|     |
|
| |
 At last - Gen Next sprouts new Kansens - Shanta Serbjeet Singh, New Delhi e-mail: shanta.serbjeetsingh@gmail.com August 1, 2009 For longer than I can remember we have all fretted about the dwindling audiences that the concerts of classical dance and music throw up in the best auditoriums of the city. We have watched helplessly, as the same, few thousand spoilt names on Delhi's standard invitees' list, the known power elite, have received and cavalierly dismissed invitations from the best known names in the dance and music fraternity. We have drawn a collectively audible sigh at the fantastic prices that artists of the visual persuasion command nowadays. We have noted wryly that even top musicians enjoy a comfortable existence. But dancers? That is another story altogether. They pursue the most vulnerable, most short-lived, the most physically demanding muse. Inflationary pressures hit dancers the hardest. Till date there is no backup of professional agents to represent them, as is the case in the field of the visual arts or literature. Worse, when they do manage to organise a sponsored program, they have to do everything themselves, from printing the invitation cards to reaching them to 'worthwhile' people to calling them up personally, so that the hall has a respectably full look. What an irony! All this singularly dedicated, herculean, personal effort cannot even bring back gate money to the artiste or her organisers, unlike even Chennai, forget foreign capitals. Delhi stands unique in allowing everyone a completely gratis entry, from the rasik to the philistine who is simply curious and often walks in and out of the auditorium as the mood dictates! How have we come to this pass?This is a long story and I shall reserve it for another day. For now, enough to talk about a small miracle that is happening finally, bringing into the auditoriums that rarest of rare, that fast vanishing species, a committed audience for the classical arts. And this happening was first sighted at the just concluded marathon Sangeet Natak Akademi festival of performances by awardees. Forgotten were the tired, blasé faces which normally come to what is known as the Mandi House mile. New faces, totally 'hat ke,' eager to watch classical dance and music, to see for themselves how the 94 year old living legend Sitara Devi dances, or to hear the riveting music of Lakha Khan Mangniar of Rajasthan's Thar desert poured into the brand new air-conditioned audi that the SNA has created for itself around Meghdoot Theatre. For the uninitiated, Kansen is a term that the great Vishnu Digambar Paluskar coined at the turn of the twentieth century to answer those who mocked his efforts to popularise Hindustani classical music by taking it out of the ivory towers of the salons and the darbars and into ordinary music sabhas.Yes, he agreed, he would not be producing any new Tansens with his democratization efforts. But no, he would not give up his right to create a new breed of Kansens, rasiks who know how to listen to the Tansens. A little sleuthing revealed that the credit for this turn of events belongs to the SNA Chairman Ram Niwas Mirdha, an octogenarian politician from Rajasthan who was inducted in 2005, in place of the dismissed NDA appointee Sonal Mansingh, literally midstream, by the first UPA regime. Those of us, who knew what a hornet's nest he was entering, wondered how exactly he would cope with the somewhat special demands of the world of the performance arts. Today, four years later, we are eating the humble pie and learning how experience and political sagacity help in defusing controversies, rather, in ensuring they don't happen, and how institutions are built. Mirdha's 'cultural' experience extends from serving as Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi (for two terms, 1976-1980 and 1990-1995) to being on the Executive Board of UNESCO. At LKA, without any background in the complexities of painting and sculpture, he brought to heel a motley group of mid-level artistes who had hijacked the governing body. By the time he left the LKA, he had cleaned up the Aegean stables for good. Six times a minister in various Congress ministries, even now President of a range of civil society institutions, from the Indian Heritage Society to the Indian Institute of International Law, he has used his astonishing range of experience in administration to take the Akademi out of its ivory tower and allow a new generation of dance and music lovers to emerge. By quietly shifting the focus of the SNA's activities to the National Capital Region, by giving every deserving dancer and musician who knocked on its door the Akademi's support to run its own festival of dance and music, to expand its own training program of performance arts, in far-flung colonies of the National Capital Region, Mirdha has ensured that in four year's time a new nuclei of dance and music lovers has been created. Can anyone ask for more?  Shanta Serbjeet Singh, for twenty-five years, columnist, critic and media analyst for The Hindustan Times, The Economic Times and The Times of India, is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and Delhi Govt.'s Sahitya Kala Parishad for her contribution to the field of culture. She just finished her term as Vice Chairman of the SNA, is the founder-secretary of the World Culture Forum and continues as Chair of the UNESCO created NGO APPAN (The Asia-Pacific Performing Arts Network), a position to which she was appointed in 2001. Singh has authored several well-known publications such as 'Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor' (published by Ravi Kumar (Paris), 'The 50th Milestone: A Feminine Critique' (Sterling Publishers, to mark India's fiftieth anniversary of Independence), 'Nanak, The Guru' (Oxford University Press) and 'America and You' (22 editions). |
