For instance, those public institutions exist in every state. In Karnataka for instance, you have huge education societies, where all the mathas [?] run 40-50 high schools, 3-4 colleges, there are crores there. And then there are these educational entrepreneurs who run huge institutions. Dozens of schools, pharmacy colleges, teachers training courses, technical courses, engineering colleges, medical colleges, and we can have a dialogue with them, and say you are giving education to the people, education has been made into a business, but still it behooves on you that you also support efforts to do theatre.

Sanjna: Along the same lines, maybe we need to say, we create excellent performers, we have to create work for them. We have to create the work. The government’s not going to create the work. The education institutes are not going to create the work we need o go to these institutes and say yes maybe you could give us the money but in exchange we are going to create a whole series of programmes where our trained individuals can come and interact with your students.

Raghunandana: Absolutely that is what I was getting to. The expertise is there, but the expertise is actually getting drained away to the TV. [Off mic comment – 56.22] Itis not just 20 people who come out every year from the NSD. There are dozens of cases of wonderful youngsters who pass out from Ninasam, I know many of these people and they are actually tearful when they have to go and work in the TV. After trying to work for some years in the theatre, they are really shattered when they have to go and work and they keep saying they feel guilty. For the initial period they say I want to do theatre but I can’t do theatre

Sanjna: When you think about a training set up, you have to think about a possibility of generating work. You can’t think of these disconnected. NSD should be closed down and we should think of training centres or creating excellence but along with that there has to be work. And that’s where we should start thinking. We know the reality let’s talk about where we lead.

Raghunandana: As part of this policy, we must not only envision dialogue with the government and with the corporates but also with these huge public institutions. If we can talk to them, persuade them, make them see our point it would be useful.

Prasad: Just sharing one experience that Sanjna knows about, some of you may also have heard of it. We created a project called Rangavardhan in Maharashtra; it was a network of organizations working in the theatre producing plays. In terms of money we got support, sponsorship to the tune of 7.5 lakhs in total and we were able to create one week festivals at twenty five different places in Maharashtra and Goa in that money. That was not the only money, but it was because of the local initiative that was generated, that we need this. We need to have performances from different parts of our state. If I am in Sholapur, I don’t know what happens in Vakola. If there is some good director creating fantastic work, I would never know in my lifetime. He may be just 400-500 kilometres away from me, still I do not take that initiative to know about it. So if we can think about creating some kind of sustaining infrastructure, where there would be some support coming from outside, but basically it is a local initiative, then it would survive. And then it would create possibilities of more performances. Possibilities of doing theatre at different places. And actually, when we started this Rangavardhan initiative, personally I was very much inspired by what Ninasam does with its’ Tirugatha. When I had my first encounter with Tirugatha I was in my 11th standard. But since then I was thinking about it and I thought that this might be a good idea. Today I can say that if I do a play I can take it to around 50 places in Maharashtra. I can go there, I can tell them I am coming there, I can perform there. This is a good play, we would like this to travel and … [off mic comment –59.38] yes, yes, our artists don’t get paid. But if we work on it that is also possible, that is what I believe. If just, through simple local initiative, these things can happen, then with more push we can take it a little ahead. Because to give an example of a place called Chalisgaon which is a very small taluka place in Uttar Maharashtra, and there was one small organization called Ranga Gardhav, and they got involved in this, and the first year they announced an audience membership programme. And they said in one year we will bring six experimental plays to Chalisgaon, and you pay us Rs. 200 – 300 for all the shows. And they got around 400 plus members for that which was sufficient for them to run the programme for one year. By the end of the first year the “in-charge” of the programme started feeling skeptical about whether it would work next year or not, and so he decided to invite two commercial plays, instead of six experimental plays. So it became four experimental and two commercial. Next year, when he again announced the scheme, there were around 100, 120 people who were registering with the organization. So he was really scared why this happened. And he actually went to every house to the people who were earlier members of the scheme, and most of them told him, that you had committed to show us six experimental plays, and what you have done is you have brought two commercial plays which we can see in Jalgaon. So it is not like audience doesn’t like to see those plays. If this thing can happen in Jalgaon or Sholapur, I am sure it can happen anywhere in this country.

