It’s been over 60 years since Independence, and we are still crying ourselves hoarse about the disappearance of the feudal patrons of the arts, as we struggle to put in place organisations and institutions to take over from where our maharajas, rajas and nawabs left off. Obviously, it has not been an easy task, given that documentation about art forms, content, artists has not been taken seriously in our culture and we are too busy doing shruti and smriti (remembering by rote) of history! Consequently, many art forms and harbingers of the forms have died before we could administer oxygen.
However, to give the devil his due, institutions set up in Independent India have being plodding on with this rather thankless, endless and difficult task. At the apex are the national Akademis — Lalit Kala Akademi, Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) and Sahitya Akademi. The next rung comprises state akademis and regional and zonal culture centres and other state level organisations. Then of course, every state has some or the other dream boat like the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal that limps along living in its questionable glory.
So far so good? The ground reality is far from rosy.
The biggest predicament in the arts has been the management of these institutions. In the absence of trained personnel to handle these institutions, the quandary of the government is no different: Who needs to be hired to run these institutions? Is it a good idea to hand them over to the “artists” like they had handed over Bharat Bhavan’s visual art programme to Manjit Bawa? Of course it was an unmitigated disaster. A fabulous artist may not necessarily make for a great administrator. A few culture mandarins understand this. But in the absence of alternatives, they have no option but to take recourse to this to assuage ruffled feathers.
To begin at the beginning, the problem lies in the fact that none of the MBA courses being taught in the country take into consideration art management. And the trained MBAs don’t want to work in the arts sector for obvious reasons. The only exception that India can boast of in the last 60 years was the erstwhile secretary of the SNA, late Keshav Kothari. He was an MBA, a trained Kathak dancer with immense knowledge about folk and classical forms of arts. Aesthetically, academically and administratively Kothari was one of a kind, for he singlehandedly put on the map many art forms,
and brought about positive changes in the presen-
tation and perception of Kathak.
Largescale art organisations need both administrative directors and artistic directors, who have to be in tune with each other, with clearly demarcated work areas, and this itself is a tall order.
I must recount a small incident here: In a medium-sized organisation, the administrative head was an ex-Army man, who insisted that all artists must report at a specified time to work, with polished shoes and hair cut neatly! If only the administrative head had given the artists a free hand about the way they dressed and the timings they kept. The artists obviously refused to comply. This tug of war escalated to the point where it became a full-fledged battle and needless to say who won — the artistic director of course!
To my mind the solution lies somewhere in between: Training people from within the art sector to run their own organisations is one. For an outsider, the murky waters of the arts are too dark to swim, and yet there is a patina of genteel tehzeeb that is nothing short of hypocrisy of the worst kind. If you have not spent a long time understanding the nuances of it, you will end up taking things at face value and be taken for a ride.
The IIM Bengaluru had once invited me to hold a few lectures on arts management and the general concern was about payments in the art sector and sensitisation and orientation that the area required. And my own experience over the last 30 years is that now more than ever, art needs to be professionally managed to be pivoted to the next rung internationally and remain part of the culturescape of the international art world. For this we need to create a new cadre of people to take this forward.
Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist.