.....Towards the

NATIONAL MISSION FORCREATIVE AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

THE TASKFORCE FOR CREATIVE AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

The future of India’s creativity

PAST FORWARD

VOL - 1,2,3

Th e Asian Heritage FoundationC-52, South Extension- II, New Delhi -110049

phone- 0091.11. 26263984-7. Fax: 0091.11.26263988mail@asianheritagefoundation.orgwww.asianheritagefoundation.org

Th e Asian HeritaC-52, South Extension- I

phone- 0091.11. 26263984-mail@asianheritagwww.asianheritag

In the transition to a knowledge based economy, the creative and cultural industries have become the most rapidly growing phenomena in

the world. Take, for example, the United Kingdom where it accounts for 7.9% of the GDP, growing by an average of 9% per annum be-

tween 1997 and 2000, compared to an average of 2.8% for the whole economy.

Following the UNESCO charter, a number of countries initiated a slew of policies, programmes, pilot projects and administrative mecha-

they all acknowledge the synergy of the cultural and creative industries and see them together as the primary drivers of their economy.

The importance of culture and creative potential is also increasingly recognised by the international community as a key to more sustainable

development models. Cultural industries are generally small, decentralized and mobilize communities for self empowerment (especially the

women and the poor) and require more grassroots participation than any other industry. Furthermore, they utilise resources that are geo-

capital than agriculture, IT or large industry. In India, Agriculture employs 37-40% of the workforce while other Industries together employ

around 17-20%; the skilled and semi-skilled people that could constitute India’s legacy, cultural and creative industries form the bulk of the

Most developed nations have already lost their traditional skills and are now attempting to nurture what is left as heritage while simultane-

ously capitalizing on the creative design-led industries where they have an edge.

India is in the enviable position of having a large variety of living, skill-based traditions and a number of highly versatile creative people

capable of carrying this unique legacy further (approx. 145-175 million skilled practitioners). We have a nascent but expanding design and

media industry that can help us reposition our traditional knowledge and thereby create original inroads into the global market.

We must exploit this edge to our best advantage…by combining the vast resources of heritage we have at our disposal and

the advances made in technology to create distinctively Indian products and services – India’s own USP that can hold its own

against the best the world has to offer. For example, our pictorial traditions of Madhubani, Warli, Saura, Pithora, Gondh, Patuas,

Patachitra, miniatures and painted textiles could extend their vocabulary through animation, an industry where the Indian share

of the global market (US $70 bn) is already about a billion dollars and is predicted to rise to $15 billion by 2009-10. Similarly,

India’s share of the global Gifts, Handicrafts and Handlooms market (over US$ 250 bn) is growing consistently at an average

of over 20% year on year mostly due to product development.

To this end, there is a pressing need to encourage planning, investment and engagement in key areas such as mapping and statis-

tical analysis, human resource development, capacity building, design innovation, creativity indices and benchmarking systems,

infrastructure development, protection of intellectual property rights and copyright regulation, support policies for developing

businesses, small and medium enterprises and targeted promotional and export measures. Simultaneously, urgent assistance

is also required to facilitate structured private/public sector cooperation, access to credit and loans, market research and the

deployment of information and communication technology to ensure cross-sectoral linkages and access to data and the global

market.

-

sion for Creativity in Cultural Industries (draft enclosed) is urgently required to delineate a cohesive strategy and to spearhead

cooperative ventures, private sector participation and civic engagement.

28

Chapter 1POSITIIONING A BIG IDEA

Chapter 2MAKING, DOING, BEING

CHAPTER LEAD-INS AS /AN OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT

Chapter 3GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Volume - 1

29

Chapter 4INDIAN SCENARIO

‘the same page’ Shilpsagar

Volume - 2

30

Several authors have decided to go beyond describing the state of affairs

The authors have sometimes chosen to elaborate on one aspect and not

Bifurcation of the articles and collation of the material into different

Chapter 5INDIA’S EDGE

India’s Edge

Rajeev Sethi

Nina Sabnani and Nitin Donde.

Hitesh Rawat, Rta Kapur Chisti and Rahul Jain

Sanjay Prakash

Dr. Pushpa Bhargava

Geeta ChandranChandralekha

Dr. Vandana Shiva

31

melaSudarshan Khanna.

Veenapani Chawla gurukulsBhaskar Ghose and Shubha Mudgal

well.

Chapter 6THE WHEEL MOVE

The Wheel Moves

Chapter 7THE WAY AHEAD

The Way Ahead

Volume - 3

32

Policy and Planning Services indigenousmapping systems

in use as creative indices Dr Darshan Shankar.

transmission of tradition versus child labour Smt. Renuka Chaudhary, MahatmaGandhi Buniyadi Siksha

a Ministry for artisanal manufacturing Rajeeva Ratan Shah

In Financial and Credit services Vijay Mahajan and Divya Thangadorai

grameen-banks

international pilots

Capacity building

Educational modelsDarly Koshy, MP Ranjan, Kavita Singh and Nalini Thakur

Cultural Management and administration

Technological innovations and interventions Ranjit Makkuni, Anil Gupta, RK Pachauri and Johny ML

Jugaad Design without designersAnand Sarabhai and Aditya Dev Sood

Regional Service Centres SunilMunjal, Tinoo Joshi and RK Shrivastava Civic and private partnerships Nina Ranjan.

Legal Servicescopyright, community indicators and ownership,

geographical indicators and intellectual property rights and usage protection.

Pravin Anand Swathi Sukumar and Sudhir Krishnaswamy Kritika DN

Achille Forler Indiancopyright laws in the international context.

Marketing and Promotion, In revenue models

Rajeev SethiFaith Singh and William Bissel urban/domestic

street vendors’ organisationMadhu Kishwar

Manish Arora Internationalnational revenue models

Aman Nath and Nina Rao tangibleheritage

intangible heritageSandeep Dikshit

Shaguna Gahilote

33

Ninasam

culinary tourismLotus Bazaar

Exhibitions

Dr Kiran SethAwareness Campaign

.

Chapter 8BRAND INDIA

BrandIndia

Urban renewal and heritage rejuvenation Pilot projects Heritage

conservation Nalini Thakur

Global Arts’ Square AHF in Jaipur Skilled artisanal neighbourhoods

Anadgram, Nehru Kala Kunj and Kala Neri K Jayakumar

Regional centres of excellence Zonal Cultural Centres

Events, Fairs and Festivals

city festivals Sanjeev Bhargava Rajeev Sethi

AHF. Brand India products

Khadi, Craftmark , Ayurveda by

and the Golden Eye

Flagship project

International interventions Regular programmes linkups with national missions businessincubation models –

34

Chapter 9PURNA KUMBHA

Purna Kumbha

Chapter 10SHAJAR-E-HAYAT

Shajar-e-hayat- the tree of life

MESSAGES

President of India

UPA Chairperson

Former Prime Ministers of India

,d

nks

rhu

VOLUME I

CONTENTS

By Shri Manmohan Singh, Honourable Prime Minister of IndiaOn the need for out- of- the- box solutions for nurturing India’s heritageand the importance of creativity in a global Market place

1 POSITIONING THE BIG IDEA CREATIVE AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AS A LEAD SECTOR IN INDIA By Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Executive Head of the Planning Process, Government of India

2 MAKING, DOING, BEING : A TIME FOR JOINED-UP THINKING By Rajeev Sethi, Chairman and Founder Trustee of the Asian Heritage Foundation, Advisor to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj and Vice-Chairperson of the Taskforce on Cultural and Creative Industries, Planning Commission

3 A GLOBAL PHENOMENON : EVOLUTION OF THEORY, POLICY & PRACTICE

Cross cultural milestones

Shift from Manufacturing to Services to Knowledge

An overview of multilateral global mechanisms in place Case studies of Nine Countries : Forward Group -UK, Singapore/Hongkong & China, Canada/USA; Peer Group - Philippines, South Africa, Brazil/Columbia

Shri Montek Singh Ahluwalia took a pioneering step by setting up the Taskforce for

Creative and Cultural Industries within the Planning Commission. In his introduc-

tion he outlines why positioning this sector in the lead is a big idea.

Overview

Positioning The B

ig Idea

5

Positioning The Big Idea

Creative and CulturalIndustriesas a Lead Sector

By Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Executive Head Of The Planning Process,government Of India

Buying a papier-mache box from a Kashmere crafts person while walking around the Silk Route

Festival in Washington with my wife, provided a brief but talismanic experience of global trade

artistic sensibilities through import and export have united a large part of the world in its pursuit

to look for contemporary ways of transforming ‘unorganized’ economic talent and aspirations with

of agro industries; this entrepreneurial energy must now reach the threshold and transform our

6

intellectual property to produce products and services with social and cultural meaning,

more, the innovative action and positioning of facilities with a blue print for this sector,

will not only help us save scarce resources, do more with less, but also involve the largest

number of economically vulnerable people all over the country, in the efforts to make

recommendations they have suggested a more tentative ‘mission’ mode composed and

activities, addressing the needs of a vast and varied multitude- yet, with the parameters

clearly enunciated and understood, there is a chance that this sector may actually prove

“Culture springs from the roots

and seeping through to all the shoots

From cell to cell, like green blood,

Is released by rain showers,

But culture that is poured on men

From up above, congeals there

Like damp sugar, so they become

Like sugar-dolls, and when some

Life-Giving shower wets them through

They disappear and melt into

A sticky mess”.

Hassan Fathy, Egyptian Architect

Positioning The B

ig Idea

7

task of exhaustive mapping as a start to the recommended actions, be completed in the

implementation of projects and programmes suggested by them are assessed, raised and

important sector that has suffered enough with sentimental subsidy, little coordination,

‘dressing’

government reports, will help take it beyond the shelf, to a broader public and kick start a

“Culture blooms as naturally as mother earth.

In one earth grow many trees— mangoes and guavas,

If it takes the crutch of a wall it dies.

It has to be below the sky, rooted to the earth.

Roots lie in darkness.

When nourished they shoot up and gain luminosity.

A seed should not be shy of germination.

drops it becomes a plant, then a tree.

Cultur’e like a seed has an organic growth.

Sanskriti ek shehed ki nadi hai jo chup chaap behti hai.

Water makes sound not honey.

Mun ki pehchaan jis se hai woh hi sanskriti hai.

BABA AMTE, Anandwan, Nagpui

To be a painter one must know sculptureTo be an architect one must know dance

Dance is possible only through musicAnd poetry therefore is essential

(Part 2 of Vishnu Dharmottara Purana, an exchange between the sage Markandya and King Vajra)

11

Making, D

oing, Being...

Making... Doing... Being...

Occasionally rebuked since childhood as a ‘jack of all trades’ I was mostly at a loss in describing what I did in life.

With the overarching umbrella offered by the new nomenclature of “cultural and creative industries”, I now have rea-

son to feel comfortable. Being labeled “designer”, “theatre scenographers”, “artist”, “activist”, even “policy planner”

or “impresario”, I know that making things happen in today’s world requires more muscle than one’s core-competency.

Being a designer itself places one on the larger canvas of what a mentor in youth, Romesh Thapar called, ‘Design for

Life’. Charles Earns used to say, “Everything Connects”. My Gurus, Smt. Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay and

Smt. Pupul Jayakar held a seed and sourced the sap, Gira Sarabhai offered talismanic views, while charismatic lead-

This publication is also a tribute to the indomitable courage of India’s extraordinarily gifted people who’s ‘never-say-

die’, tenacious identities, coupled with their skills to make or to do, allows them to be special. We marvel at India’s

legacy of cultural industries seamlessly infusing tradition with new vitality. We bow to India’s vision of remaining still

and centered, while surging ahead …. to the strength of our roots that go deeper even as our spirits continue to sour.