Sudhanva: I just want to make two comments. One is I think at some point we decided that there is going to be as little as possible NSD-bashing in this forum. Let’s also decide that there should be as little as possible TV bashing! I am actually very thrilled when 19 out of 20 actors who come to Jana Natya Manch actually go to TV. I am thrilled, because I don’t want them in theatre. I think they are much better off doing television. I think they are doing great service to theatre by migrating to TV. I am delighted. You don’t want that kind of acting… The other, more serious comment. I think it is important to recall the history of professional theatre in a state like Maharashtra. You start talking about professional theatre in Maharashtra and

immediately you think of Bombay and Pune. But yet the fact is that it is not Bombay and Pune which is actually the birthplace of the commercial or professional theatre, but it’s actually the smaller towns. Towns like Sangli, Kohlapur, Satara and so on and so forth. I think that there is a great need to think about the role of the small town. I don’t think it’s happened really even in social sciences. We haven’t looked at small towns even when we talk of studying urban spaces and so on. We don’t think of small towns when we study economics and those processes and so on and I think it’s very important to do that especially in the realm of culture. One point that Raghunandana had brought up and think it’s a valuable thing to keep in mind, is the role of all kinds of public institutions, in helping theatre not to prosper, but to at least survive. In Delhi for instance, whatever level of amateur work that happens in Delhi the groups which are very active, groups like Act 1 or Asmita or so on, they actually survive almost entirely on what are called either sponsored shows or call shows. Now these sponsored shows are not sponsored by a big company. It would be a sponsored show of lets say, the State Bank of India Employees’ Association, or something like that, or schools or colleges. Now that’s a huge realm of support for theatre. Which I think needs to be thought about, which needs to be studied in some detail, and that’s a resource that needs to be tapped. Last point, is about subsidies of the State. I think it’s very important to keep in mind that the whole question of subsidies actually works out very differently in the West and in countries like India. One of the things I keep saying for instance is lets do, in our agriculture, lets have the same amount of state intervention in our agriculture as there is in the US. US agriculture would not survive a day; it would collapse if the state did not very heavily subsidize it. The same US, and its’ multilateral agencies are asking us to withdraw subsidies from our agriculture. So let’s not listen to what they are asking us to do, let’s try and do what they are doing in their own countries. And the same I think, to a certain extent, not the US though, but the same sort of thing is happening in the realm of culture as well. One of the things the monster called globalization, liberalization whatever you want to call it, has done in India, is to make the mantra of the market the reigning philosophy of the state. In other words, the argument is that if you want to survive, you must be able to survive competitively. And if you are not able to do that, then you have no reason to survive. Why should you survive? It’s the same thing that’s happening in agriculture, it’s the same thing that’s happening in education it’s the same thing that’s happening in culture. So therefore, the withdrawal of subsidies from the realm of culture is not an isolated thing, only in culture. It’s actually across the board. The other thing to keep in mind though is that while there is a great deal of emphasis on the so called withdrawal of the state from economic activity, from social welfare activity etc and therefore also from the realm of culture, there is actually a much stronger state that comes into being in certain other respects. For instance there is a great deal of emphasis on spending on defense, on police and so on. So there is a much stronger state, in certain realms and simultaneously the same forces are asking us for a withdrawal of state from certain other areas. And I think that just needs to be kept in mind.

Devi: To add to Sudhanva’s point, the state comes very strong in Andhra Pradesh by imposing in almost all the towns and cities, if you take up a dhapu to a street you must pay Rs. 100/- challan and take police permission. This government, they gave us the promise before they came in they’ll not impose these things. They’ll lift all these challans and payments. They did not do it.

