People's Democracy

NUKKAD Janam Samvad is the organ of Jana Natya Manch, a forum of theatre activists founded, among others, by Safdar Hashmi who was killed by armed hooligans while performing a street play early on the New Year day in 1989. In the course of the last decade, Jana Natya Manch has been able to translate Hashmi’s inspiration, in a rapidly changing context, into a sustained campaign for a theatre for the people. The present volume, which is actually an omnibus number (July 1999-September 2000) of Nukkad Janam Samvad, reflects this concern of the Jana Natya Manch and is a bilingual anthology of 20th century texts by writers from Plekhanov to Safdar Hashmi.

People’s Art is the theme that binds together the contents of this volume which have a genuinely cross-cultural character and which demonstrate how Marxist perspectives to cultural activism may have relevance beyond geographical-social boundaries of theory and practice. An exercise which puts Mao Zedong, E M S Namboodiripad and Amilcar Cabral side by side with Romain Rolland, Brecht and Gramsci, as theoreticians of a people’s art, is important even to the extent that it serves as a counterpoint to the current tendency of presenting Marxism as a ‘Eurocentric’ philosophy.

In this volume one would find in one place a good many documents or excerpts from documents which are not so readily available any more. One such document is Romain Rolland’s "People’s Theatre" from which an extract has been included. Another is Mao Zedong’s "Yenan Forum Talks." Similarly, Plekhanov and Gorky have been rescued from oblivion and placed side by side with Indian theorists and practitioners like Namboodiripad, Ram Vilas Sharma, Ritwik Ghatak, Utpal Dutt and Hashmi himself. The texts in this collection are not necessarily by people who professed Marxism. Neither Rolland nor Premchand would perhaps have called themselves Marxists. But all the texts can be called "Marxist" texts in so far as they regard revolutionary changes in society as being associated with changes in popular consciousness and with popular initiatives to counteract the overpowering enthrallment of dominant ideology. One cannot talk of "people’s art" without assuming the development of a subjectivity that demands it. Thus the anthology is seeking to re-articulate issues regarding the vital connections between social-political change and culture that post-modernism tends to sweep under the carpet. A quotation from Amilcar Cabral highlights this basic concern of the anthology:

The concept of "people’s art" is radically different from that of "mass culture." Although few of the texts in the anthology state with Mao Zedong’s precision who exactly the "people" are, his identification of the "workers, peasants, soldiers and petty bourgeoisie" in Chinese Revolution as those for whom people’s art is meant, can provide us with a general starting point. By the term "soldiers" Mao Zedong meant the Red Army, that referred to the specific situation in China at the time. But apart from that, generally in these texts, "people" connote the classes that are regarded as the agents of a revolutionary social change. "People’s art" thus embodies this politics of change in culture. "Mass culture" is, of course, not monolithic; it certainly includes resistant spaces and fissures that demonstrate the self-contradictions of dominant ideology.

Yet its production is generally associated with large investments of capital, with the homogenising pressures of profit-making infrastructures, and the trend towards the cartelisation of distribution channels. The subjectivity that mass-culture assumes is passive, while if "people’s art" is to have meaning, it must assume the possibility of the active articulation of demands coming from below into culture.

There are two kinds of texts in this anthology. Some consist of a critical analysis of existing examples of art to find out their relevance for the people as resistant cultural spaces. Lenin’s article on Tolstoy is an example of this; it asserts that although they were produced within a particular class situation, Tolstoy’s works were of relevance to people of the exploited classes in their efforts towards change. There are other articles too, notably by Mayakovsky, Brecht, Utpal Dutt and Safdar Hashmi, where the idea of people’s art is sought to be worked out through creative practice. The idea of "people’s art," therefore, is not flat and uniform; as Brecht points out, experiments with forms are in fact part of a political struggle:

Thus it is not just in classics like Tolstoy, but also in experimental, avant-garde though cultural forms tends to be erased from our discourses. When in 1934 Gorky said: "We must make labour the principal hero of our books," or when he described authors as the "engineers of souls," this could of course have been interpreted simplistically as the straightforward replacement of one hegemonic structure by another, a more turning inside out of the assumptions of earlier power systems; in fact, theorists of socialist realism have often incurred this charge upon themselves.

But in Gorky’s statements, the politics of culture is made explicit; Gorky tells us that capitalism itself has its own cultural politics, it completely erases the "decisive significance of labour" in the creation of culture and uses the agency of culture to manipulate the human mind. This exposure has relevance even in the era of late capitalism and reminds us of the need for intervention into seemingly apolitical cultural spaces.

Writing in the context of a country which had been under colonial rule and where capitalism had to make a compromise with feudal and semi-feudal forces in order to develop, E M S Namboodiripad shares Gorky’s concern about highlighting the "decisive significance of labour" and at the same time asserts that in people’s art, there must be a renovation and recreation of traditions along with struggles towards a new society. Culture, which could not have been created without labour, must be retrieved for the benefit of labour. It is Gorky’s argument about the monopolisation of culture by the ruling classes that is the starting point of the search for a people’s art that would defy this hegemonic presence. This holds true in the theory and practice of the Indian writers included in this volume as well.

In this anthology, some pieces are in English and the others are in Hindi. Some of the Hindi pieces are translations, like Lenin’s piece on Tolstoy or Namboodiripad’s articles. But it is not very clear on which principle some pieces have been translated into Hindi while others have remained in English. In fact, a minor criticism that may be made of this extremely useful and relevant volume is that it might have attracted a wider readership if the same articles, both in Hindi and in English, had been anthologised in two separate volumes.