12

PART I

dialogue with related governmental initiatives running in parallel and sometimes opposite directions

share our concern for the future of our traditional and contemporary knowledge systems, creative

unnot take stock of its scale and strength as a selfhas the capacity to go a mile! On the other hand, the far more visible large industry and high-tech

service sectors grab all the goodies, adding negligibly to the pool of gainful employment that remains

-

With the inevitability of our future being so heavily informed and shaped by the forces of globalisa-

-

der plant evoking sakthi, the chance discovery of which marks the begin-

13

Making, D

oing, Being...

14

Now look at these specimens found in

Made much later in the pe-

known as the ‘Fustat’ fragments these

are composed largely of printed cottons

Used probably as tomb cover-

used in barter between Egypt and

also a part of this intercontinen-

tal trade that was a precursor to

15

Making, D

oing, Being...

The Silk Route at Smithsonian,Washington produced in deferent

part of the world by an entirely Indian team

16

17

Making, D

oing, Being...

“negating the linear movement of history; the

tradition develops like a spiral that re-coils and un-coils.

Within this movement, nothing is totally rejected.”

consistency, immutable across space and time; the other reed plays the tune of immediate time and space. One then is repetitive but stable; the other changing. The two

together create the music that sounds different at different times.’’

In an era when tradition and modernity are seen as two polar realms, devoid of any mutual interaction, we have much to learn from these two wise women.

18

MODERN INDIA

• Identity, memory ..• Heritage = Commerce

• Boats, bullock-cartrr s, bridges• Transportation = ships, highways, aircraftff

• Kunds, Kollams, Cheras, Baolis, Vaavs,

Acqueducts

• Irrigation=Big Dams, Canals

• Cottage Industries & household manufg• Large Industry = IT Telecom

• Pilgrimages, dhdd ararr msalall s ..• Travel = Tourism, hotels, resortrr s

• Vernacular dialects ..Gurukuls, Madarsas ..

• Craftff s

• Education = English, IITs, IIMs etc.

Fine Arts

• Live & itinerant performance

• Popular theatre, dance, music ..

• Media = Electronic broadcast, cinema

• Indigenous Systems of health & healing• Health = Allopathic Medicine

• Organic farming, indigenous seeds,

fertrr ilizers..

• Agriculture = Green Revolution

• Water mills, manual labour• Energy = Nuclear, hydel power

• Handlooms & Khadi …• Textiles = Techno mechanized multi-fiber

• Culture• Science

TRADITIONAL INDIA

While staggering statistics are being widely acknowledged in the developed

-

vancement has not occurred in developing countries which draw more on tra-

however, that this imbalance is due to the fact that most developed nations that

have put in place mechanisms for cultural industries are bereft of traditional

traditions and a number of highly versatile creative people capable of carry-

How is this sector perceived in India today? Let’s open up the Big devide

19

Making, D

oing, Being...

-

-

sources as a tenacious symbol of enterprise which needs ground level support, similar

-

ucts and services – our heritage and the advances made in technology – our own origi-

• Rate of Employment is 45% of population and 35% of the population is

un-employable (i.e.under 18 years/over 65 years/physically handicapped). There is a

potential to gainfully employ 20% of the 110 Cr. population i.e. 22 Crores (mainly in

rural areas - 10Cr. Literates & 12 Crore illiterates)

• Surveys prove that there is an excess capacity of 20-22% in the population employed

by agriculture which tranlates into 5 Crores of people unemployed/underemployed in

this sector. (2 Cr. Literates & 3 Cr. Illiterates)

• The Agriculture sector growing at approx 2-3% p.a. cannot absorb this potential

workforce.

• Organised manufacturing, mining & services can absorb a maximum of 2 Crores

(~20% of their present employment potential i.e. 11 cr) especially in urban and sub-

urban areas. This still leaves a large employable workforce of 13 crores literate and

15 Crores illiterates)

• Creative, cultural and Traditional/legacy industries is the only key to gainfully

employ this potential work force especially in the rural areas which attract very little

industrial investment/interest. This workforce (at least the literate population) can be

absorbed in the industry if an enabling environment is created within next 6 to 8

years.

• Additional contribution to GDP created by the potential employment in this sector

even at one–half the per-capita income (Rs.18,000 pa) is to the tune of Rs. 216,000

Crores (6% of GDP at current prices)

• Rate of Employment is 45% of population and 35% of the population is

un-employable (i.e.under 18 years/over 65 years/physically handicapped). There is a

potential to gainfully employ 20% of the 110 Cr. population i.e. 22 Crores (mainly in

rural areas - 10Cr. Literates & 12 Crore illiterates)

• Surveys prove that there is an excess capacity of 20-22% in the population employed

by agriculture which tranlates into 5 Crores of people unemployed/underemployed in

this sector. (2 Cr. Literates & 3 Cr. Illiterates)

• The Agriculture sector growing at approx 2-3% p.a. cannot absorb this potential

workforce.

• Organised manufacturing, mining & services can absorb a maximum of 2 Crores

(~20% of their present employment potential i.e. 11 cr) especially in urban and sub-

urban areas. This still leaves a large employable workforce of 13 crores literate and

15 Crores illiterates)

• Creative, cultural and Traditional/legacy industries is the only key to gainfully

employ this potential work force especially in the rural areas which attract very little

industrial investment/interest. This workforce (at least the literate population) can be

absorbed in the industry if an enabling environment is created within next 6 to 8

years.

• Additional contribution to GDP created by the potential employment in this sector

even at one–half the per-capita income (Rs.18,000 pa) is to the tune of Rs. 216,000

Crores (6% of GDP at current prices)

Why do cultural and creative industries spell the future of work?

Employment Scenario% of No. of % share Amt. (Rs.) Growth

Workforce people in GDP GDP Rate %

Population of India (2005 E) 110 Crores

Employed (Workforce) 50 Crores

Agriculture (Cultivators & Agri Labour) 48% 24 Crores 20% 6,00,000 Cr. 2-3%

Organised Industry & Services 22% 11 Crores 66% 20,00,000 Cr. 10-12%

“Self-organised”/ Household /Artesenal/

Legacy Industries 30% 15 Crores 14% 4,00,000 Cr. 12-15%

Cultural

Industries,

14%

Creative

Iinds, 20%

Agriculture

20%

Other

Industries,

46%

Org.

Industry,

22%

Agriculture

48%Cultural

Industries,

30%

EMPLOYMENT SHARE IN GDP

20

Finally, the most important issue we must raise is the state of the skilled person behind these legacy industries. What are they thinking? How are they relating to the tremendous

developments taking place…many of which have a direct impact on them? What are their aspirations for their children and themselves? Working out ways of addressing the

concerns of skilled craftspeople is meaningless if their own voices are not articulated. We bandy them about the world as the repository of our heritage, but never recognize their

needs as people, when we bring them back to dump them in inhospitable slums. Do we know what miserable conditions many of our artisans and artists live and work in today?

Do we feel for the gloom they face and indeed, the doom that India will face, if we allow them to disappear? Let me give you an example…

Gopal, well versed in the art of weaving, sells balloons and his mother

21

Making, D

oing, Being...

Nathilal

Who has the time today to pause and think-could this man pulling a rickshaw, selling balloons

of powerloom,

So, who in this scenario where few survive, is going to bother about the hundreds of thousands displaced

22

-

chitects have never learnt to use traditional skills as a relevant part of our building activities around the

Who then can employ the incredible science and art known to the communities of the Sthapthies, Ma-

-

The late Zameer Khan, equally starred, stayed with

his family in a house nearby.

here with her family of eight, three members, 3 cats and a fat goat.

Making, D

oing, Being...

My generation must ask… as have those before us, “Do we leave our country as a better place or do we accept this tag as an also ran, in a

race seething with borrowed synthetic aspirations?”

If all services were automated and available at the press of a button – the interpersonal language of sharing will be lost and if all the modern

methods of production points only to the machine, then the honourable skills of the hand will survive only as in gene banks…. For the few,

by the few, of the few.

The once solid and expansive base of the pyramid where culture seeks to measure itself would erode and its peak will be entombed in the

silent graveyard of museums.

You will remember the beginning, the inter-play of madder --- evoking shakti – the force of life and repository of memory …. An indigo

resonant with Rasayana and the eternal chemistry of change.

Where did it all go wrong?

At one micro level let’s take the case of Ramaswami .. a master dyer living in a small village, near

Salem in Tamil Nadu – amongst the few crafts people who know the process of making natural

die. The colonial invention of Alizarin and substitute for indigo changed the natural scale of our

vocabulary and pallette forests forbid him entry to get the raw material he needs and few, includ-

ing Ramaswami, are aware of the economic value of natural dies or the buzz around it in world

markets.

To conclude, let me go back to textiles, may I translate a muhavara…..

It is said that colour is the king, the fabric the subject and the motif the maid:

Let us for a moment, see the colour Neel and Aal, as a metaphor for India’s balanced spirit,

…. the tenacious fabric, as the indomitable skill of its people,

…..the unique design or motif as the unbridled imagination of our culture,

… At another level, making, doing and being become one…

…. There is Creativity in culture, their is future for skilled work and the ethos of our nation is

24

If there is to be a roadmap including a knowledge base, positioning as

in the 20th century the Planning Commission, an august body seeking

to bolster our economy, would have to lay the path that charters an un-

precedented journey.

doverHello, HandoverHello, HandoverHello, Handover

Dangers of Corporate Involvement:

Culture and industry? While romantics have always lived by the notion that the two don’t

go together, that to be “industrious” is to be non-creative and that creative people need only

fresh air and water for survival, the reality is different. Vibrant cultures are those that

guarantee a full stomach, a roof, however leaky, and a reasonable future to the children of

every cultural worker. This, besides of course, teaching them to be industrious. The most

committed Chhau performer can be forgiven if he would rather watch his son pedal a cycle

rickshaw on the streets of Ranchi than starve as an unemployed dancer. And were data

to be compiled on the number of hereditary performers of music and dance who have

had to take to blue collar and even menial jobs or become petty traders in post-Independent

India in order to just survive, it would shock the chattering classes.

Shanta Serbjeet Singh, Dec 18, 2005, The Hindu

25

Of culture, Mao

THE ECONOMIC TIMES 28th October, 1990 Artscape

SOLILOQOY RAJEEV SETHI

Alas! The word ‘Sanskriti’ — like ‘Paryavaran’ — is only pronounced with priest like perfection, or in an-glicized accents, in and around the India International Centre. Either way, it makes little sense to the man on the street. I don’t believe we have the vaguest idea of what a cultural policy really means.

On the one hand you have those son-of-the-soil types who dismiss it as merely a leisure time activity. The song-and dance routine on the other hand is relegated to the con-fines of hot houses – under the guise of documentation and preservation.

Then, we have many who talk of poverty and expect culture to take a back seat. True, large manifesta-tions is how the concept translated in the 1980s and that perhaps can be only a small part of what we ought to be doing, but to say that the coun-try is poor, and culture must unfor-tunately be treated as a luxury is like requesting someone to stop breathing because the air is pollut-ed. I, for one, have no doubt that the nations much prioritized economic programme is intrinsically depend-ent on the cultural awakening and pride of its people.

Culture as a word has lost its medi-eval connotation - to do with mere agricultural productivity. Our equiv-alent - ‘Sanskriti’, suggests the ac-

tion of doing and creating. Gandhi (the Mahatma) preferred the word ‘Sabhyatha’ - civilization instead of ‘Sanskriti’. The word expresses how we produce and use what we need and what we don’t...it reflects on what constitutes our habitat and t he shape, size and materials of our shelter...It shows how we grow, cook, serve, eat, amid drink…. how we adorn and dress and even un-dress It explains the way we speak, think and act... the manner in which we gesticulate, connect, greet or abuse...the way we cure and heal.., the manner in which we control rebel and organize and much, much more.

