JOIN USLiving in a far away village in Nadia, West Bengal, nobody knew Golam Fakir as an artiste six years ago. Belonging to a marginalised community, without formal education, Golam used to carry dead bodies from the police station to the morgue. His is a fascinating story of transformation, from a non-entity to a celebrity singer of Baul Geet, a form of Bengal’s folk song, all in a span of six years.
He has performed all over India and has travelled to many countries including the UK, Switzerland, France and Scotland. His income has gone up from Rs 200 to Rs 30,000 a month. Golam narrates his experience in his own fashion, “I never thought of anything beyond my two meals a few years ago, and now I’ve the opportunity to travel across the globe and perform on stage with great performers, and represent my country. It fills my heart when people appreciate and applaud Baul music.”
Moyna Chitrakar is a patua artist, who specialises in the scroll painting of Bengal. Her story reflects how women have been empowered through art. Moyna and her husband would earn about Rs 1,000 a month, six years ago. Today, her family earns many times over. She has travelled with her paintings and other products to different parts of India, attending fairs and festivals. She even went to Shenzhen to attend an industrial fair. She has now constructed a two storey house in her village for tourists. A confident Moyna says, “We can now concentrate on our work and not worry about our next meal.”
Crafting this change since 2004 is banglanatak.com, a social development organisation in Kolkata. Speaking about the process of change, Amitabha Bhattacharya, director, says, “Culture is a great enabler. It fosters social inclusion. Performing art traditions are an asset for developing rural enterprise.” New markets and new brands help promote traditional performing arts and crafts, he points out. “Heritage becomes a means of livelihood and empowerment. The motto is ‘to preserve art, let the artists survive’,” he adds.
The Ministry of Culture, West Bengal, supported the initiative from 2005-09. In December, 2009, EU provided support to the project named Ethno Magic Going Global to take ethno art to the global arena. The project has created a tremendous impact.
Reviving these heritage skills as means of livelihood necessitates mobilising changes in mindset as the folk artists become ‘cultural service providers’. A comprehensive training and capacity building programme was undertaken after the formation of a self help group to help innovate ways of rendering the traditional art forms. The aim was to establish a guru-shishya parampara, where skilled craftsmen pass on their knowledge to the practising artists.
Winds of change have now started blowing elsewhere too. Recently, a fast growing company in the Indian energy sector has come up with the documentation of Swang, a popular form of folk theatre in Haryana and Punjab. It aims at introducing the form to facilitate its promotion.
According to Kishan Kumar, a theatre activist, the government organises Swang to raise money from the public for repair or construction of schools or roads. Its popularity may be gauged by the fact that around three lakh rupees was raised from a performance of Swang in Haryana.
Taking the cultural revival a step further, banglanatak.com has also taken the initiative to enliven the age-old art forms of Bihar. Efforts are on to rejuvenate the feisty cultural inventory of Bihar that includes folk songs like Sohar, Nirgun, Kajri, Byaas; dances like Jhijia; dramas like Ramleela, Nautanki; tribal dance like Santhali dance and crafts like Sujni and Sikki.
Apart from art forms, the scope for developing ethno-cultural tourism is also being explored in places like Gorbhanga, Pingla and Jangal Mahal in Bengal, Tinsukia in Assam and also Goa. The important impact of developing tourism in these places will be the restoration of peace in the disturbed areas of Bengal and Assam through the inclusive growth of the aboriginal people.
In today’s world, culture can prove to be a potential tool for establishing universal peace. For, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”