It is marriage season in my family and nieces and nephews and even cousins are getting married this winter; some of them even getting married the second time – classic cases of triumph of hope over experience — but of that another time!

What strikes me as absolutely appalling is that all of them want to have DJs for their functions. Not that I am averse to shaking a leg given the music of my choice, but I truly miss all the wedding songs that were sung in the family for generations. The lyrics of the songs not only involved all the masi, mama, bua, chichi, tau brigade so intrinsic to any wedding, but managed to share some important lessons of life and living in the new households and how to handle new equations. The whiff of their beautiful lyrics still lingers.
I have myself spent my wedding night in a kohbar handpainted by women of the house, and now increasingly fewer women either know the motifs painted in the kohbar or want to do it. Ditto for the rooms where children were born. Young women today would much rather have new fangled designs in fluorescent hues on their walls or wallpapers rather than a handpainted wall. Even the now ubiquitous mangalsutra, which was hardly a part of the pan-Indian cultural mindset, finds itself centre stage. Ditto for the festivals we celebrate. Teej, which was peculiar to Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar, is being celebrated with much gusto in our metros as if it was rooted here! Or Chhat or Akshya Tritiya or Karva Chauth or Father’s Day, Mother’s Day or orgasm day or whatever day we pin to our calendars that we import from other regions and countries.
The point I am trying to make is that if a wedding or a festival is a microcosm of the cultural mores of our times, then it really is about time we need to have very close look at what we are accepting as a given in the arts mainstream. In our race for a “global” culture and misplaced attempts to incorporate popular culture into the “high” arts, we have created a peculiar problem where we have eroded our folk, traditional and tribal cultures and replaced them with some peculiar caricature of the original.
It is not about funding, it is not about patronage, it is not about definitions as to what constitutes art, and it is not even about the dramatis personae: it is about taking the arts centre stage in the mainstream. It is about being inseparable in the average person’s heart, mind and life, which make it mainstream. Even if one were to not get into the niceties of what constitutes mainstream, the fact remains that a host of problems which plague it wouldn’t be there if the arts were genuinely part of the mainstream and not merely being paid lip service to.
As my educationist friend Dr Kavita Sharma says, it begins at the college and school level. The humanities streams are being given the go by our educational institutions in the race for scoring 100 per cent marks. Little realising that the finer sensibilities are all developed thanks to the humanities streams, we are manufacturing commerce and science students who are neither here nor there. These in turn are giving rise to a generation of culturally rootless people who are easy preys to the so-called “global” cultural mores.
The print and audio-visual media don’t help with virtually no or little space for the arts, for their logic is simple: There is little or virtually no demand, so why should we supply? Point taken. But if we all shrug our responsibility, passing off the onus on to someone else, then where will it all lead to? It is my conviction having been part of the cultural “mainstream” for now almost four decades, these are like Chinese food — an acquired taste. And once acquired, it stays. Just as noodles are so mainstream now that no wedding or any other children’s party menu is complete without it, if newspapers and television channels make it their responsibility to develop that taste, other media will have to follow suit. It remains to be seen what will emerge and where it will be positioned, but for our own sake, I feel it will be more rooted and here to stay.

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com