Lately, much is being made of an exercise that will place a holistic cultural policy on the anvil. The Haksar Committee Report they say has provided the main salvo. De-spite the dust it has raised I believe that like all the earlier policy re-ports before, the dust will soon set-tle on it! Despite all the fizz and the shoulds, it is going to end up being

just another olive in the cocktail. The report was primarily concerned with the reports of the Akademies. Amid anyone who thinks that a na-tional culture policy can be equated to the functioning of the Akademies is plain ignorant.

On the other hand, Mao thought it of his great revolution as cultural. And look where it got him! In my next column I will outline why culture needs more teeth and how it should set about acquiring real influence.

2

Making, D

oing, Being...

Working experiences

Seven generations of my family have been carving stone. From

my father, I came to understand the beauty that lies in cleanliness

and clarity. Just see the exquisiteness of the jali; it gives you a

feeling of air and light. I like doing complicated designs that take

a long time. They stay in my hands longer. Jobs don’t come all the

time. Work doesn’t depend on me. I depend on work.

Soni Ram

SOLILOQOY

26

Teeth for Culture

THE ECONOMIC TIMES 13th October, 1990 Artscape

SOLILOQOY RAJEEV SETHI

The word culture made Field Marshal Goering reach for his gun. Chairman Mao thought of his great revolution as cultural. Gandhiji preferred to use the word sabhyataor “civilization.” A Sufi poet is said to have described culture as the fragrance that is left behind after the incense stick of life is burnt.

There are no barriers to fragrance; boundaries created fifty years ago in a fractured South Asia cannot change the essence of shared experiences, history and geography. Evanescent, it permeates the being of the subcontinent - as much a part of its wilderness, as in its villages or cities.

Unfortunately, since culture defies a definition, it has no single face for the common man and therefore no ballot value, no official programme or policy – or appropriate budgets.

On the one hand you have those ‘sons of the soil’ types who dismiss it as merely a leisure time activity... the song and dance routine. On the other hand, it is relegated to the confines of hot houses - under the guise of documentation, preservation and silk lined museum shelves.

Then we have many philistines who talk of poverty and expect culture to take a back seat. True, official patronage, setting up academies, development boards, holding large manifestations, pumping in sentimental subsidies and stipends, is a small part of what was required but to say that the country is poor and culture must be treated as a luxury is like requesting someone to stop breathing because the air is polluted.

Conventional economic indices may rate us as poor but our wealth of heritage could make us

a forerunner in an alternative developmental paradigm. I believe sustainable economic growth is a cultural process.h is

Therefore, I see red, whenever I hear dilettante’s whisper. “Let culture be! The people will decide”. Sure! But look which people? Look around at the greed and chaos around you and see who’s winning and at what cost?

The mandarins in the finance and planning ‘mehakmas’ have to first understand what promotes productivity, what leads to intolerance and contempt, breeding new insecurities and uncontrolled pollution. What we spend on the entire department of culture is a tiny fraction of what we spend for VIP security... Could there a connection?

In this age of liberalization, I am all for the middle path with defined measures of control and a social contract with the money tigers, that can check the abuse of culture in the name of so called development. t. What we now require is parliamentary intervention and appropriate legislations that will give more teeth to the Department of Culture. I feel the Ministry of Human Resources must feel compelled to draft or seek approach-papers from all other ministries on connected issues that alter time honoured cultural perceptions and set up inter-ministerial task forces required to make culture less cosmetic.

The country went up in flames over the reservation of 80,000 jobs for backward classes. Yet many times that number of the so called OBCs was displaced by unfeeling governments that did little to ensure proper support and imaginative promotion of marginalized sectors of cottage industries handloom etc. Did anyone from culture

speak up? Today 4,000 Chenalamapatti weavers from Tamil Nadu live in the squalor of Delhi slums - some selling balloons while their wives work as housemaids. An entire tradition is being lost and a culture is being altered to a point where it loses its center. Does then a cultural statement amount to precious little textile exhibitions mounted neatly in the crafts museums and festivals of India?

The shift of production and greater automation in agriculture should mean keener concern for systems that ensure de-centralized and self-employed sectors. But no, these are further marginalized and the

lifestyles of a people are being drastically altered. Urban migration and the great shift of people from one region into another in search of work is creating its own social and cultural conflicts.

The Ministry of Health needs desperately to evolve a new strategy of unitary care for preventive and curative medicine, the alternative small stream systems have to be integrated with the mainstream to convince

us that care is not just a privilege of the rich. Visiting a hospital’s OPD for even one hour will convince anyone that we have very little of culture or civilization.

Our own indigenous systems of medicine are receiving more attention outside the country while thousands of un-translated manuscripts gather dust in forgotten libraries all over India. Some of these are rotting under the various State Departments of Culture!

When the Ministry of Steel sets up a factory in a tribal belt, does someone in tribal welfare have a greater say in the matter? Does the Industrialist give thought about its impact on

tribal aspirations and culture, their tradition and ultimately on the quality of their lives? The fact is that hundreds of thousands of tribals have been displaced involuntarily from their ancestral occupation with the arbitrary deforestation, false promises and intimidation. Has this provoked the Dept. of Culture to even sponsor a study to examine these charges or their altered conditions? The lives of the people have changed but it is necessary that a virile expression and rooted

heritage becomes a mediocre copy of a copy in the name of modernity?

Who protests when pesticides poison our foods, or preservatives debase our cooking and eating styles and who has studied how fertilizers and hybrids have changed the perception of season and our varied eco-agri-cycles. When a river is poisoned, all the When a river is poisoned, all the culture that it supports also dies.culture that it supports also dies. Shouldn’t the Dept. of Culture think about all this as being of cultural concern as much as an environmental one?

Should the Ministry of Urban Development get away without building codes that allow cities and towns to flout local climate, aesthetics, materials and skills? Does not cultural identity suffer when the built environment envelops us in a homogenized spiritless landscape? Does the Dept. of Culture challenge its own sister Department of Education when curricula for higher education to point only to the west, and when teachers would rather have us toe the line than find time for questions. And what of us, as parents, preferring that our children learn Jack and Jill and not some ‘exotic’ vernacular rhyme?

Rampant consumption breeds its own insecurities - it thrives on it. In this age, consumer is king and culture its handmaiden.

Indian TV is a medium that sought heavy public investments on the ground that it will serve rural needs. Today instead, it is mostly subservient to gross urban demands manipulated through consumer plugs by a growing, articulate and a very resourceful creed of white-collared communicators. There attitudes and official resources profoundly convert culture into an entertainment activity with programmes that take away even the little leisure in which we entertain ourselves. TV today caters to a plethora of urban neuroses. This, more than any other medium, is affecting the way people in rural areas have begun to perceive

27

and express themselves through gross imitation, intimidation and identification.

How many hours of software is commissioned for rural viewers? Has anyone put the Panchayat on TV or catered in a robust creative manner to real rural issues without talking down?

If all this is not meant to be the Department of Culture’s concern, I feel it will have very little left to sing or dance about! I want more teeth for culture and for it a finger in every pie.

The loss of a custom or a ritual from memory or practice has not been my enduring concern. The potter has stopped making some beautiful votive offerings. Well too bad but so what!! There is no longer a felt need to propitiate certain deities linked with fatal diseases that are now extinct. For example, the worship of Shitala Mata, the goddess of smallpox will perhaps have to change as she takes on different functions within the reality of modern medicine.

A man driving a tractor does not need the same footwear and plow as his forebears. The village shoemaker and carpenter can therefore, not expect the customary exchange of grain for their efforts. New varieties of seeds, methods of irrigation, and of factory-made fertilizers, have changed man’s perception of the season and the harvest. The balladeer, called in to invoke the blessings of the gods and to lift evil spirits that cause the illness of a patron’s camel, has now to compete with the veterinarian.

Women who sang the most telling songs on the way to the well, sharing the day’s happening with each other, have now merely to open a faucet in their homes. Good! No doubt the water pot – however superbly designed to be carried on the waist and on the head would now require to be changed. The songs, invented by the women to lessen women to lessen drudgery, will fade away. drudgery, will fade away. What should concern us more is how the need and energy

— so delicately expressed and enshrined in the communication of the women — now finds a new vehicle for expression?

1. What is replacing that which must go?

2. What do we want to preserve and how do we proceed to preserve and for whom?

3. The concern then, is to constantly and persistently ask, from here to where? Can people participate and relate creatively to the pace of development and absorb its

consequences with any sense of quality?

Lately, much is being made of an exercise Lately, much is being made of an exercise that will place a holistic cultural policy on the anvil. I don’t believe even in another 50 years we will have the vaguest idea of what a cultural policy really means. Various Committee Reports they say have provided the main salvo. Despite the dust these reports have raised, I believe that like all policy papers, the dust will soon settle onthem. Despite all the fizz and the ‘should be’s’ and ‘shouldn’t be’s’ they are like olive’s in a cocktail. Most reports concern themselves with the official programmes and the functioning of Academies. And anyone who thinks that a national culture policy can be equated to the functioning of august bodies is plain ignorant. What is needed is a pragmatic and a very common sense approach to the way cultural policy is being administered or even the fact that there was a lack of culture policy.

At 50 if I was to take stock of what hasn’t been done and what requires immediate attention, I would point out the critical lack of comprehensive schemes for the welfare of artists and artisans, the people behind all the art - the repository of our heritage - bandied about the world as our ambassadors and brought home to live in squalid slums.

We need a methodology for a census on the arts to evolve a system that helps to classify cultural expression in its varied contexts;

then we need to set up neighbourhood and voluntary infrastructures that can support and generate its own cultural programming. We need to redress the hazards in the arts, and evolve a less officious and more inspiring system of rewarding excellence, offering privileges and infusing pride amongst skilled people who feel vulnerable in this age of flux. We need to detail the composition of curricula for cultural education and administration and insure autonomy and networking between institutions.

We need better designs, wider - much wider access to documentation and a re-definition of the scale and nature of cultural dissemination not just for the sake of the few, for the few. More interdisciplinary interaction is required in the arts and the brilliantly conceived Zonal Cultural centers have to become more focused on revitalizing their devised agenda. Training in the arts has to become more realistic and market oriented and presentation format for the arts has to take on the bull TV– horn by horn,z channel by channel.

No one can have a final say in matters related to culture. Culture, like breath is to life, will always be an inseparable part of our existence, the fragrance of our civilization. The air we breathe is polluted because we have not invented new systems to check the decay. How to restore to a society its self-purifying mechanism? How to prevent our senses from shrinking further? How to celebrate innovation and decry the mediocrity of imitation? There are many questions and answers will come from those who don’t take freedom for granted.

In my future columns I will be writing about the methodology for a census for the arts, on the need for evolving a system that helps to classify cultural expression in various context, on the setting up of neighborhood and voluntary infrastructures to support cultural programming, on issues related to the hazards in the arts and the critical lack of schemes for artistic welfare, on the pros

and cons of awards and on the issue of pride and privileges.

I would like to explore the composition of a curriculum for cultural administration and offer my views on autonomy and networking between institutions, on the design and access to documentation and on the scale and nature of dissemination. Also, on inter- disciplinary interaction and innovation, on marketing and presentational formats and on the theme of continuity and training in the arts. I want more teeth for culture and for it - a finger in every pie. “But the pie is becoming smaller for the want of resources”; they say, “and culture is not a basic.”...Really? Perhaps, because the entire Dept. of Culture gets only Rs. 80 crores and Rs.200 crores a year for VVIP security becomes a necessity. Should we ‘let the people decide’?

Seeing the whole

I am a Muslim and I make Hindu, Christian and Islamic

themes. We assume each consumer respects the spirit. Yes,

we hope that people do not put an insulting object by its

side. While making it, I don’t touch it with my feet. There

is “kadar and ibadat” (respect and devotion). Then there

“karigari” (skill). Without one the other does not come.