Heiko: I wanted to throw some light on what is called community support and how that connects very well with what Sudhanva just said. I think I am speaking only about those towns in Germany that I know a little bit about. I would think that with some reason one could call what’s normally labeled as state support for culture, one could call community support. I’ll tell you why: because everyone’s paying taxes, first of all. And the different modes of spending these taxes in the municipalities, be it in a city like Berlin which is divided into different districts, be it on the level of the city, be it on the level of the different districts, Berlin is also a state, all that sometimes confounds it, but it goes on to the different districts of Berlin that people contest in the legislative assembly of the districts, of the city etc what is done on the taxes, be it in legislation or welfare or culture. So a lot of people I think have the feeling that what’s actually being done with their money is their money, is the community. I remember in the 60s and 70s when a lot of conventional theatre forms were done away with by certain directors and certain groups which were subsidized by the city, there was a big debate about that waste of money on that shit that was created on stage, that kind of fine arts that has nothing to do with art, nothing an ordinary person could relate to, so why is the city spending money on that? Now recently in the 90s, Berlin specially came into a bigger financial crisis because of loss of a lot of industries to pother parts of Germany or to India or other places. So the amount of subsidies across the board was constantly reduced. When for instance, parents had to clean the schools of their children, because the schools would not be able to afford a professional cleaning service, then of course the question is raised why the opera is being supported for millions and millions of euro when no one, neither those parents nor those children would go. So it’s always a contested space. Basically I think the notion of the state is very remote, something which the ordinary citizen has no control of and has nothing to do with the needs of the citizen, that has to be seen in the perspective of the democratization of societies, of histories, histories of poverties etc. And also about the devolution of power with acts like the Panchayat Act, the Nagar Palika act. Things like that have taken place in India. Of course we have a long history of devolution, it doesn’t work perfectly at all, but it’s in place. So people are much more connected with what the state is actually doing.

Samik: I have a few responses to make. First I’ll just add something quite seriously,to what Sudhanva started when he said that we should stop NSD bashing and some other of these bashings. Similarly about the festival bashing. For what I think from what little I’ve seen of the festival scene, in theatre at least, has been that the festivals do not really affect in any serious way, the theatre audiences. The regular, committed theatre audiences which are there in several cities and small towns in India. These audiences exist, and when Ninasam starts developing an audience, developing an audience culture, particularly through the culture course which has been an exciting experience for me, I’ve been there for the past 8 years or 9 years regularly and been there for the whole course – it’s a stupendous thing. But at the same time the fact remains that there has been a theatre going culture. In Karnataka, even in the small towns, where Ninasam Tirugatha now goes. Maybe a few towns have been added to the list. So once you have the base of a culture and somebody starts working upon it, it starts developing a theatre going culture. That has happened in a very big way inKarnataka, and Ninasam has played a very significant role. But where the audiences exist, where the audiences are there, festivals haven’t really meant much. But at another level what has happened is that the festival because of the hype, because of the publicity, because of the glamour, grandeur, whatever, has drawn in people who

have never watched theatre. So the festivals have drawn in crowds, which have never been really exposed to theatre, which have never taken theatre seriously. There is another thing also, and this I think is a kind of response to what Sophia was saying, a complaint that very often people from outside India make, is that why don’t people pay more for theatre. Now what has happened traditionally where there has been a theatre going culture is that the section of society hat goes to theatre cannot really afford even now, to pay the higher prices. So the higher prices are afforded by a section of society that would rather come to the festivals. And its not just the festivals, the way the festival culture has grown, and the hype, and support of the corporate organizations, there is not just the one festival a year, it is also a kind of year long festival, with several shows brought on board, which are sponsored and hyped in a certain manner. Not a collection of ten plays or twelve plays. But maybe one play, hyped to festival scale. So there also, the audience is the festival audience. Which is a completely marginal, peripheral audience. It doesn’t belong to theatre. For example when Midsummer Night’s Dream, Supple’s production goes to Kolkatta, it is not watched by the theatre going community of Kolkatta. Because of the kind of publicity, the ticket distribution system, the selling system, everything is left so exclusive, so insular, its not targeted to them, even the location, so this is a while festival scenario which doesn’t really affect the living theatre at all. It’s irrelevant, basically. But, I’ll be the devil’s advocate and say maybe, if even 2 per cent or 3 per cent of the people who wouldn’t otherwise have watched theatre at all, if they are just a little bit curious, and add to the community, then what is wrong with it? So not counting on the festival, not depending on the festival ….

[bit lost due to changing of tapes]

TAPE 2 – Track 1.

Samik (contd): On the last day [when] I had a very direct fight. The way we had planned the seminar, the last session was supposed to be a dialogue and a clash between Schechner and me. So Schechner started his point on the last day by saying, theatre is an urban phenomenon. And by urban, he clarified that the urban phenomenon relates to the big city, the metropolis. Theatre relates to the metropolitan experience. So this is a theory and this theory would be immediately bought by the corporate sector and the government, the state, which asks the Price Waterhouse to define its agenda for it. It’s all part of the same thing, so when Schechner comes out with that pronouncement that all the theatre that is happening in the rest of India, beyond Delhi, Bombay and maybe Bangalore, even Kolkatta and Chennai are not recognized seriously as metropolises, so beyond that what happens is not theatre. So this is a dangerous philosophy or an ideology, which is now being introduced in a very professional manner. So we should be aware of that and we should try to confront it.

Anita: Samik, now that you have brought up Richard Schechner I’ll just ask you one question [general laughter] I have to ask this question! If so many people find him so objectionable, how is it that NSD keeps bringing him back every three or four years? He has told me this personally, “I am funded to go to India, every year, by the Indians”. And then the other question I want to ask you is, if he says that theatre is a purely metropolitan activity, he does it in a little hide-out in New York, or somebody else does it in a hide-out in Bombay or Delhi or something, how is it that he so freely

adopts and adapts indigenous – so called indigenous forms? How is it that he can then say, yoga is something that I brought to the Indians. Again, that is something that he has told me. I am witness to this. [Off mic comment – 02.48] Yeah, ‘Rasa Boxes’ are now courses that are sold in New York. So you advertise it. [Off mic comment –03.00] No but why the hell should you call him here?

[Off mic banter – 03.14]

Raghunandana: Just to add to this and to clarify one thing, in the meetings that take place in the NSD, now I am on a couple of its committees, the chairperson of the National School of Drama, Mrs. Amal Allana, quotes with great approval the fact that Schechner identifies theatre as being a metropolitan phenomena. And the consensus among at least some decision makers in the NSD, in the process that exists there is that theatre should go that way and it s only that kind of theatre which uses high technology, huge expenses, public money, it is that kind of theatre that must be supported. I am putting it on record because this is an incontrovertible fact. And it’s on record even in their documents.

Alan: It’s the result of academic branding.

