People's Democracy

 SAHMAT Project: ‘The Making of India’

THE Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) launched its latest project, ‘The Making of India,’ at Chennai on November 2, with a seminar and Sufi music concert that together foregrounded the plurality and compositeness of Indian culture. Organised jointly by SAHMAT, Swaralaya and the Media Development Foundation, the programme at Chennai was the beginning of an ongoing project that marks 15 years of SAHMAT’s existence as a platform of creative struggle by artists, activists and intellectuals, against the forces of communal divisiveness and revivalism. The project will culminate in a large scale exhibition that presents, in a layered and complex fashion, the various cross-cultural influences from within and without the country, that have defined and continue to shape the art, architecture, crafts, music, poetry and other spheres of India’s cultural past and present. By doing so, the exhibition seeks to combat the endeavour by the Hindutva forces, in the name of ‘cultural nationalism,’ to identify Vedic or ‘Hindu’ culture as the main and even exclusive source of Indian culture.

The seminar at Chennai, held at the Asian College of Journalism, began with opening remarks by Sashi Kumar (chairman, Media Development Foundation), and brief introductions to SAHMAT and the ‘Making of India’ project by M K Raina (theatre activist and film-maker) and Ram Rahman (photographer and designer). The speakers at the seminar were CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury, Professor R Champakalakshmi (historian), Professor Aijaz Ahmad (cultural scholar), and N Ram (editor-in-chief of The Hindu). Sounding a warning about the danger in not taking a position about ‘the making of India,’ Yechury pointed out that that the contours of the emerging nation will depend on the stand taken by the people at large, against the agenda of communalism and majoritarianism. “The idea of India,” he said, is the celebration of its diversity. Any effort to impose a uniformity on this diversity will destroy the India that we know today.” Professor Champakalakshmi, in her presentation, said that if historical processes were better understood, the march towards the unmaking of India would be halted. She underlined the importance of studying the context in which the formation of identities --- community, regional, linguistic, cultural identities --- took place at different points in history. Professor Aijaz Ahmad said that resistance against the forces that seek to impose the majoritarian agenda on the country cannot be conducted on a piecemeal basis. “This can be resisted only by a comprehensive project, a new struggle for national liberation,” he said, adding that the making of India has a profound orientation towards the future. N Ram, speaking about the role of the media in the making of India, pointed to the uneven development of the print media in India. He noted that there are two traditions which stand out in what he called ‘the great Indian media bazaar’ --- an older tradition of a relatively diverse, pluralistic and independent press, and a younger tradition of manipulation and misuse. The four presentations were followed by an hour-long, lively session of questions and comments from the audience.

An auditorium packed with an audience almost a 1000 strong was the venue of the Sufi music concert that took place the same evening. Mridangam maestro Umayalpuram Shivaraman started the evening with a spellbinding recital. He was followed by the renowned Manganiars of Rajasthan, who enthralled the audience with their energetic rendition of the verses of great Sufi poets like Bulle Shah. The language of secular music proved, once again, to be a great leveller, as linguistic and regional differences were swept aside by the audience’s appreciation of the Manganiars and their clamour for more. The grand finale of this segment of the evening was a ‘jugalbandi’ between the Manganiars and Umayalpuram --- the former with castanets and the dholak, the latter with the mridangam. The second part of the evening saw Madan Gopal Singh, Rekha Raj and their musicians bring alive the spirit of the great Sufi poet Waris Shah and his immortal verses about the legendary lovers, Heer-Ranjha. Madan Gopal Singh prefaced his deeply moving rendition of the Sufi verses with a comment about the significance of the Sufi tradition in the fight for recovering a secular, composite culture. He shared with the audience how he rediscovered the power of this great poetic and musical tradition as a part of the struggle that SAHMAT has been engaged in, since the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.