The War On Imagination ; From Banished Cabaret Girls to Hounded Artists, From Caricatures in Cement to Electronic Vulgarity, How Tyranny of the Philistine Threatens the Future.
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Summary
Raymond Williams has notoriously declared that 'culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,' and Rabindranath Tagore translated the word as 'Sanskriti', packing a huge hornet's nest inside it. The English word, in its original usage, indicated agricultural process; the Indian term brings in notions of refining and purification.
And we love to present our culture as ancient and unchanging. But the fact remains that it has been changing continuously, and our relatively recent confrontation with western civilisation has accelerated the change. Till the 19th century, and in some cases well into the 20th, performing arts, such as music, dance, and theatre, as well as skills such as weaving, painting, carpentry, house-building and textile-designing were seen in India as vocations fit only for those lower down the social scale, unworthy of the upper castes. These prejudices, however, had to be repositioned when we found that our colonial masters projected their theatre, architecture, music and dance as the glories of their civilisation.See the full content of this document
Extract
The War On Imagination ; From Banished Cabaret Girls to Hounded Artists, From Caricatures in Cement to Electronic Vulgarity, How Tyranny of the Philistine Threatens the Future.
Thus, by the end of the 19th century, we see the upper classes in Bengal and West India patronising public theatre, and upper-caste women singing in public at the annual conferences of the Indian National Congress. In th...
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