Samik: I’ll just continue for another few minutes. It’s part of the life. Like Kathakali, which began quite early, all things go into that big kind of basket. But which is meant for the metropolitan audiences as metropolitan theatre. And all these are minor components, things that go into the witches’ brew. And how it operates, I had this wonderful experience which I’d love to share with you, Peter Brook, three years before he did his Mahabharata, came down to India, traveled throughout India, and he made a very clear statement when we first heard him speak in Kolkatta, where he said that he was not going to use any Indian tradition or anything of the kind, because it was Mahabharata as the Europeans saw it, and it was meant for the European market, European audiences. Clear enough and very rational, sensible. I have no problem with that. At the same time he said that he would like to take a look at the different ways in which Indian traditional forms, Indian village forms, how they deal with the Mahabharata story, with the Mahabharata legend. How they theatricalize the Mahabharata legend. So he wanted to study that and watch it, so some of us – a small group – there was an anthropologist, there was a theatre director, and I was also part of the team, three of us, we traveled with Peter, Jean Claude Carriere and his Japanese music director to watch the three different kinds of the Chhau in Eastern India. Now we have these three variations of the Chhau, Mayurbhanj Chhau, which is in Orissa, Saraikela Chhau, which is now in Jharkhand, then Bihar, and the Puruliya Chhau, which is in West Bengal. And these three states have a common border. And one can see if one watches the three Chhaus – now there is a fourth Chhau also – which is also very interesting, the xxx Chhau, which I had been watching a lot, but if you watch that development the Mayurbhanj Chhau began, not as martial arts – I hate that word – it was training practice that was part of a living practice, people living so close to the forest, their survival strategy, training themselves to survive in the forest and survive with the animals, with the hazards of the forest. Part of that training, and to make the training aesthetic, enjoyable, entertaining for themselves so that they get something out of that, not as an exercise but part of the living, these dance forms grew. So Mayurbhanj is Chhau at its most natural, originary state in a manner, no masks, the bare body, with a tiger loin cloth, but the body painted. And painted wit the stripes of

animals, the green lines of the forest, these go onto the bare body and they dance with that. When the Mayurbhanj Chhau went to Puruliya, from Mayurbhanj to Puruliya, the local tribal community adopted it. So they brought in an elaborately designed mask, a very ornate, rich mask, decorated and embellished with leaves, fruit, foods of various kinds. So they are all again part of the forest, but the forest turned into a piece of art which they bear on the head. And the head dominates – in a way when you watch the Mayurbhanj – Puruliya; it’s a small body, a very small lithe body, with this enormous, exquisite mask. When this travels to Seraikela, which was the princely state, an independent stat for a long time, outside the colonial strategic structure, the prince started dancing, so he couldn’t bear the burden of that enormous mask, so it had to be highly stylized, “artistically designed and toned” kind of mask. Very bare, wonderfully formed and carved mask. And only a half face mask really. So you see a whole history in all the traditions. To cut the long story short, we had only two days and we were traveling through the Chhau country, watching the three Chhaus in their historical and physical locations. So we started with the Mayurbhanj Chhau. It was all organized perfectly, timed correctly, nothing lacking anywhere. When we came to the spot, we found that the singer dancer was lying n his stomach, and was being painted on his body. And the entire village, it was a small village, but women, adults, children, all of them together, about three hundred of them, that was the entire population of the village, they were all around this man being painted and watching it with wonder, fun, reverence, everything. We land there and within ten minutes Peter Brook gets impatient and says why are they wasting time? Why weren’t they ready? Because I have to go to the next performance. So we tried to explain what was happening that it was the performance. Because the community was watching the man preparing to go into the forest. And the entire community would not go to the forest so this is the strong man, the active man, representative of the community who goes to the forest. So we are part of it, we are celebrating it, enjoying it, it’s our festival, it is the performance. The Mayurbhanj Chhau dance is not the performance that’s only a part of the performance, but this is a part of the performance and the community s taking part in it, supporting it. There was no funding for this performance but there was an occasion that people would be there and more fun for them. To look at these clowns from the city and how they look, and we become part of the performance. And even Peter Brook becomes quite a funny performer because he starts getting irritated and looking at his watch and the people even start asking us what’s wrong with the Sahib? Because we have started the performance and it’s on. What’s wrong with him, why is he looking at the watch? So this is also what is going to happen, with the whole entertainment industry, and its just an anecdote but it was a revealing anecdote it was a learning experience for me, and it was also part of the learning experience for that night we had fixed up a small dak bungalow – one of these old inspection bungalows created in the colonial period for the traveling British officers. It would normally have just 2 rooms or 3 rooms at the most and there would be a kitchen and there would be the caretaker’s room, a small room where he lives with his whole family. That’s the usual construction of the dak bungalow. We had come to this dak bungalow and we had been told and they had been briefed and everything was done, and the deal was that the four Indians would be in one room, and the three sahibs and one memsahib would be in the other room. They were fairly large rooms, in those days, meant for the colonial masters. But the moment we reached there, the sahibs grabbed both the rooms. So the poor caretaker with his whole family… we got into an argument with them saying that you stay there, where you have been staying all this time, all these years, looking after the place and looking after us, let us sleep outside

