The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi, set up in the year 1985, has been working in the field of arts and culture. It has been a major resource centre for all forms of art, from visual arts, performing arts, creative and critical literature to festivals and lifestyles that have an artistic dimension. Through research, performances, exhibitions and workshops the institution has been working towards placing the arts within the context of human and natural environment. This prestigious institution has a centre in Bangalore, on the campus of Bangalore University.
For providing greater focus to the south Indian arts, a southern centre was established in 2001 in Bangalore. Deepti Navaratna, a neurobiologist by training, also a musician, took charge of the Bangalore centre in January 2016 at a time when about 15 projects had to take off.
“Apart from the mundane and administrative duties that demanded my immediate attention, completion of pending projects conceived by this centre was my chief concern. Within two years, we managed to complete all the said 15 projects,” says Deepti, with a sense of accomplishment. The recent book on the ritual practices of the Melukote Cheluvanarayana Swamy temple is one such.
Karnataka : Bengaluru : 26/03/20018 : (pic to go with Manasa copy for Friday page) A view of library at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) campus on March 26, 2018. Photo:V Sreenivasa Murthy
Besides, the centre has launched fresh initiatives such as an ethnographic study of the Siddi communities of Karnataka that documents their life, music and culture, a workshop on mural art that has generated 10 rare mural paintings of Kerala depicting tales from Ramayana, and more.
To have a constant engagement with the public, Deepti informs, “we came up with regular programmes such as Sakshya Drishya, Pustaka Smriti Samskruti and Chellidaru Malligeya .” If Sakshya Drishya screens films once a fortnight for children, Pustaka Smriti is a monthly book reading forum for providing a platform for discussion of books in Kannada and works that study art, architecture and culture of Karnataka, and Chellidaru Malligeya is a monthly documentation session on the vanishing folk traditions of the State.”
A major in-house facility of the regional centre at Bangalore is the extensive and well-stocked library that is open to everyone interested in performing arts, history, literature, religion and folklore. A nominal amount is charged as membership fee. “Entry for the first five-days would be free for any visitor,” says the librarian. It has a huge collection of research works on various art forms of the country, apart from other books.
- The Southern centre became a regional centre with the setting up of eight other centres across the country in the last few months.
- They will soon have courses on specific professional fields -- Culture Informatics, Art Curation, Art Management, Preservation, Museum Studies etc.
- An auditorium in memory of M.S. Subbulakshmi would come up once the allotted funds are released. The 250-seater auditorium on the Ambedkar College campus, Kengeri Main Road would host cultural programmes like other major auditoriums in the city.
“Setting up a library is never an easy task. Looking at our struggle many artistes donated books from their own personal collection,” explains the librarian.
The library is flanked by the corridor of sculptures and the amphitheatre. There is also a reprography unit where documents are reproduced. “It is because of this that the centre has been able to hold thousands of ancient manuscripts. In fact, the sculptures that stand in the veranda are imagined and carved according to the descriptions present in some of the manuscripts we have preserved,” she says.
“The primary focus of any centre has to be academic, apart from documentation and outreach programmes,” feels Deepti. The fact that the centre is progressing in that direction is a happy sign, says this neurobiologist, who is presently working on how the human mind learns and registers music lessons.
