ARTIFICATION PROBLEM

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.