TOWARDS A DE-ARTIFICATION OF CULTURAL PRACTICES IN INDIA:
Critical engagement with imitating western conceptualization
(Draft note)
p. k. sasidharan
The question of de-artification arises in the cultural
context of India wherein imitating western conceptualization seems to have
become a naturalized way of cultural imagination. Artification of
culture forms part of greater enslavement and has become a deep-rooted problem to
be laid bare and tackled. De-artification as an intellectual strategy of
engaging with the process and affirmations (imitations) of artification need
not be free from the complex situations of subtle enslavement. Rather, it
emerges from the identification and critical sensitivity of artification as
a problem to be confronted.
The problem of artification is primarily
understood here as a tendency of cultural reduction involved in the western
ways of understanding and characterizing other cultures. The aesthetic reductionism
is seen as a source of numerous issues for concerned cultural communities by
way of estrangement of traditional practices or causing eventual extinction of
them for want of sustainable conditions for natural growth and evolution.
Aesthetic appreciation as such, of something non-art need not be problematic so
long as it is not founded on some essentialist historization. Aestheticizing
something amounts to dispossessing it in entirety if that happens at the cost
of its generative energy. But the cultural annihilation becomes a fait accompli
when the concerned community in large goes for imitating what has been
externally induced and imposed. In the art history, artification may
be seen as a creative work of transforming something non-art into art, whereas
in the case of the aestheticization of the non-art artification process
becomes problematic and assumes to be a different operation altogether in kind
and degree. As it can be traced historically, the aesthetic-seeing of
non-artistic cultural practices, especially those of non-western, goes in
tandem with the advancement of hegemonic west. Its transformative effect was
apparent as a political exercise that brought a drastic change in community
praxis.
With the emergence of decontextualized discourses on non-western
cultures, there had several impinging effects upon the prevailing modes of
community practices and thereby leading to disfiguration and draining the
vitality of cultural forms that are having a wider significance than artistic
enjoyment. Thus the conceptual deformation seems to have had a magnitude of a
cultural catastrophe which disturbs and disables many of the inherent
potentials of cultural practices in the Indian subcontinent. To that
extent, artification of culture has to be viewed as having more
disastrous impacts than that of any physical war. It is to engage with
such a non-physical-war like artification of culture that the present
paper wants to develop some critical strategies, and explore possibilities of
building resistance. The term de-artification of culture is employed here
to signify the strategy of resisting the cultural imitation of western
conceptualization of some of the cultural forms in India. An exposition of the
process of cultural artification also assumes importance to see the
ways in which wide-ranging community practices have become or deformed into
mere artistic forms.
In the history
of humanity, wars of domination seem to have been waged in manifold but shrewd
ways that can never go suspect their intent other than being piteous entreaty
to do better for conquered. The imagery and verbatim of larger good get floated
mitigating immediate troubles and sufferings. Paradoxically enough, those
‘sooth-sayings’ are found to be the pervasive source of sufferings, which
remain overwhelmingly despite the stoppage of sufferings enforced by the
physical war of domination and extortion. Strangely, the perceived non-physical
conceptual wars of domination continue to get reaffirmed in the vocabulary of
liberation that is being created and perpetuated by those subjects who had once
endured sufferings from physical war. It may be termed as a cultural war and
domination that are waged through imposed ideas and linguistic or conceptual
constructions. The cultural irony that is being alluded here has its specific
point of reference to the centuries of colonial dominations by different
European forces in the Indian subcontinent. This situation need not be
construed only to European or external influences and enforcement instead might
be seen equally applicable to every relative cultural exteriority and other
antagonistic internal divides and relationship within the particular cultural
community.
