![]()
PART I
Politicizing Creative Economy
![]()
1
When Victims Become Entrepreneurs
From Sentimental Nationalism to Sentimental Capitalism
Introduction
When business school professor and creative economy consultant Richard Florida exhorts Indians to modernize their vast creative potential rather than waste it and lag behind in the global creative economy (Florida 2006), he encourages an amnesia about the Indian government’s long-standing and expedient use of “culture as resource” (Yudice 2003). Likewise, commentators and attendees at UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Creative Communities convention in 2005 believed that “Future policy planners will no doubt refer to the ‘Jodhpur Consensus’ as a road map for the 21st-Century in which a historic segueing of ‘culture’ with ‘industries,’ economic development with poverty alleviation and traditional skills with modern packaging, happened” (Singh 2005). Together these proclamations contribute to the perception that the creative economy is new. In fact, as I demonstrate in this chapter, it has a history going back to the earliest days of India’s independence.
In earlier times, it was couched in developmental nationalist terms guided by some socialist principles. These principles were reaffirmed in 1972 at a seminal debate on India’s cultural policy, where Dr. S. Nurul Hasan, Union minister of Education, Social Welfare, and Culture, suggested that “Lenin … emphasized the need to broadbase culture, the need to harmonize the great cultural achievements of this small [ruling] class with the urges and aspirations of the masses” (Hasan 1975, 13). In pursuit of this goal in India, Hasan noted that “we will have to choose between obscurantism [found in old cultural forms] and the scientific outlook. We will have to choose between preserving class relationships in society and moving forward towards a socialist society in which there will be no exploitation of man by man, in which the quality of life of the common people will be developed and enriched” (16). Here, culture becomes a resource for modernization and progress, for the construction of a democratic nation through a scientific, socialist outlook. Hasan assured his distinguished audience that the debates they were having at the seminar “will at least influence the thinking of the Department of Culture as well as the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare” (14).
Despite his assurances in 1972, by the 1990s, cultural policy debates have moved decisively away from socialist principles toward neoliberal articulations involving the privatization of cultural production as one means of developing competitive advantage. In November 2007, during a parliamentary debate on national culture policy, Dr. Karan Singh, Congress Party member, current president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and former minister of Culture and Education (1979–1985), asserted, “We are one of the few nations in the world that can claim to be a cultural superpower. Our culture, without the use of arms, has spread down through the centuries … throughout vast swathes of South and Southeast Asia. Now, therefore, we must give culture top priority” (Singh 2007, 14). At the same debate, another Congress Party loyalist, Shobhana Bhartia, asked the Ministry of Culture whether it “is proactively thinking of greater private sector participation to enable the private sector to come in and maintain certain monuments; support performing arts, and if so, whether the States [provincial governments] are also being sensitised” to the need for private sector involvement (Bhartia 2007, 14).
Rajeev Sethi, erstwhile patron of Kathputli artists, cultural entrepreneur, participant in UNESCO’s Jodhpur convention, and vice chairperson of the Task Force on Culture and Creative Industries for India’s Planning Commission, gives a definitive statement of India’s cultural competitive edge, “we will be seen as poaching on the economic future of ‘advanced’ nation states relatively lacking a wealth of ancient heritage. Rich countries obsessed with staying one step ahead will now have to face competition from countries like ours, leapfrogging with home spun state-of-the-art innovations that have global markets” (2005). These imperial desires are couched as social purpose. The executive head of the Planning Process, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, introduced Sethi’s task force report (2006) on the potential of the creative sector, claiming that it would combine “creativity, traditional knowledge, and intellectual property” to enhance trade and exports, thereby making “the next Big Idea” (Ahluwalia 2006, 6). Significantly, Sethi claims that if appropriately capitalized, the creative sector can absorb the population rendered surplus in the agrarian sector and that cannot be absorbed elsewhere in the system—approximately, 20 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population in 2005 (2006, 19). Brimming with confidence in, and militant optimism about, India’s cultural competitive advantage fuels the burning commitment to coordinate design and media with folk creativity, combine public and private resources to modernize heritage, according closely with India’s liberalization policies of the early 1990s. The socialist “scientific outlook” has given way to a heady optimism, at once making the disjuncture and continuity between cultural policy then and now readily apparent.
