http://www.dailyo.in/politics/mahesh-sharma-abdul-kalam-bjp-culture-minister-despite-being-a-muslim/story/1/6335.html
20-09-2015
Why Mahesh Sharma should stop worrying about Indian culture
The ministry of culture seems to think every organisation is a variant of a Shakha
20-09-2015
Shiv Visvanathan
@ShivVisvanatha
Years ago, Kannada writer UR
Ananthamurthy claimed that cultures should not be always looked at as
dichotomies or oppositions. Foreign culture should not be seen as alien
because it violates the laws of hospitality and translation.
Ananthamurthy suggested that the model of centre and
periphery or metropolis versus province condemns one category to
perpetual parochiality. Such a model never outgrows the grammar of
hegemony.
Indian society, he claimed, had a more benign way of looking
at cultures, using the house as a metaphor. It was the idea of the
front yard and the backyard. The front yard is official, formal. It was
the place where one met strangers and visitors. But the backyard which
began with the kitchen was the place of intimacy of gossip. The model of
front yard and backyard worked better as a way of handling cultures.
One translated them, domesticated them, indigenized them. It was more
playful, less aggressively nationalist.
One wishes the BJP’s ministry of culture and its minister
Mahesh Sharma had read the great Kannada author. Instead of being
Orwellian, Sharma could have been more democratic and plural.
Ranting
Sharma’s recent ranting during an interview needs to be
taken seriously. Sharma sees himself as a chowkidar or custodian who has
to defend Indian culture from the encroachment of western culture. He
claimed western culture was not good for us. He felt it had no sense of
the family. He added a 14-year-old girl wanting a night out is okay
elsewhere but not in India. Sharma is not seeking a cultural revolution
but is seeking to battle cultural pollution. The task is bureaucratic.
It will involve a systematic attempt to rectify institutions. I must
confess that Sharma’s project is evocative of Hitler and Stalin. Its
pollution rituals have ethnic and racial implications.
Sharma could cite as an example of such activities the
renaming of Aurangzeb Road as Abdul Kalam road. Sharma claimed Kalam was
a nationalist, despite being a Muslim. The biases are clear. Anyone who
is not a Hindu, begins with a handicap as a nationalist. Other
religions and ethnicities have to work harder to prove they are
patriotic. The lines are clear. Even Kalam, to be Indian, needs a
certificate from Sharma.
There is a provinciality to the official utterings of
Sharma. He is clear that the Gita, the Mahabharat and the Ramayan are
parts of an official syllabus but the holy books of other religions do
not have official status. Sharma is clear that they do not quite
represent the soul of India. Sharma’s project is a campaign in hygiene.
The world cleansing has a double edge. Cleansing invokes cleaning and
eliminating that which is regarded as dirt or alien. The site for all
this fumigation actually is, as Sharma admits, the 39 institutions of
culture under his control. Museums, galleries, schools of drama will now
have to work hard to indigenize themselves on official lines.
I am fascinated by the word “pollution”. Pollution indicates
a process of contamination. It is built on the classificatory uses of
pure and impure. In Sharma’s classificatory world pure is local,
indigenous majoritarian while impure is the strange, alien and foreign.
Purity belongs to the indigenous, local majority. Pollution rituals thus
clean cultural dirt and contamination. Now history, culture,
educational institutes will be subject to this cleansing process. It is
clear the BJP process of cleansing has gone beyond historical
rectification. Now past, present and the future will be subject to this
disciplinary exercise.
Cleansing
Cleansing as Sharma explains is purification, distancing,
rectification. It is a search for authenticity which is official. The
inspirational source is Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. He is the ideologue of
cleanliness to accompany Savarkar as the ideologue of patriotism. Sharma
is clear that what he is targeting is thought pollution. This project
is BJP’s version of thought control. For Sharma, the relation between
parents and children is central. He sees this as the authority model for
governance as the regime in power decides what is good for citizens.
There is a patriarchal model of citizenship as it is going to decide
what thought is good for you.
It is old, in fact quaint that a party which talks so
proudly of IT and the information revolution has no idea of the
knowledge revolution and the role of English in it. In fact ironically
it was the middle class knowledge of English, that gave IT in India a
comparative advantage over the Chinese. Present in the idea of pollution
is a notion of dignity and presentation of the self. For Sharma, there
is a sense that an Indian going abroad, who cannot recite a Sanskrit
couplet, brings shame to the land. He is seen as uncultured.
Project
Sharma’s project of cultural pollution seems to be
beginning with the Nehru museum. He is questioning the appointment of
the director Mahesh Rangarajan. What Sharma cannot question is
Rangarajan’s competence, the fact that as a professional, the director
ran an immaculate and exemplary operation. Sharma might also be
surprised that Rangarajan’s command of Hindi is as immaculate as his. In
fact, the first casualty of the Sharma reforms is professionalism. It
is clear now that an academic cannot be autonomous. What makes him
relevant is party loyalty. Directorships, it is clear, will now be made
not on professional competence but party loyalty.
It is not only the cultural impositions of the regime one
is worried about but its sense of illiteracy about choice, consumerism,
the new demand for sexuality, the new access to pornography. The
ministry of culture seems to think every organisation is a variant of a
Shakha. The violence begins there and one wishes Sharma’s sense of
culture was as open as an ordinary citizens.