on the charpoy. But they were very hospitable and kindly so poor people, they left the room, and the four of us stayed in that room. So that was also part of our education, how you consume culture. And how you then transmit culture. Anyway, let’s come back to a very important point that Devi raised, maybe when I talk tomorrow, I will be talking at some length about the interfaces between the community, and the nation state and the democratic process which has been mentioned by Suddhu and others –Heiko also. So we’ll go into that and I won’t go into that right now. But what is happening, when you say why doesn’t the nation state do something about this. About the groups, about these struggling groups in the villages. How do they survive? Why doesn’t the nation state come in there? Now something that is happening. Because of the agenda of the nation state as it has been defined over the years, whatever government comes, whether it’s a left government or centre left, right whatever, the agenda is that it should be “useful” not so much for that community but at least for the whole state. So they think of a community identified with that particular state. Thegeographical language, cultural borders of that state. So if it is a local thing, you have to make it useful. ‘Use’ is the word. So what has happened even in West Bengal, and in other states as far as I know, whenever the nation state comes forward to support these people, the first thing they would do is they would ask an NSD trained person or a person who is an established figure in the ‘respectable’ theatre, the metropolitan theater, or the urban theatre to come down and train them – the audacity of it – train them to do theater in a kind of packaging which can serve the needs of the supposed larger community. So give them a programme, give them an issue, give them a particular theme, and even the way you do it. In fact it’s not NSD bashing in any way but again a very practical problem. The NSD has produced so many actors over all these years and so few have gone back to their places to perform. In the state of West Bengal at this given point in time I can’t name a single director who has been trained at the NSD and does anything in West Bengal. We have had about 20-3 students who have graduated from the NSD. They don’t perform they don’t serve they don’t do a thing in the whole of West Bengal nobody knows about them. Now how do you feed these products of the NSD? Anita will be giving more details about the NSD, no bashing but a fact is that the government for all other training institutions, most othertraining institutions, the poor students have to pay for the training. NSD foots the entire bill, and pays a sum for the honour of having such a wonderful students. So all the money that goes into the making of these NSD actors and then again the same problem. Now what will they be doing? If they are not taken by the television or the cinema, and they can’t do the theatre that is happening there because that theatre is not so well funded, not the 60 lakh budgets that they have enjoyed. So they have been corrupted and spoilt for life. So they can’t do theatre for a community. So where do they survive, they survive in a limbo where they can be given these assignments to goand educate and corrupt and spoil and destroy the theatre in the folk communities which is not theatre by the Schechnerian definition. So asking the nation state to intervene at that point has a terrible risk because the nation state has also to support these products of the nation state. So great caution has to be exercised in all these things and I think the answer still lies in developing the support system of the community. Which has been there, which has a tradition of its own, develop it, nurture it, help it and try to make the nation state not directly intervene in supporting theatre but supporting the community of theatre to develop. Keep some sort of barrier, a distance between theatre in action and the nation state. Keep the community in between, maybe that can help. And something of that has happened in West Bengal, which is not an ideal situation, I’ll talk about its advantages its limitations, but some

thing has happened at that level, just as Ninasam has grown over 50 years, so has theatre in Bengal, post independence, grown with a certain history, a certain pattern in which the Indian People State Association played a very great historical part in developing this culture. So there is a history behind it, nothing very special about the taste or the mind or anything of the Bengalis, it’s a history behind it so something of that I’ll try to share with you tomorrow.

END OF SESSION 1.