Both ‘culture’ and ‘activism’ have become slippery categories. I’m prone to frequent accidents these days as I bump into ‘cultural theorists’, ‘cultural activists’ and ‘culture policy experts’ at every seminar. The injuries are often severe. This is a contemporary hazard created by the rapid transition of the idea of both ‘culture’ and ‘activism’ from their location in the substantial contradictions of day-to-day life, to now become disengaged from any notion of transformative politics. Increasingly, it is a hip category among upwardly mobile urbanistas.
When Walter Benjamin proposed that “there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” he was pointing towards the need for acknowledging this tension critically, through active engagement with the manipulations of power through culture. And, as Michel Foucault has suggested, forms of state power and hegemony have become so capillary and have penetrated so deep in our pores and co-opted us that it has become almost incumbent upon us to ask ourselves the question ‘what tyranny, what terrible infamy and prejudice am I going to support or endorse today?’ and then proceed to actively work against it the whole day—literally work against oneself. Cultural activism is about this politics of locating the self in everyday life and critiquing it unsparingly—not about celebrating it.
Doing the political, culturally
This, of course, is a new realisation, subsequent to the interventions of feminism and the subaltern critics. In the old Leftist sense, it meant “doing the political, culturally”. It was an idea that emerged at a time when it was believed that art could be ‘revolution by other means’. However, that meaning has changed over the more than hundred years the idea has been in existence. The ‘cultural activist’ had both a charismatic and a romantic provenance from the early years of the 20th century. If Trotsky imagined the idea in his 1905 , Georgi Plekhanov ( Art and Social Life , 1912), Rosa Luxemburg (‘Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation’), Anatoly Lunacharsky ( The Cultural Task of the Struggling Proletariat , 1918), and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems gave it body for the Bolshevik Revolution. Critical oxygen came from anarchists like Emma Goldman and Nestor Makhno, who were not averse to artistically challenging any and every manifestation of power—even in a radical party. They remained ever suspicious of power divested of both accountability and aesthetics.
By the mid-1920s, the idea of both politics and governance as a daily form of artistic and creative self-renewal began to consolidate itself. The start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the emergence of an artists’ front against the advances of Fascism quickly converted this into an international phenomenon. In several locations around the world, the plank of ‘cultural activism’ united the struggles against colonialism, racism, imperialism and fascism.
By the 1940s, this was becoming the motivational force in the liberation movements in Mexico and other Latin American centres. Here ‘Art’ became the name of a people’s movement, triggered by artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Simultaneously, the liberation movements in Algeria and other African countries began giving cultural activism its theoretical arm. Inspired by Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon articulated the role of culture in revolution. The aroma of the Cuban Revolution and the figures of Castro and Che created the cult of the ‘cultural activist’, soon to spread across Latin America. Married to liberation cinema, it coalesced into the fantasised image of an activist with a camera in one hand and a gun in the other.
In the subcontinent too, it consolidated through a broad and all-encompassing coalition between artists of all persuasions. The Progressive Writers’ Association and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (PWA and IPTA) were merely the organisational face of what was otherwise a larger and deeply participative engagement—a historic moment when artists knew they could set the agenda as well as be part of it. You only have to read Kalpana Sahni’s little book Balraj and Bhisham Sahni: Brothers in Political Theatre (Sahmat, 2012) and Sumangala Damodaran’s just published The Radical Impulse (Tulika) on the pan-Indian diversity of IPTA’s (and KPAC’s) musical lineages to realise how broad and infectious the movement was.
The ideas of culture
Meanwhile, from another end, ‘culture’ was also issuing warning signals. It was turning out to be a ‘hidden persuader’ and the main ideological weapon for several convergent and divergent political frames—for Nazism/ fascism, for majoritarian nationalism, for bureaucratic and programmatic Left party centralism (the Andrei Zhdanov Doctrine and the idea of ‘Incorrect Art’), for new identity politics, for advanced capitalist consumerism, and for the recent formulations around industrial commodification built into the articulations on ‘creative and cultural industries’. In the past six decades or so, ‘culture’ seems to have been aggressively instrumentalised the world over, more by regressive forces.
During the peak of our national movement, Gandhi, Tagore, Ambedkar and Savarkar proposed their own diverse ideas of cultural politics. Most of them culturalised politics; few chose to politicise culture.
Subsequently, it’s formations like the RSS, VHP, DMK and the Shiv Sena who seem to have best exploited the mobilisational potential of cultural politics and its hypodermic effects, which keeps its cadres hooked even as it consolidates the monolithic hegemony of the peddlers of power. This has been accompanied in recent years by a parallel swamping of most Left-Liberal cultural platforms and their neutralisation by a rabid resurgent nationalism and the equally poisonous communal polarisation.
After the final dismantling of IPTA in the early 1950s, it was only during the Emergency and for about a decade afterwards, that it seemed possible to build an interrogative space in which art/culture/politics could be substitutive terms. The period is best known for the growth of groups and movements like the Jana Natya Manch in Delhi, Samudaya in Karnataka, the SKILLS collective (of which I was part) in Chennai, the Odessa collective in Kerala, the Jana Natya Mandali in Andhra, the Dalit Vedikes in Karnataka and Maharashtra, the new feminist organisations across the country and so on. The brutal murder of a pioneer ‘cultural activist’ like Safdar Hashmi also led to the formation of SAHMAT, which has taken key initiatives in the past decades.
Now, however, we are witnessing the reinvention of the ‘cultural activist’ as an ‘events manager’. Mass mobilisation platforms have been hijacked by communal predators and assorted swamis and yogis on the one hand, or by commoditised mass spectacles like yoga and mega fests on the other. Presumably they fulfil a role that has not been sufficiently examined by transformative politics.
So the question needs to be asked, what would cultural activism mean today? And what would be its new imaginary?
There certainly have to be new intellectual and theoretical engagements on several fronts. For example, in an era of religious revival and the spread of neo-mysticism in epidemic proportion, one would certainly like to see a greater re-engagement with both theism and atheism. And an unexplored area by earlier radical cultural formations—which is to learn, understand, reinterpret and recover spaces in ‘tradition’ without handing it over on a platter to communal elements—the kind of work, for example, that my colleague Chandralekha did in dance which, I suspect, has still not been comprehended by ‘progressive’ friends.
The author writes on culture and activism and is worried about the future of both