Shaukat AliFigure cutting and joinery

Ankhen do, drishti ek, honth do, lafaz ek

Pair do, raftaar ek, Haath do, taali ek

Bhed phiryeh aisa kyoon?”

BABA AMTE, Anandwan, Nagpui

28

A NATION in which a leader can seriously ask “Do you think an artist is a special per-son?” is a nation in jeopardy.

The other day I tried to explain this in chaste Hindi to our new minister for tex-tiles. He yawned. Our delegation of master craftspersons and weavers tried telling him about specific projects related to housing, occupational diseases, product reservations and other things. His political producer was more voluble; he warned us about this nation of thieves, chastised us for our servility, and told us to take what we need with the force of a ‘danda’. We reminded him that the fate of ten million weavers and several million craftspeople was clubbed with his own min-istry and unless they took precedence, the ‘danda’ will continue to be wielded by the textile barons.

Yet, I must agree that political rhetoric has some effect. After all didn’t Shri Datta Sa-mant make a lot of noises and hasn’t the government been dishing out more than 200 crores annually to maintain the sick textile units, employing only a 100,000 workers. The silent handlooms with a hundred times that number get only a piffling fraction of that figure.

Preferential treatment based on heirarchies exists amongst government machinery as-sociated with the performing arts as well. Without going into the arts versus craft, folk versus classical debate, I would like to point out another case of faulty perspectives. s. Nine months ago the then Prime Minister magnan-imously announced registration of all slum dwellers in Delhi and the giving of ration cards. So far so good. But implementation was characteristically short sighted as targets had to be immediately achieved.

The population in Delhi slums and squatter colonies doubled overnight. The increased density and close proximity of jhuggies, improvised with waste plastics and wood crates, made them more vulnerable. To top it

all zealous legislators encouraged everyone to tap the “electric poles feeding rich mans homes” without permission. Working for the last fifteen years in one slum, housing more than six hundred puppeteers, balladeers, ac-robats etc., we were alarmed and warned the concerned authorities about the implication of such actions.

The slums in Delhi burnt last summer as never before. In the fires, along with all oth-ers, about hundred artists also lost all they

. Since we were more organised, we got had. Ssome relief from the hotels where the artists had performed on various occasions.The five star kitchens of the ‘Taj’ catered to the slum dwellers of Shadipur for 15 days

We also made the Sangeet Natak Akademni promise them that they would sponsor some programmes to help them purchase new in-struments.

The slum dwellers have never heard from them after their empty assurances, inspite of repeated requests and reminders for action.

There is a feeling that these poor folk artists only make a noise with their drums. And, yes of course we have the Utsavs and Festivals, tomtomming the nation’s pride in its cultural heritage. The artists are bandied about as the fast depleting repository of this wealth.

No doubt, while the various festivals have made people more aware of the variety of art forms, I have somewhat naively harboured the illusion that this increased exposure will help us hasten a better deal for the well-being of artists or in meeting their needs.

Since Independence, India has seen rapid in-dustrial growth and consequent urbanisation. Migration from rural India to the burgeoning metropolis has fractured ancient links and channels of interpersonal communication. The principles of philosophy of inter- depen-dence required to nurture production systems and community-life are gradually lost, being perceived as irrelevant or unscientific. This alienation has been felt more than ever be-fore and with much greater intensity in the last few decades. Unprecedented changes

Of TouristInterest Only

THE ECONOMIC TIMES October, 1990 Artscape

SOLILOQOY RAJEEV SETHI

29

have reflected on the patronage conditions and environments of traditional perform-ers and artisans, challenging the survival of their time-honoured skills. It is time that we recognised that the responsibility of society does not end with the sponsoring of a project here and a bit there, or by conferring titles and awards that offer the artist little more than a once in a lifetime stint with status.

For every known artist they are hundred today who, for want of basic amenities and support, never see the light of day. If the base of the pyramid erodes, the top will be of little consequence. Even successful artists should realise that their pursuit of excellence im-plies a shared concern and responsibility for those who are less fortunate.

I know of a few musicians who think noth-ing of charging thousands but who profess ignorance about the monthly emoluments of their accompanists.

Once an accompanist tabla player from Shahdara told me, “The emptiness of my stomach resounds with the encores. I hardly have enough for a scooter fare back home from the concert. After spending about 12 years in rigorous rehearsals, I used to get Rs. 450/- per month, which is less than the lowest of the low government scale. I am 50 now…not more than 15-20 people know me… I remain only a part of the show and after show time… with the applause, we exit ‘Raat Khatam-Bat Khatam.’

Carrying their heritage, Miras ( from which is derived the degenerated title of Mirasi) artistes move in consonance with their own rhythm and harmony. From the courts of kings and tawaifs, they today find themselves confronted with the three Ts of Time, Tech-nology and Targets on the one hand and a culture of paper weights on the other. Talent, like a soap, has to be packaged, and officially graded or it slips into a gutter. Tan Ras of Delhi Gharana in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court was given Chandini Mahal as a ‘jagir’. To-day Chandini Mahal has scores of musician families living with many others in cramped one room tenements. Facelessness stalks ev-erywhere as the city reeks of apathy.

Thousands, of weavers, craftspersons, ‘folk’ and ‘classical’ artists who carry the rich mil-lennial heritage of our culture now live on the peripheries of urban areas under squalid and destitute conditions. There is a complete absence of National Institution or Bodies that address themselves, in any significant manner, to the artists medical, education, environment and social needs – although these are interlinked to the quality and often the probability of their performance and oc-cupation.

There is unemployment and underemploy-ment, exploitation and an age old indiffer-ence; there is self-deprecatory alienation that devalues their art; and most of all there is a debilitating sense the traditional artists feel today – that they may be of interest to tour-ists but of little use any longer to their own society.

For every known artist there are

hundreds today,who for want ofbasic amenities

and spport neversee the light of

day

On cooperative action

Our workshop has all young people. Hindus and

Muslim- where is religion in a round chapati? We

recognize each other’s skill as well as the spiritual

our workers. Yes, we don’t always agree about mon-

ey. People cut rates and try to defeat cooperative ac-

tion to control pieces. Quality suffers in the bargain

and then even the chapattis disappear.

Nur Ahmed SayyidHamanullha Khan, Siddh Rama, Sidh Dayyia

On his work

I like designs that challenge the mind to invent a treatment. To-

day‘s repetition tires the heart. It would be alright with a machine,

but with hands it is bothersome. There is not enough mind-work in

it. If we did not use our brain - food would reach our ears, or our

stomach by my own work. I cannot change my profession. I have

-

master of my time. If I stop doing work with my hands, my mind

will loose its ability to play as well.

Afzal KhanCrewel and Staple Stitch, Kashmir

30

The art is alive aslong as the artist is !

THE ECONOMIC TIMES 30th December, 1990 Artscape

SOLILOQOY RAJEEV SETHI

Artists of all calibers and in every age, have allowed their arts - once in a while to be pan-dered for commerce. This would even be ac-ceptable if they could find the time and space to return to themselves and to each other for rejuvenation and renewal.

It would now seem that the majority of artists are even more socially isolated than before and are increasingly dependent on the cu-riosities and goodwill of the ‘upper’classes and file pushing ‘connoisseurs’. The rural and ‘folk’ artists are particularly bonded to the whims of their new patrons. Even peo-ple studying their art forms or working with the artists seem to get more recognition and economic benefit than those practicing it. Deterioration of tradition comes from such economic disparity of professional pursuit. The sense of achievement influenced by ma-

terial gains becomes critical.

Today, most people on the arts bandwagon are more concerned with personal ambitions and reaping dissensions. A great part of their lives is spent in cornering key positions, and ubiquitous roles allowing for only a few to come up. Such people exist for years on a running relay of ongoing projects that guar-antee a steady flow of official resources and high level of contact. Their programmes are designed more for personal aggrandizement and less for ameliorating the suffering of the artists or celebrating their genius. Very few people are really concerned about the disap-pearance of time honoured skills as living components of our traditions.

I have had enough of grandiose official ef-forts to preserve the vestiges of our glorious

past and the mute relics of our threatened present for so called ‘posterity’. Glitzy ex-hibits silk lined show cases, leather bound documentation and bulky project reports are not even the beginning of preservation and are marginal as exercises for creating public awareness. When will these programmes and records become accessible to those who need them most as ready reference? I refer in par-ticular to those artists who belong to the oral traditions and need more than their vulner-able memory to keep their art alive.

Aren’t most artistic manifestations held to-day becoming increasingly an end in them-selves, to be celebrated as annual events on the manicured lawns of the arts academies and international centres? Is the amount be-ing spent on exposure and preservation, gen-erating some returns whereby the repository of rich traditions can get a new lease of life where ever they belong?

If you go around eastern Rajasthan you will be hardpressed to find even a few women on the roadside wearing traditional prints on their skirts or blouses. What the mills of Manchester were unable to do in a hundred years, has now been achieved by the mills of the brown sahibs in less than two decades. Yet, funds have been allocated for a forth-coming exhibition for the Festival of India in Germany, extolling the textiles of the Thar desert.

Although I am weary of seeing the same team do all the major exhibition of the Festival of India for the last 8 years what concerns me more is whether they are capable of raising even a fraction of the budget that will help make the women of Rajasthan more aware. How many know today how their traditional apparel evokes their own landscape, how it suits their climate and how it helps to keep their own village folk employed? How many of those who talk of conservation or make be nurtured and stored in weather proof mu-seums and electronic hardware or in official hot houses from 10 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. with salaried master craftspersons or media Us-tads ?

The real reason we spend such a great deal of our energy seeking to define our connec-

tions with the past – or preserving the past for what its worth, is because we are so un-sure of our future.

While change scares some of us, a climate of innovations will require a broader base of involvement from those numerous artists who’s daily struggle leaves them no space or time for creative thinking; it will require greater participation of the everyman – from the millions out there, who have skills to make things, to express themselves and to communicate with those around them.It is from this extended and humble base of crea-tive activity that any culture has to measure and sustain its growth.

Re-established mohallas of artists and art-llasists in every mohalla is what will finally determine the health of our heritage as a nation. Just before his death, Bade Gulam Ali Khan had said that if only each family could have just one member trained in music there would be an end to communal hatred. I have written, my earlier columns, about the cost society has to pay for undervaluing the importance of culture. Now to round up this piece I will highlight the problems faced by those most easily identified as culture’s chief protagonists the professional artists and arti-sans themselves.

Who is this artist in NEED ?

It could be a performer too old to work or a community of leather workers with a skin condition that deteriorates with their liveli-hood; or a metal caster or stone carver fight-ing for a whole generation inflicted with disease due to unscientific and exploitative conditions of work.

Visit Moradabad and you will find that com-munal hatred is not just about severed heads of cows or chasing pigs into some neigh-bourhood. Or breathe in th silica-laden air of Kambhat to find out the T.B. rampant in this filthy town is not just because the arti-sans have an unbalanced diet. Have the of-ficial bodies in charge of arts and crafts ever looked comprehensively into issues related to health matters, occupationed diseases, insurance and environmental degradation ? Most organizations are only concerned with the packaging of the product or arranging a performance. They feel better means of marketing will alone provide the artists the wherewithal to look after themselves; they will then be able to move out of a slum and buy a roof over their heads, find a place to work and see their children through a life furthering their skills. Really ?

31

Some of us have been going from pillar to post for the last 15 years now to get some land for the creation of a pilot habitat for the several hundred families of artists living in the slums of Delhi, Jaipur, and Bombay. We are constantly told to wait because we are in the queue and land prices are prohibitive; yet we see doctors, lawyers, journalists, of-ficers, and 700 others co-op’s of middle and upper income groups get the land they need at concessional rates. The economically vul-nerable are suspect – even if they have organ-ized themselves into cooperatives to avail the same facility.