This chapter demystifies seeming contradictions between disjuncture and continuity in India’s cultural policy by considering the sentiments deployed in India’s planning processes. As noted in the introduction, the mobilization of affect in the accomplishment of rule must be taken seriously if we are to understand how discourses resonate among people in a given time and place. I emphasize continuity across time in mobilizing cultural production as a resource (cf. Yudice 2003). Simultaneously, to account for disjuncture, I attend to the sentiments mobilized and generated by cultural policy over time. I show that in the developmental nationalist past (1952–1980), elite guilt about planned industrialization was expressed in cultural policy that generated pity for the poor. Consequently, harnessing subaltern cultural production toward employment generation, revenue generation, and national unity lay at the noble heart of cultural policy.
By contrast, liberalization policies since the early 1990s blatantly enable capital accumulation through displacement; development interventions from employment guarantee schemes to slum development projects attempt to fill the welfare void (Chatterjee 2004, 2008, 2011). Simultaneously, the rise of right-wing Hindu culturalisms since the 1980s has produced a cultural policy that sells pride, optimism, and hope as means of reinventing Indian heritage (as Hindu) while gaining competitive advantages. Elite guilt is now expressed as willful optimism about the artistic and entrepreneurial capacities of the poor, which can be harnessed toward reinventing heritage, revitalizing urban infrastructure, and competing in global rankings.
The transition identified in this chapter is a political economic one that goes from developmental nationalism to neoliberal capitalism. It is also one of changing affects, from pity for artisanal victims under sentimental nationalism to optimism for artisanal entrepreneurship under sentimental capitalism. As will become apparent, the categories of sentimental nationalism and capitalism are not pure, nor is the transition from one to the other linear and absolute. Nonetheless, development policy in independent India harbored a shifting and intensifying culturalism that changed from canons of national diversity and heritage defined by Hindu upper-caste hegemony into spectacular Hindu fundamentalism, which, in collusion with neoliberal policy, mixes a cocktail of valorized cultural practices that shape the grooves upon which contemporary creative economy discourse gains traction.
In specifying the terms of this transition, this chapter identifies historical precedents and continuities, contemporary particularities, and contextual specificities in the shifting relationship between cultural production and development planning over time. It also shows how policy has long deployed passions and sentiments to help legitimize a postcolonial state that secures the reproduction of conditions of exploitation and displacement necessary for capital accumulation (cf. Chatterjee 1993). Thus, rather than view culture and capital, emotion and the market, as joining forces only when Hindu cultural nationalism and neoliberal policy became ascendant in India (Desai 2008, Sarkar 2008), I argue that culture and capitalist development cooperated even in the time of developmental nationalism.
Sentimental Nationalism
The newly independent Indian state committed itself to using cultural practices, heritage, and diversity as governmental technologies for substantiating independence, claiming territorial integrity, and initiating modernization and development. This strategy is apparent in the Five Year Plans of India’s developmental nationalist era (1951–1980) and in the era of neoliberal culturalism and resurgent cultural nationalism (1980-present). Perhaps the two driving discursive commitments of India’s early FYPs were to (1) ensure that the economic system worked against concentration of wealth and toward the welfare of all and (2) build a unified nation out of a diverse populace. These primary concepts and realities shaped and were shaped by centralized planning during the tenure (1947–1964) of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Above all, sentimental nationalism affirms nation as community by pitying the victims of industrial development through a cultural policy that saves the diverse cultural production of the victimized, while reinforcing the supposed inevitability of planned industrialization as welfare for all. Despite unsettled borders and political differences at the time of independence, most officials and bureaucrats agreed that planned industrialization was inevitable and would bring fundamental changes to rural and tribal life, including in cultural production. Cultural production became a key arena of intervention through which belief in the national community, the slogan Unity in Diversity, and the rhetorical commitment to welfare for all were visually cultivated and institutionalized (Roy 2007). In 1972, one director of a theater institute in Delhi, Mohan Upreti asked, “How far can Indian society retain a sense of the collective while undergoing industrialization?” (1975, 163). Bureaucratic vision in cultural policy sought to answer this question and manage elite guilt by enabling artisans among tribal, folk, and rural citizens to survive, rather than drown under capitalist development by promoting artisanal modernization.
