The Hindu Business Line : The business of culture

The Kerala Schools Arts Festival was a reminder not just of the business potential of cultural performances but also of the enduring power of culture to unite and amalgamate in a context of diversity.

K.G. Kumar

Last week saw the opening in Thiruvananthapuram of the 49th annual Kerala Schools Arts Festival, touted as Asia’s largest youth art fete. The seven-day festival, organised by the State Department of General Education, attracted around 8,000 children from various categories of schools – high schools, higher secondary schools and vocational schools – of 14 districts of the State. Egged on by intensive live media coverage, the children competed in 216 events that were held simultaneously in 16 different venues in the capital city. Between 50,000 and 75,000 people reportedly attended the festival.

For once, most people residing in Kerala appear to have forgotten the current woes of the economy and the contagion of the global financial and economic crisis. Instead, buoyed by the general frenzy of competitive camaraderie and the plethora of colourful song-and-dance acts, not to mention the skits and drama performances, Keralites remained hooked to their television sets as anchors co-ordinated live reports from festival venues. One Malayalam television channel even set up a studio-based pavilion at the festival ground to hunt for budding artistes for its reality shows.

Normally, periods of economic gloom are accompanied by a sense of cultural crisis, with prophets of doom bemoaning the loss of classical art culture to the barrage of inane television reality shows, flippantly comical films and garishly conceived pop music videos.

Yet, as the ongoing Kerala Schools Arts Festival demonstrates, people also tend to use cultural events to lift the pall of gloom brought on by an economy in crisis. What better way to banish the blues than by soaking in some sterling performances by young talent.

Jakarta Theatre Fest

This is true of countries that seem far off and alien too. For instance, the annual Jakarta Theatre Festival that ended last Wednesday in Indonesia’s capital city, was reportedly a success, with greater levels of creativity and artistic quality.

The festival’s organiser, Manahan Hutauruk, was quoted in The Jakarta Post as saying that despite concerns of declining public interest in theatre with the prevalence of cinema, television and the Internet, the festival managed to perk up the theatre scene by attracting more people to halls.

There are also other potential benefits of an event like the Kerala Schools Arts Festival. As Financial Times columnist Peter Aspden pointed out recently in his column on “Things to look forward to in pop culture”, with the blurring of borders between traditional categories in the arts, “the public appetite for cultural promiscuity is stronger than has been imagined.” The result, he writes, could be a greater openness to alien art forms, and closer co-operation with their most original practitioners.

Thus, the practitioners of Kerala’s traditional art forms, like theyyam, theeyattu, margom kali, and kalamezhuthu, which were all on display at the Kerala Schools Arts Festival can hope for not just a revival of their ancient traditions but even a new-found interest in amalgamation of contemporary culturati.

Kerala’s vibrant medium of television will no doubt aid the process through conventional talent hunts as well as creative programming that seeks to incorporate elements of the past with modern-day sensitivities.

Big business

Culture is, after all, big business too and some scholars identify culture in terms of consumption and consumer goods. In fact, Unesco maintains that culture “should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”

Raymond Williams, a pioneer in cultural studies, notes: “A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested.

These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings.”

With such a pivotal civilizational role, it is little wonder that there are even consultancies that operate in the “business of culture” and offer a wide range of services in sectors such as Performing Arts and Visual Arts; Museums and Heritage; Multimedia and New Technology; Entertainment, Leisure and Tourism; Creative Industries and Cultural Regeneration; and Education and Research.

The cultural manifestations of Kerala’s human artefacts and activities such as music, literature, lifestyle, food, painting and sculpture, theatre and film, which were showcased at the Kerala Schools Arts Festival, is a reminder of the enduring power of culture to unite and amalgamate in a context of diversity.

The writer can be contacted at kgkumar@gmail.com

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