We are told we cannot ask for a work-cum-dwelling space because the zoning laws of the city do not permit the same. Cities are made keeping commercial, industrial and residential areas as rigidly separate. Who asked traditional craftsmen whether they can travel with their families to a workshedeveryday or whether a musician can rehearse in one place and stay in another ? Jaipur’s gunijan khanas and artisans’ nas mohallas are llasan indication of how cities were planned earlier.

A catalytic environment for nurturing the skills of traditional artists and artisans is the critical need of the day. A musician’s child who rarely sees a tree living in the squalor of a tin shed cannot be taught the nuances of Raag Basant.

So, Hon. Ministers of Textiles and Culture, don’t just tell us to go to the Department of Urban Development or Ministry of Health. The artisans and artists are seen like files that never move. Instead you liaise with your col-leagues from the different departments or go back to the Planning Commission and fight hard to make them give you the appropriate allocations that will enable you to serve your constituents better.

Creative artists have also a growing need for legal advice and action. Artists, writers, scholars barely know how to draft a con tract document to protect their interests and I know many performing artists who should sue sev-eral agencies and individuals for misusing their work. The disparity of payments in the official mass media – between south-north,

men-women, dance- music; disparity ofpayments between different agencies, their dubious grading systems, the multiple us-age of programme’s through electronic ex-tensions, are all issues ready for some legal prodding.

Likewise the issue of reservations for hand-looms, stayed in the court by a vested pow-erloom lobby, has stood unchallenged and unheard in the Judiciary in the absence of public interest.

There are child artists whose skills are often abused, like in the carpet trade, and women artists whose problems of status, space, time and resources require special attention. Art-ists need management skills to run their co-ops, set up thrift and credit societies, arrange loans and combat indebtedness.

They need marketing skills to deal with spe-cialists, critics, media, buyers, exporters etc. These are problems that many do not even perceive as problems in the present scenario.

Some artists also need help to readjust with contemporary values where their ethnic group traditions dictate an antisocial life style. The rather robust attitude towards sex of a Kanjri dancer and a Nat from Maharash-tra had me thinking about parallel morality in variance with what’s around.

That is till I saw them buckle under the abuse of demonic lust. I also remember an alco-holic poet who no one wanted to help and a sensitive painter who left everything because he could not see the debasement of art.

Then someone also has to think about recrea-tional activities for the artists – the interper-sonal and interdisciplinary contacts required for growth; about a creative halwai wanting to experiment with regional foods and new recipes. There may be a traditional painter wanting to know about computer graphics or a goldsmith wishing to learn about watch assembly.

I have always wanted to arrange a national workshop of tribal painters and dancers in a

tribal area so that they could meet and share each other’s joys, aspiration and apprehen-sions.

Some of the most poignant moments in the arts for me have been my meetings with ‘small’ artists wanting to raise collective so-cial consciousness on vital issues. A magi-cian wanting to be a part of the of the main-stream has evolved ingeneous acts to express his concern for national integration. An ac-robat wanting to train in gymnastics wishes to bring in an Olympic gold for her country. A Hindu mat-weaver from Bengal creates a long roll weaving a series of mehrabs in absa prayer rug for the Jama Masjid of Delhi. These are people out to save the world and may their tribe increase!

Society owes to these artists and artisans a special debt. Their contribution is irreplac-able. Likewise the environment they need for their work is particular. What needs to be strenghthened is their inherent capacity to create wealth for themselves and their com-munity

My voice, while it lastedMy feet, while they dancedMy fingers, while they playedMy hands, while they workedMy senses while they prevailedHave asked you so many questions..........?

On the quality of life

hunger is for two chapattis and I can only mange one, it is

alright. I mange, but with honesty and fairness because lies

have short lives. Where is the need for me to lie to you any

way? When I say I need your help to make my living, you

will see that I am genuine, and you will help me. If you

saw that I was a liar or a cheat, with what eyes would you

look at me. Tell me? Does anybody look with friendly eyes

at a liar?

Ali Osad Urf SadiakLeather worker

32

PART III

Chapter 6Chapter 1

Chapter 3 traces the evolution of the concept of cultural industries and its transformation into a GLOBAL PHE-NOMENON, fueled by State policy intervention and the positioning of private-public initiatives in different coun-

-

Chapter 4 brings us home with THE INDIAN SCENARIO with eminent personalities throwing light on where

-

and space than provided here; this gargantuan effort will continue with the development of a web portal for this sec-

sub-sector and extended the rest into Chapter 5 and Chapter 7

Are we biting off more than what one can chew by clubbing these many sectors together?

Chapter 5 titled a INDIA’S EDGE we argue otherwise and show how ‘the traditional’ and ‘the modern’ can help

of the old and the new, margi and i deshiii

Chapter 6 THE WHEEL MOVES -

33

Making, D

oing, Being...

we felt the concept for a single Ministry grouping all connected departments from other ministries to form a whole

Chapter 7 points to THE WAY AHEAD..

-

Chapter 8 celebrates the making of BRAND INDIA suggested as a tenure for the Mission would help it devise and implement the mixed media programme outlined in

Chapter 9optimistically, called it the PURNA KUMBHA, ‘the pot of plenty,’ providing a blue print for sourcing resource would

Chapter 10, brimming with hope, is titled SHAJAR-E-HAYAT, ‘the tree of life’. We have here col-

PAST FORWARD is a timely reminder of what we need to do before it is too late and loosing our legecy and being

Rajeev Sethi

Created in the 1940s, an era when technological developments such as cinema, the photo-illustrated press and broadcasting were

making rapid inroads into individual homes and society as a whole, the term ‘cultural industries’ was originally intended as a

-

ists, the new media was there to stay, impelling a rethinking of the very understanding of culture. Furthermore, the popularity

and unprecedented reach of mass media made it a lucrative commercial venture as well as a potentially powerful tool for cultural

and political dissemination. State policy now began to address this issue – in capitalist countries, cultural policies aimed to gener-

ate employment and greater economic returns through sector; in socialist countries, culture, subject to extreme State intervention,

became a vehicle for propaganda; and in newly independent post-colonial states, culture became an important means of creating a

national identity.

With the more recent shift from a manufacturing to a service based economy that is largely content driven, creativity and content

have become the basis of competitive advantage in a global market. Creativity has to now be seen as not just residing in the arts and

media industries but as a central and increasingly important input into all sectors where design and content form the basis. Over

forty countries, some of which have economies and cultural contexts with little in common with that of India’s and others which

could be considered our peer group, have already recognized this factor and accordingly implemented programmes and policies that

can nurture and support their particular cultural and creative industries. Simultaneously, national and international bodies are

also examining the potential offered by the cultural and creative industries as a tool for grassroots development and the preservation

of cultural diversity and heritage. Running the gamut of commercially, politically, economically and culturally driven policies and

programmes, the examples of these prior experiments in the domain of the cultural industries present us in India, poised on the

brink of following suit in the same direction, with the opportunity to better equip our vast cultural and creative sector for success.

Overview

Global P

henomenon

37

Global Phenomenon

METAMORPHOSIS :Adorno to Art Policies

Cross-cultural Milestones

embroiled in debates about its value within transitional

accessible to a far larger and more heterogeneous

audience, fracturing previous notions of ‘art’ and its

infrastructure and micro-economy; the newfound

pervasiveness of its products implied that electronic

the massive capital investment and the technical expertise

beast called culture and how could they use it to their

revolution, class struggles, the establishment of

capitalism and resistance towards its monopoly, the end

Located within this framework and actively shaping and

being shaped by it, culture was becoming increasingly

Culture in the free enterprise economy: Art

becomes a commodity

of a single factory system geared towards nothing more

its consumers from the drudgery of their increasingly

automated work and to prevent them from recognising

Raoul Hausmann

Amid the chaos of World War I, Europe was taking a

quantum leap into the modern era through rapid techno-

logical development. While critics condemned the “machine

culture” spawned by the birth of the photo-illustrated press,

radio broadcasting, industrial assembly line production as

well as commercial cinema, a small group of artists of di-

38

verse nationalities – the Dadaists – were using the new

media at their disposal to challenge both traditional artistic

categories as well as contemporary society.

cinema, the latest entrant on the cultural scene, took over,

detail and politically charged subjects in favour of

of Bombay focussed on providing ‘light entertainment’

The major audience for a normal Hindi commercial

income groups. But more important than them are the

people who live below the poverty line. It’s very strange,

but most of the people who do odd jobs, or even beggars,

releases. In fact, I played a character like that. She was

a rag-picker, and whatever money she got from selling

rags she would stuff in her blouse, so she didn’t have

to give it to her father or mother. She would then use

far-fetched imaginary fantasy or some funny incident.

It’s the truth.1

the commercial cinema an impersonating, debased, and

purist seeking to maintain and police cultural boundaries

emerged out of a system of assembly-line production –

each year had been steadily increasing and the years

following the Second World War had created a boom in

Ten years from now we’ll have good roads, housing

schemes, hospitals, food, buildings, etc, but no culture.

We can import technology and know-how, but we can’t

import culture…

The Indian cinema is still held in its foreign lead-

ing strings and is totally unrelated to any tradition in

Indian culture, old or new. In fact, what the Indian

cinema is doing is to force Indian sensibilities into alien

moulds. Its disruptive effect is going to be, and already

is, far-reaching among the common people. It is rap-

idly destroying their folk culture and converting them

mentally into a typical town rubble, a disgusting plebs

urbana always crying for the circus.

-Nirad Chaudhari2

“To spin the simplest yarn on celluloid the wheels of a

- Satyajit Ray3

planning, this translated into large-scale industrial

projects such as power plants and factories as well as

not produce an essential commodity, and as a culture

industry, its products did not enhance or embody the

an alien imposition devoid of any organic connection

with a long and illustrious history of diverse indigenous

– what was to become perhaps the most pervasive

Once popularised, cinema became an electronic extension of

‘folk’ art forms. Thus, ‘Jhoot bole cauwa kaate’, a song of

Industry. The original stakeholders of its artistic property

remain marginalised.

Ray, Satyajit, ‘Under western eyes,’ Sight and Sound

Global P

henomenon

39

Bobby poster

culture industry claimed to be serving the consumer’s

need for entertainment, it concealed the way in which it

therefore feeds a mass market where the identity and

tastes of individual consumers becomes increasingly

less important and the consumers themselves are

pervasive, media culture was seen to impress its stamp

on everything until “the whole world is made to pass

“Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art.

The truth that they are just businesses is made into an

ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately

produce. They call themselves industries; and when

their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about

-Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

– painting, sculpture, music and dance – that are deemed

the only remaining expressions of freedom, creativity

capitalism is based on a romantic Marxism untouched

this utopian world view that he extends to his discourse

expression of “bourgeois subjectivity” and extolling

the virtues of the few cultural forms he deemed to be

music represented the key sites of resistance to cultural

forge connections between the cultural avant-garde and

the new popular media, arguing that both functioned

outside the boundaries of conventional art production,

reaching out to new audiences and embracing original

any form of cultural production characterised by the

relatively large-scale replication of cultural artefacts

by means of technology, Benjamin acknowledges that

Benjamin, mass media and avant-garde art provided the

initial conditions, at least, for the creation of something

who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an

refusal of capitalism is abandoned in favour of a

democratisation of capitalism through critical public

consisting of two distinct parts – the ‘system’ and ‘life-

and the state, of money and power; the second to the

world of everyday experience, social discourse and

believed that ‘undistorted communication’ between free

values that could successfully counteract the dominative

himself recognised, was that the life-world was

increasingly subject to ‘colonisation’ by the system,

thus radically reducing the possibility of collective,

40

and discourses on art, they too joined the ranks of the

historical need for emancipation from the rigid social

structures of pre-modern tradition on the one hand, the

‘colonisation of the life-world’ by the logic of capitalism

Culture in the socialist state: Art as an ideo-

logical weapon

While thinkers within capitalist Western societies were

economic context, communist states, such as the Soviet

intervention in the cultural domain whereby all art was

codifying a system of artistic rules, which ensure the

Unlike capitalist states where the artist is seen as a

these same reasons, artists and art in socialist states

utterly subservient to the state, its progress, ideological

objectives, and creative pursuits determined by the

To work in a factory

blacken your face with smoke

then at leisure later

other men’s luxuries –

what is the good of that?