In planning terms, this vision translated into two key principles: (1) “culture” as an immanent way of life and marker of diversity to be showcased through cultural institutions for classical arts and revival of folk forms, and (2) “culture” as a technology of, and space for, governmental intervention to cultivate the ideal national citizen and promote a combination of rural self-sufficiency and rural modernization through production for export, growth, and employment. In the very first FYP (1951–1956), Gandhian ideals produced the interlinked goals of “community welfare,” “self-help,” “mutual service,” “economic betterment,” and “co-operative effort.” This view of welfare worked in conjunction with Nehruvian notions of growth and modernization: “The [community welfare] programme concentrates on certain strategic features of village life, but has within it the element of growth, so that its essential aim is to transform not only the technical environment in the village, but also the social and economic relations and attitudes within the village community” (ibid., my emphasis).
A second characteristic of sentimental nationalism is that it cultivated a flattering self-image of humanitarian nationalist elites by projecting employment generation as the chief outcome of artisanal modernization, even though artisanal exploitation remained its foundation. Rhetorically, artisanal modernization was supposed to generate employment in cultural production for victims of industrialization, which involved considerable infrastructural changes. Providing evidence of the transnational production of development nationalism’s cultural policy, historian Leela Gandhi notes that in 1952, Prime Minister Nehru invited the Ford Foundation’s Douglas Ensminger to play an active part in financing and shaping the Planning Commission’s approach to modernizing small and village industries (Gandhi n.d., 22). The Ford Foundation gave the Planning Commission’s rhetoric concrete form by setting up “four regional small industries service and extension institutes,” “a small industries corporation,” and “a small industries board which would bring together leadership from the various states” (ibid., 23).
This approach to artisanal modernization is most obvious in crafts policy, as developed under the leadership of socialist-feminist and Gandhian, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Beginning in 1952, the All-India Handicrafts Board promoted handicrafts across the country, which the first FYP viewed as a potential resolution to the problem of educated unemployment: “For those who have received some training and education, generally speaking, the most promising direction of activity appears to be the development of the smaller industries. Further, both small industries and handicrafts have great importance as means for providing employment for women in their homes as well as on a more organized basis.” In the community development program discourse, a rural woman was otherwise viewed as a “housewife” (Berry 2003, Chaudhuri 1995), but crafts were simultaneously seen as productive and respectable work within the home.
Epitomizing sentimental nationalism and its ideals of national unity and diversity, welfare for all, and pity for victims of industrialization, the Handicrafts Board funded apprenticeships and awards, developed craft design, connected crafts to emporia and broader markets, and enabled artisanal skill-transfer in regions losing skills due to severe out-migration. Not surprisingly, Chattopadhyay could not reconcile her Gandhian and socialist-feminist ideals with Nehru’s planned industrialization. Although she viewed craft as the production of useful objects for daily use, she also constructed regional, national, and global craft markets as preconditions for making artisanal crafts into productive, income-generating employment.