Wipe the old out of our hearts!

Enough of penny truths!

The streets our brushes

the squares our palettes.

The thousand-paged book of time

says nothing about the days of revolution.

Futurists, dreamers, poets,

come out into the street.

- Vladimir Mayakovsky8

An order to the Art Army (December 1918)

production in a communist economy, belonged to the

‘bourgeois’ subject matter and style of art produced

under the tsars and embrace their new task as “engineers

“It [Russian art] concerns the value a man puts on his

own life. The Russian cannot believe that the mean-

existence can be pointless. He is inclined to think that

his destiny is larger than his interests. This leads in art

to an emphasis on truth and purpose rather than on

aesthetic pleasure. Russians expect their artists to be

prophets – because they think of themselves, they think

of all men, as subjects of prophecy.”

10

the use of political slogans and imagery as a means to

were marshalled to the cause of re-educating the entire

comparative ease of large print runs, the vividness of

its imagery and its greater accessibility, posters became

featured on town walls, fences, boats and special

propaganda trains, and in demonstrations, Russian

of the revolutionary struggle, a record in colours and

words,” enthusing those who were participating in the

Global P

henomenon

41

Soviet Poster, Chinese Poster, Haripura Congress

In the Soviet Union and China of the early 20th century,

posters became a visual extension of State propaganda, urging

the common man to join in the task of building a communist

nation. In India, Gandhi commissioned Nandlal Bose to

design posters for the Haripura Congress. The protagonist

of these posters is the rural Indian busy with work, making

style of the poster derives from Indian miniatures, creating a

sense of ‘Indianness’ that all Indians could identify with.

‘Working relentlessly for the Military Department since

the beginning of 1919, Comrade Moor has rendered

an immense service to the Red Army with his bold

poster designs. The ranks of the Red Army cherish

his revolutionary posters which raised their morale and

illuminated the way forwards. During the past three

years, Comrade Moor has designed 150 canvases and

posters for the Red Army. The Military Revolutionary

Committee of the Republic, noting Comrade Moor’s

services to the Revolution, honours him for the heroic

battle he has waged with his own particular weapons

– the brush and the pencil.’

Fuelled by the belief that they were contributing to the

political and spiritual future of their country, Russian

artists tried to create an art form that bore no semblance

to that patronised by the autocracy or to the ‘soulless’

rediscovery of pre-European Russian art coupled with a

search for the most advanced, the most modern means of

Once the revolutionary ship was stabilised,

however, state intervention in cultural production grew

promotion of radical, non-traditional directions such as

impressionism, constructivism, cubism, concept art, and

42

realpolitik of building an industrial base in a backward

country meant that all avant-garde art became at best, a

sort of luxury and, at worst, a vestige of pre-revolutionary

bourgeois culture which had to be extirpated from the

realism’ was instated as the state policy on the grounds

that realist art was more popular and comprehensible

based on a sense of its task – who it is addressing, what

has to be done to consolidate economic progress and

encourage its new constituency, the common man, to

leaders and policies of the Soviet Union or elevated

another, always highlighting the move towards a

socialist realism, especially those who wished to work

in avant-garde or non-representational genres were

not regarded as employed when working on their art

and could therefore be accused of social parasitism, a

charge that could send a person to the Gulag labour

urged to represent realism, it was only a limited view of

from heroic portraits of Stalin and Lenin, muscular

peasants, happy factory workers, collective farms, and

industrial landscapes was frowned upon, as were novels

deemed inconsistent with Marxist doctrine and musical

Without wholly identifying with the Revolution, the

true colours for his revolutionary cartoons’.

-Lenin

I do not know how radical you are or how radical I

am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must

always try to be as radical as reality.

- Lenin

varied somewhat from country to country, socialist

realism became the predominant art form across the

Mao clocks

In an extreme of state intervention in the cultural

sphere, literature and in the arts in China of the

1940s were made entirely subservient to Communist

ideology. Strict guidelines were laid down regarding the

style, content and format that was considered permis-

sible. In an ironic twist, Chairman Mao’s visage has

since found its way onto clocks, sold as popular memo-

rabilia.

class struggle and nationalistic regeneration under Mao’s

fronts, among which there are the fronts of the pen and

army alone isn’t enough; we must also have a cultural

army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our

there was to transform any left-leaning liberalism and

Global P

henomenon

43

lingering individualism into the collective service of

to deliver control of literature and art, once in the hands

The purpose of our meeting today is precisely to ensure

-

ary machine as a component part, that they operate as

powerful weapons for uniting and educating people and

for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they

mind. What are the problems that must be solved to

achieve this objective? I think they are the problems of

the class stand of the writers and artists, their attitude,

their audience, their work and their study.”

– Mao Zedong12

Mao left no doubt about the subservience of art to

whole revolutionary cause; they are cogs and wheels in

From the notion that the value of art derived from

revolutionary necessity, came a heightened esteem and

and Literature,” which became the cornerstone of Soviet aesthetic

supermen! Literature must become part of the common course of the

Mao, however, made it abundantly clear that this would

only apply to those who could adhere to the new

cling to an individualist, petty-bourgeois stand cannot

can do any meaningful work unless he is closely linked

with the masses, gives expression to their thoughts and

only what is needed and can readily be accepted by the

starting from the workers, peasants and soldiers can we

unambiguous, comprehensible to the audience, designed

counterpart’ of ‘socialist realism’, Mao’s aesthetic of

‘popularisation’ was designed not as a representation

realism – in other words, idealism and not realism at

that was a departure from this approach was labelled

“As Marx put it in a famous exhortation to philoso-

phers; the task is not just to understand the world but

to change it. So too with artists. “Socialist realism” is

more than mere faithfulness to reality: it contributes to

reality; it creates reality….There is, in fact, only one

taboo: the recognition of a variety of realities is forbid-

den, including any separate reality of one’s own. “Re-

alism” operates this way not because it does not wish

to know abut reality. You do not need much theoretical

training to realise that there can be no “real” reality

when there are many realities.”

– Miklos Harasztiin his dark-humoured account of state-directed

socialist art in Eastern Europe, The Velvet Prison

Western-style art were both considered ideologically

Other sources also existed as potential models for

development, including European and Soviet socialist

very fact that they were foreign would from time to time

of the time, Mao seemed to favour those theories and

programs intended to cultivate indigenous “national

44

“Some works which politically are downright reac-

tionary may have a certain artistic quality. The more

reactionary their content and the higher their artistic

quality, the more poisonous they are to people, and the

more necessary it is to reject them.”

– Mao Zedong16

visual manifestations of angst, generated by poverty

and loneliness in their lifetime, become such a valued

commodity among the wealthy and socially prominent

to express the thoughts and feelings of the masses, as

interpreted for them by their ultimate supervisory agency,

the time, the newly established revolutionary government

enlisted the arts and architecture in a campaign to give

Speaking about the conundrums in which cultures on

been proclaimed which leads to a grace lack of cultural

expressions could be solved by showing folklorisms,

the solution is not in showing our identity, but in acting

instruments) into the garbage can, to then go back

culture), adapting it, or even nationalising it, which may

with our own criteria, or at least participate actively in

this happens, it will have stopped being a Western

Culture in the postcolonial economy: Art as

identity

was as much about national identities as politics, in

consciousness grew from common bonds of language

from the necessity of unifying diverse cultural groups

formation as independent republics, what we today call

and social assemblies lived side by side but were deeply

or less homogenous and permitted itself to extend loops

had perforce to “invent” a national identity that would

create solidarity among its varied population, assimilate

their individual cultures, as well as consolidate their

land system was dismantled, labour was organised and

reformed, foreign economic despoliation were initiated,

and indigenous culture became the focus of a national

music, literature, theatre, dance, and painting, there

native costumes, and painters not only populated their

Mexicans were illiterate and that, as he put it, “Men are

more malleable when approached through their senses

as happens when one contemplates beautiful forms and

wages decorating public walls with paintings that could

Mexican art, one that expressed the Mexican character

Global P

henomenon

45

ancients and the foreigners could teach us, but we could

developing an art form that was at once nationalist, anti-

Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Amrita Shergil

Mexican and Indian art of the immediate post-colonial era

shares certain similarities – primarily, a search for an identity

that is at once local yet global. This often translated into

a romanticisation of the rural population, now considered

the true and rightful occupants of the land. Diego Rivera’s

work represents the pro-active peasants and workers of the

Mexican State, and Frida Kahlo’s work is tinged with a

nostalgic, romanticising a Mexican past and prophesying,

nostalgic reimagining of a picturesque national and personal

identity. Although “Western” in terms of its medium and

style, the works of both Mexican artists are littered with

local references. Likewise, the Indian artist Amrita Shergil’s

is transformed by her choice of subjects and colours – village

women represented with a rich palette of earthy browns, reds

and ochres.

works the odious and degenerate type of common people

once and for all, the painting of sandals and dirty cotton

view, no matter how much the world changed, the same

evils – war, injustice, poverty, oppression, ignorance –

46

whose work was full of hammers and sickles and who did

him ideologies were suspect; they all led to demagoguery

- Diego Rivera

across centuries, classes and geographies, expressing

itself in the folklorism of Rivera on one hand and the

heritage that was free, and often superior, to that of her

romantic reconstruction of the past to imbue a ‘legitimate

resist the social and cultural challenges posed by the

heroes of popular legends from regional ethnic groups

culture of the various regions to the rest of the country

purely voluntary efforts – among them, Rabindranath

materialism had matured, nourished by western adulation

government had a mammoth task at its hands – the

creation of models for a national culture and translating

and reclamation of a historic past capable of eliciting

national pride and cohesion, the upliftment and economic

development of its vast population, and a progressive-

internationalism which allowed the new nation state to

focus on the international met in cultural policy; the

arts, the mass media and the non-mechanical were all

in multiple centuries, multiple pasts simultaneously,

KG Subramanyan

Art in Post Independence India was characterised by two

distinct approaches: an internationalist modernism and a

search for a cultural sensitivity in art practice.

K G Subramanyan, an artist of this generation, consistently

attempted to regain for modern art that additional resonance

traditional artists derived from shared culture and language,

experience and iconography. Through involvement with

weaving and textile design, toy making, writing and

Global P

henomenon

47

illustrating children’s books, and creating murals integrated

with architecture, he succeeded in breaking out of the narrow

limits of high art and explore different modes of cultural

production and communication.

the preservation, fostering and dissemination of culture

What we seek today is not a repetition of the old pat-

tern, be it Indian or colonial, but a positive contribu-

tion to strengthening the quality of current life

-Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay18

a parallel to what cultural industries has become today;

the only difference is that today policy makers are more

open to including the more commercial, non-traditional

Culture in the postmodern era:

Art as economic policy

theory was borne of this boom, spreading to theory on

the world now irreversibly and undoubtedly consumerist,

but the pragmatics of functioning within this system

means that even the bastions of ‘tradition’ or the ‘avant-

garde’ have now joined the groups already camped out

account of the culture industries, for instance, has

been critiqued

the cohesive character of mass culture and an overly

pessimistic, condescending prognosis of the “masses” as

brainless puppets attached to the strings of the powerful

the overall dynamics of the industries that provided mass

communication and cultural goods and services to an

increasingly wide cross-section of the public, choosing

instead to see these industries as the eradicator of an

with nostalgia for a cultural experience untainted by

culture industry is now deemed an overly dismissive

account of capitalist economies and their dynamics,

rigid boundaries between high art, mass culture and

industries has for the most part tended to focus the

cultural and social implications of cultural consumption,

the increasing presence of the culture industries in social

and economic life motivated its development as an object

of policy, moving discourses on the cultural industries

out of the realm of conceptual analyses and into the

framework of local, regional and national policy for the

48

working with city and other arts agencies, culture now

came to be repositioned within a rhetoric of the ‘value’

of culture – the assessment of which constantly shifts

between aesthetic, economic and social understandings

and constraints faced by subsidy and arts policy systems

Early forms of arts policy in many countries mirrored, to

some extent, the disdain for mass media and commercial

they strictly demarcated publicly supported ‘excellence’

in the cultural realm, and popular arts and cultural forms

models promoted by governments therefore supported

the production and exhibition of “traditional arts” and

literature, the visual arts, classical dance and music on

social improvement, based

on the belief that such cultural forms are of

intrinsic worth to the community;

public subsidy, whereby

on the grounds that these forms were not

otherwise commercially viable;

national culture, and the

the ‘true’ representations of national

became the focus of arts policy only to the extent that

policies thus promoted state-funded cultural activities

with limited impact, while largely ignoring and often

which tended to reject the market and focused on a

residual approach to public intervention in the cultural

sector, Nicholas Garnham, a political economist, offered

as “those institutions in our society which employ the

of industrial corporations, to produce and disseminate

symbols in the forms of cultural goods and services,

publishing, recorded music, design, architecture, new

media – and the ‘traditional arts’ – visual art, crafts,

theatre, music, concerts and performance, literature,

museums, galleries – all those activities which have been

divisions between these two categories – but a line

between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ is ideological and not

though in receipt of enormous public subsidy, cannot

‘make it’ at some point, calling struggling pop musicians

– one relies on ‘the market’, the other on a bureaucratic

Both deal in symbolic value whose ultimate test is within

a circuit of cultural value which, whether mediated by

the market or bureaucracy, relies on a wider sense of it

therefore presume that they are two separate sectors

noted above, the commercial sector provides wealth and

With the erosion of the cosy separations of ‘art’ and

‘mass culture’ set up by early policy systems, the role

instead of merely being ‘defended’ against new forms of

who promoted a more populist orientation of cultural

those areas of arts and culture ‘least contaminated by

commerce’ cultivated those activities with the lowest rate

of growth in consumption and the strongest class biases

where “most people’s cultural needs and aspirations are

being, for better or for worse, supplied by the market

as goods and services,” they argued for an analysis of

Global P

henomenon

49

far more important as employers of labor, objects of

consumption, and areas of public intervention, than the

traditional performing and visual arts, which received

those cultural activities which fell outside the public

funding system and operated commercially were

of a whole range of cultural goods and objects which

music, books, adverts, concerts) had nothing at all to do

involved an alternative economic line, concerned with

cultural industries research was developed through

The Creative Nation viewed culturaln

industries as an important contribution to national

economic development, and indicated the value-adding

possibilities arising from effective policy development,

particularly with regard to the development of the

cultural industries value chain, or ensuring that the

products and outputs of artistic creativity were better

excellence to the whole way of life of a community, this

approach to cultural policy sought to reach sectors, such

as popular music and media, which had typically not

been well served by conventional arts policy, as well as

broadened and enriched debates about the role of

the production of symbolic goods and services, was

it then possible to exclude any activity of industrial

cultural industries, or the use of aborigine artwork on

use of music by artists such as Moby or Fatboy Slim to

were of little help in making these distinctions, divided

inclusive as to prevent almost any realm of human

It may be argued that all industrial production con-

tains a design element (and therefore creativity, intel-

lectual property, and culture). What, then, is really

the difference between the cultural industries and other

manufacturing industries? It is not the output of the

production that distinguishes the cultural industries

from other manufacturing industries, but the fact that

the cultural industries as a concept offer an alternative

interpretation of value generation.

Jodhpur, (February 2005)

policy purview of those areas of government that were

television, radio, multimedia, built heritage, cultural

property, indigenous cultural heritage, open learning and

that more obviously attracted governmental support than

others – orchestras rather than contemporary music,

by the areas that were within the policy domain of the

industries such as television and radio were absent from

cultural policy, on the basis that they were at that time

administered by a different government department,

Similarly, in Britain, the mapping document prepared in

activity in the cultural industries and policy measures that

50

as ‘those activities which have their origin in individual

creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential

for wealth and job creation through the generation an

exploitation of intellectual property,’ the now titled

mechanisms to support both the traditional arts and

emergent cultural sectors, such listings inherently carry

connected to the institutional alignment of culture with

the heritage sector, while the inclusion of areas such as

designer fashion may have been governed by the fact

to revert to the demarcation between areas involved

directly connected to the market), and the more ‘artist-

centred’ areas of culture, which can retain a focus upon

attributed to the institutional divide between those areas

of the performing and visual arts whose development

subsidy, and those sectors that are associated with the

What has become increasingly apparent in policy debates

around the cultural industries, is the extent to which they

have been drawn upon by traditional elements of the

subsided arts, that have been able to selectively use the

economic discourses surrounding cultural industries,

particularly the elements associated with market failure

– such as public good, merit good and externality

arguments – to accommodate more traditional arguments

While cultural industries discourses stressed the

economic value of artistic and cultural activities, they

were also widely seen as being about providing new

forms of legitimation for traditional art and cultural

limitations of traditional forms of cultural policy, such

consumption base beyond higher-income earners with

and a tendency

for peer assessment to encourage familiar patterns of

forms of arts and cultural funding while broadening

statistical debates around the cultural industries, usually

training needs and increasingly, contribution to local,

The role of creative enterprise and cultural contribu-

tion... is a key economic issue…The value stemming

from the creation of intellectual capital is becoming

increasingly important as an economic component of

national wealth…Industries, many of them new, that

rely on creativity and imaginative intellectual property,

are becoming the most rapidly growing and important

part of our national economy. They are where the jobs

and the wealth of the future are going to be generated.

- Chris SmithMinister for Culture and Heritage (1998)37

argumentation with hard fact but they have riddled with

in different countries and regions have meant that the

statistics compiled for each are not necessarily based

cultural sector’ include the ‘traditional arts sector’ along

with commercial cultural activities, others are directly

concerned with ‘original production’ or ‘technological

industries sector’ has been expanded to include related

‘Culture’ … ‘Industry’ IncompatibleCompanions?

industries’ itself indicates that the term is currently responding to some

deep-stated and far-reaching need to handle transformations which go

beyond short term tactical problems and rhetoric… At stake here is a

new relationship between culture and economy.

subsumption of culture within the productive base of capitalism; it is

partially both but it is also a different dynamic which needs to be faced.

999)

Global P

henomenon

51

industries, now calls them the ‘creative industries’

pointing to a more directly economic and value-

laden agenda – throwing in employment, creativity,

competitiveness, innovation, exports, international

is sometimes preferred, with the distinction between

private sector-driven activities and those associated with

culture in a more traditional sense continuing to inform

Secondly, statistics in these areas tend to be collected

differently in different countries and regions, making

of many sectors, it is particularly true in the case of the

cultural industries as there is often no agreement as to

whether we measure ‘artists’, or ‘heritage’ or ‘ancillary

Finally, employment statistics are often based on

outmoded industrial and occupational categories which

make collection and analysis fraught with ambiguities

and omissions, especially since the whole notion of

‘employment’ has undergone radical restructuring over

employment, non-paid jobs and self-employment

has restructured the cultural labour market has made

statistical analysis useless without an accompanying

administrative problems, many of them stemming from

opened up by the cultural industries across the world is

essentially an expression of an imperative wrought by

some deep-seated and far-reaching transformations in

At stake here is a new relationship between culture and

economics is valuing human creativity and realizing in-

culture within the productive base of capitalism; it is

partially both, but it is also a different dynamic which

needs to be faced.

-Justin 0’Conner

52

LET’S GET CREATIVEINDIA’S FUTURE COULD DEPEND ON THE STRENGTH OF ITS ‘CREATIVE ECONOMY’. SO HOW DO

WE STACK UP? SUNDAY TIMES INVITED THE MAN WHO COINDED THE TERM TO EVALUATE OUR

NATIONAL IDEAS BANK

Richard Florida

If China is the world’s factory, India’s become the world’s outsourcing center. Its software industry is the world’s sec-ond-largest, its tech outsourcing accounts for more than half of the $300 billion global industry, according to tech-nology expert Martin Kenney.

But India’s future depends crucially on its ability to com-pete fully in the Creative Economy – not just in tech and software, but across design and entrepreneurship; arts cul-ture and entertainment; and the knowledge-based profes-sions of medicine, finance and law.

India is well-positioned to compete. Bollywood, which makes over 9000 films a year, is the world’s largest film-making centre. India’s creative talent has already made its mark on the global entertainment industry and popular cul-ture. The music scenes of London, Toronto, and New York are infused with Bhangra beats.

Elsewhere too, Indian excels. Its video game industry is million, to grow tenfold, to $300 million, by decade-end, and its animation industry from $300 million to almost a billion dollars by 2009. Its advertising, graphic design and product design industries are seeing extraordinary growth.

Already, India has been a source of creative talent for the world. The skills of Indians were integral to the success of Silicon Valley. Indian expatriates started 385, or 10%, of its high-tech firms in the late 1990s. Vinod Khosla, who Forbes magazine named The “most important venture capitalist in the world”, has

single-handedly been responsible for identifying a host of key technologies and generating billions in new wealth. In the US alone, more than 160,000 Indians work in science and engineering.

India also faces substantial challenges. It ranks 41st of 45 countries on my Global Creativity Index, and aggregate measure of its strength across the 3Ts of economic develop-ment. India does well on the first T, Technology, ranking 23rd worldwide. But, despite its globally renowned IITs, it rank 44th on the second T, Talent, with only 6% of its popu-lation holding a Bachelor’s degree. It rank 39th on the third T, Tolerance – openness to self-expression and a wide range of social groups.But India’s biggest challenge goes deeper and is embedded in the very logic of the global Creative Economy. Innova-tion and economic growth are more concentrated than ever. India’s growth is premised on the success of a handful of regions. Virtually all significant technological innovations produced in India in 2004 (those for which US patents were granted) came from just three city-regions – Bangalore, Hy-derabad and New Delhi. Outside of these and several other creative centres, large sections of India’s population live a hand-to-mouth existence

Still there is a great tradition of creativity to build on; cre-ativity, it seems, is part of India’s DNA. India has long val-ued the development of talent across multiple dimensions, from literature and the arts to medicine, engineering and entrepreneurship. Its internal diversity – religious, cultural, political, and geographic – along with a tolerance of dis-sent and openness to outside influence and trade have pro-vided this ecosystem with a constant influx of new ideas and people.

Global P

henomenon

53

Pochampalli and Mobile Gaming Design:What’s the connection?

What are the Cultural & Creative Industries but industries of the

imagination, content, knowledge, innovation and creativity…they are also

important contributory factors to employment and economic growth.

UNESCO (1999)

• Each is based on intellectual property and design talent – One so far rooted in tradition and community,

and the other in a modern visual culture and the individual.

• Each evolves its own vocabulary – Pochampalli, from the temple motifs or new design sensibilities, and

gaming from popular graphics ortraditional contexts.

• Each derives its unique visual character from the process and technology that creates it –one tactile, the

other virtual, but created with the warp of insight and the weft of skill.

• Both are knowledge based – the technology of one is heritage legacy and that of the other, software

design in digital media.

• The survival of both in global markets depends on innovation and creativity– in terms of their

vocabulary, design and promotion.

• Both require human interface, are small scale and not machine produced. Seen together they are not

dismissed or straight jacketed as traditional or modern, sunset or sunrise.