Employment for victims of planned industrialization depended on export crafts markets, which involved teaching small craft workers how to make the nation a cultural superpower. The first FYP connected handicraft production with demand in foreign markets, stating that “Production programmes for handicrafts goods should be based on the study of the requirements of customers in foreign markets, not only of the wealthy but, increasingly, of the average citizen” (Government of India 1951). In 1956, the Ford Foundation made available copies of books and films about materials from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Indian handloom textiles and craft ornaments to serve as an acceptable template for export standard and design (Gandhi n.d., 26). A second Ford grant in 1957 was for a Handicraft Industry study headed by the vice president of Macy’s department store, which made “practical suggestions about marketing and design” (ibid.). Thus, the abiding elite anxiety about the fate of artisans was reconciled by exporting diverse Indian crafts via transnational corporate chains. Although Chattopadhyay was loath to commercialize craft, craft markets had just that effect.
Discussing India’s cultural policy, the sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri critiqued the ideology of marketizing craft production in a statement that is simultaneously a critique of the politics of affect in sentimental nationalism: “Out of pity for their misery and poverty, we are turning master craftsmen into greedy businessmen, so that they can be as privileged as others, learning to use electric power and grinders. In our anxiety to bring economic benefits to the tribes and their crafts, we are prepared to obliterate whatever peculiar traits the craftsmen have and to impose external standards solely in order to sell more” (1975, 153). Alongside expressing nostalgia for the folk artist unsullied by commerce, Chaudhuri inadvertently identifies sentimental regard for the poor as an affective core mobilizing subaltern cultural production within capitalist development in India’s developmental nationalist years. Thus, notwithstanding the promise of employment through artisanal modernization, marketization of crafts was in danger of killing the very uniqueness that national heritage was intended to trade on (Harvey 2001).
Sankho Chaudhuri’s critique of Indian planners’ pity for the miserable poverty of the folk artist suggests that pity made a few artisans into businessmen more effectively than it addressed the poverty of most artisans. Indeed, the hollow sentimentality of policy is apparent in that the policy expressly failed to address problems of artisanal access to raw materials, technology, and credit in craft production. As Maitreyi Krishnaraj (1992) has pointed out, the sheer number of artisans (estimates ranging between five and seven million) meant that to bolster foreign currency reserves through trade in crafts, planners relied on extracting absolute surplus value (derived from caste- and gender-inflected laboring) rather than relative surplus value (derived from technological developments in artisanal production). As such, craft production as a rural industry saw a decline (Jaitly 1994), even though the number of women engaged in it grew (Wilkinson-Weber 2004). It was women who took on the burdens of its labor (tied as it was to caste bondage) in order to make the most of its “risk avoiding function” for subsistence provisioning in times of reduced opportunities for employment (Krishnaraj 1992, WS-10).
While inequalities in craft production were neglected, craft as export and emblem of the nation flourished. By the mid-1960s, Ford Foundation’s initial focus on artisanal industrialization shifted to concern for the destruction of India’s cultural past in the face of development (Gandhi n.d., 36). Thus, a period of grant-making for cultural “heritage” began to replace development utility around the same time that UNESCO began to institutionalize its commitment to protect cultural and natural heritage. As Paul Greenough notes in his study of the Delhi Crafts Museum, artisanal talent was patronized, but artisans were expected to curb innovation so as to “achieve parity with the past” (1995, 238). Meanwhile, designers and traders with entrepreneurial energy and access to middle- and upper-class domestic and foreign markets were free to pursue their innovative uses of the nation’s craft resources. Managed artisanal modernization thus secured craft worker designs to the past of “heritage,” even as the fraught sentiments of craft policy gave new opportunities to urban traders and designers who reaped the spoils of capitalizing on India as a “crafts nation” (242). In this way, neither the crafts producers nor the nation-state were rhetorically sullied by the commodification process toward which they were in fact working.
A third characteristic of sentimental nationalism is that patronizing and parading regional subaltern forms of cultural production had the significant effects of dulling political edge, sanitizing cultural practice, constructing national pride, and consolidating canons of “folk” diversity and “high,” classical culture subject to politics of region, ...