• Each needs the other to gain and retain a competitive edge in the global market 90% of the culturalt

industries in India are traditional, while the remaining 10% is part of a rapidly advancing sector.

market.

54

The Cultural and Creative Industries:Too much on the same page?

Cultural diversity presupposes the existence of a process

of exchanges open to renewal and innovation but also com-

mitted to tradition… If creativity is essential to generate an

evolutionary leap, then memory is in turn vital to creativity.

That holds true for individuals and for nations who find their

heritage - natural and cutlural, tangible and intangible – the

key to their identity and the source of their inspiration.

UNESCO

Global P

henomenon

55

A global phenomenon

Creativity and Content in a Knowledge-based Economy

The shift from manufacturingto services and then to knowledge

in recognition of the increasingly important role of in-

formation, technology and learning in economic perfor-

aspects of economic production, distribution and con-

sumption, a phenomenon linked to the ‘new economy’

whose ‘form is increasingly informational, global and

the value of manufactured products will come from the

-

the knowledge content of products and processes is ris-

how the critical source of competitive advantage in the

public and private investment, and the ways in which

speedy production, collection and dissemination of re-

search outcomes has enabled more rapid transformation

‘Market pull’ factors that promote the rise of a knowl-

competition, greater sophistication in consumer demand,

and the growing importance of intangible assets, such as

of know-how and the growing demand for innovation

affect virtually every part of the economy and all orga-

Within contemporary models of production, the sys-

tematic application of knowledge and information to

the production of knowledge and information itself has

relies on global networks made possible by information

both employment and the share of total output, the ser-

-

-

-

oped in the heyday of manufacturing industry, to make

-

es as a residual category, comprising of all those activi-

ties that are not agriculture mining, construction, utilities

-

56

dustries employment may be in part a statistical illusion,

also not be particularly informative, since the term cov-

ers so many disparate industries and forms of employ-

ment that the implications of service industry growth

-

ing disaggregating of the services sector-

and real estate

with transportation and communication

other health, education and welfare services

entertainment and hospitality, domestic,

retailing, and services associated with personal

economy, to see the production of physical output as

constituting the ‘real economy’ and to see services as es-

industry work as involving the creation of poorly paid,

low skill jobs with high employee turnover or as being

symptomatic of an unbalanced economy that is highly

that are strongly based on tourism and migration, such

as the state of Florida in the United States, island na-

tions such as Bermuda and the Bahamas, or the Gold

Such negative perceptions of the service sector have

these is the growing convergence between manufactur-

Such developments are particularly relevant to the cul-

-

gued that the nature of cultural industries value chain

is such that clear distinctions between content creation,

-

-

the dire predictions about the industrialisation of culture

in advanced capitalism, the manufacturing and service

industries are becoming more and more like the produc-

The cultural industries are irretrievably more

innovation intensive and more design intensive

than other industries…Our claim is that ordi-

nary manufacturing industry is becoming more

and more like the production of culture. It is not

that commodity manufacture provides the tem-

plate, and culture follows, but that the culture in-

dustries themselves have provided the template.

-Lash and Urry, 1994

production’ are not merely more knowledge intensive,

to incorporate more detailed information about cus-

more explicitly cultural, since inputs are not only infor-

mational, but also aesthetic, and value adding involves

-

tors of the economy to product research and develop-

ment, and the testing and trailing of prototypes, which

is very much in keeping with the development of the

cultural or creative industries, where the production of

physical commodities is a minor sub-set of the activities

associated with discovering creativity and distributing

-

the knowledge economy, and the service industries sec-

tor, is central to understanding the dynamics of the new

-

tion as the principal source of economic growth, cre-

ativity has come to be seen not just as residing in the arts

or media industries, but as a central – and increasingly

important – input into all sectors where design and con-

tent form the basis of competitive advantage in global

impact on all aspects of everyday life, particularly those

thus recast from being a distinct sphere of social life,

to something that permeates everything from the design

-

Global P

henomenon

57

user and those who see the user, and the promotional

strategies of corporations and indeed, governments in

an era of electronic commerce and “promotional cul-

of everyday life’, connected to consumer society and the

blurring of lines between art, aesthetics and popular

-

enon it has been customary to point to the increase in

the consumption of ‘leisure’ and ‘luxury’ goods due to

the growth of leisure time, education and disposable in-

expressivity, of the breaking of rules, of the explicit re-

jection of the established social order were central com-

this counter culture, the values of personal creativity and

choice, continual transformation and innovation entered

by transformations in cultural consumption and increas-

other words, led not just to an expansion of the market

segmented, and increasingly cultural – have placed the

cultural component of many consumer goods at the

of manufactured goods as well as services, has become

-

dustries – where traditional artisan skills and business

knowledge has now to be linked to ever faster and ever

of consumption suggests that the ‘tastes’ of the con-

cultures directly onto class, or class fractions, with these

latter representing a differential mix of economic and

fraction he called the ‘new middle class’, a new urban

service class who mixed cultural and economic capital,

Since Bourdieu’s research, this line of argument has be-

come central to the sociology of consumption and to

-

struction of identity has fragmented taste groups beyond

any direct connection to class fractions, undermined the

binary of high and low cultures, and has made the cul-

consumption has become increasingly cultural, central

to the construction of individual and social meaning and

radically restructure their operations in order to be able to

detect and respond to these increasingly niche and vola-

knowledge intensive production,

terms of the capacity to creatively understand and re-

level of market knowledge and stock control, short pro-

economy’ dynamics by identifying the key to creative

industries as being the alignment of micro-businesses

and SMEs in the content creation area, where creativity

public and private – that can provide national and in-

Creative industries, such as music, entertainment

and fashion, are driven… not by trained profes-

sionals but cultural entrepreneurs who make the

most of other people’s talent and creativity. In

creative industries, large organizations provide

access to the market, through retailing and dis-

tribution, but the creativity comes from a pool of

independent content producers.16

economy as operating together in a very general sense

– as blatantly expressed in arts and business funding op-

portunities for cultural activity and in the ‘creative in-

dustries’, a neo-liberal cultural policy in which culture

is linked to a regeneration of capital through cultural

58

populism, cultural policy and management, enacted by

-

personal dimensions of the ownership of knowledge

and the need for knowledge transfer to involve a learn-

ing process, means that knowledge in the new economy

-

employment is not only growing, but is becoming more

tied to places, especially cities, indicating that sustained

processes of technological and economic innovation

need to be underpinned by social, cultural and institu-

-

phasis upon locational geography, and particularly the

formation of creative cities and regions in the knowledge

concentrations of interconnected companies and insti-

-

universities and research institutions that provide spe-

cialist knowledge, training, information, education and

promote innovation by making all forms aware more

-

in related sectors, through distinctive access to necessary

-

formation and communication technology and creative

-

teristic of economic processes that are increasingly in-

formational, global and networked would seem to point

-

-

graphical spaces is central, distribution through new me-

dia technologies points to the delivery of content to the

home, workplace, educational institution or other sites

that are not linked to the geographical site of produc-

-

tent distribution network means that, subject to available

bandwidth capacity, content creators can be promiscu-

ous and footloose in where they sell or distribute their

content to, just as content distributors can source mate-

-

tional national cultural policies, where national cultural

authorities have sought to use funding to direct cultural

Manuel Castells has observed that the new economy is

cultural, in that its dynamics are dependent upon ‘the

culture of innovation, the culture of risk, the culture

of expectations, and ultimately, on the culture of hope

in the future.’18

Global P

henomenon

59

A global phenomenon

An Overview of Multilateral Mechanisms in Place

INTERNATIONALACTION

is important to identify the various globally active

following are noteworthy on account of their immense

generating awareness among the various governments

UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL,SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURALORGANIZATION (UNESCO)Global Alliance on Cultural Diversity1

, as a six-year exploratory

undertaking, to be implemented in collaboration with

development agencies, both national and international,

and representatives of the private sector and civil

industries through:

management, elaborating cultural industry policies,

developing legislation and regulatory frameworks;

local and international opportunities for business

development;

sectors in areas relating to culture;

development, entrepreneurship, long-term planning

potential needs of participating developing countries

development of policies and regulatory frameworks

development of regulatory mechanisms and copyright

enforcement training for judges, lawyers and customs

updating of legislation pertaining to targeted cultural

THE WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION (WIPO)2

60

dedicated to developing a balanced and accessible

rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes

to economic development while safeguarding the public

cooperation among states and in collaboration with

Strategic Direction and Activities

economic, social and cultural development of all

policies and programs;

systems; and

UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT (UNCTAD)3

development-friendly integration of developing

progressively evolved into an authoritative knowledge-

based institution whose work aims to help shape current

policy debates and thinking on development, with a

particular focus on ensuring that domestic policies and

international action are mutually supportive in bringing

deliberations, supported by discussions with experts

and exchanges of experience, aimed at consensus

data collection for the debates of government

special attention to the needs of the least developed

works together with member Governments and

system and regional commissions, as well as with

governmental institutions, non-governmental

and industry associations, research institutes and

INTERNATIONAL NETWORK ON CULTURALPOLICY (INCP)

is an international forum where national ministers

responsible for culture can explore and exchange views

on new and emerging cultural policy issues and to

develop strategies to promote cultural diversity in an

governments, together with civil society, can create an

international environment that values diversity, creativity,

• offering a means through which countries

can share their expertise, exchange views and

Global P

henomenon

61

information and strengthen domestic and

international partnerships;

• raising awareness of the importance of cultural

diversity and identity to social and economic

development;

• demonstrating the links between national cultural

objectives and international development;

• advancing dialogue on cultural policy issues

by ensuring that culture is "on the table" in

and examining how to address the many challenges

and opportunities associated with the growing issues

of cultural diversity and identity in an increasingly

communication technologies and industry consolidation

-- offers great opportunities for cultural expression, it

also poses fundamental challenges to governments, civil

to remain open to the best the world has to offer,

while nurturing domestically rich and diverse cultural

can be integrated into a common approach to global

development, including the challenges and opportunities

of promoting and protecting cultural heritage for social

• promote cultural and linguistic diversity as

fundamental elements to global thinking on

development, access, governance and identity

issues;

• encourage full participation in the global society,

while at the same time explore means to ensure that

• exchange views on the central role that culture plays

on the international agenda including the sharing of

views and best practices on cultural policy;

• bring informed expertise to other international

• contribute to an inclusive broad based dialogue on

issues related to culture

ORGANISATION OF ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (OECD)

the economic, social and Governance challenges of

can compare policy experiences, seek answers to

common problems, identify good practice and co-

incentive to improve policy and implement “soft law” –

collects data, monitors trends, and analyses and forecasts

trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and

instability, trade and investment, technology, innovation,

development and environmental protection are

and to help governments to respond to, new

structural adjustment, online security, and the challenges

world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable

span areas as diverse as national accounts, economic

indicators, the labour force, trade, employment,

migration, education, energy, health, industry, taxation

62

a range of economic, social and environmental issues

while further deepening its engagement with business,

pricing, for example, have paved the way for bilateral tax

Essentially, membership is limited only by a country’s

commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic

ASIA PACIFIC REGIONAL CENTRE FOR CULTURELINK NETWORK (APRCCN)

Following the recommendation at the First World

information, research and cooperation among those

institutions concerned with cultural development

Network and serve as a catalyst for co-operative research

and joint research projects in order to promote cultural

along with other reports on cultural development, are

made available to researchers, scholars and experts in the

CULTURELINK

speedy and reliable exchange of information among

cultural and research institutions all over the world,

and to stimulate their ever-growing and increasingly

the development and regular updating of the databases

GATT/WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION

GENERAL AGREEMENTS ON TRADE AND TARIFFS (GATT)

and conditions governing trade and commerce of goods

its inception, though there were additions in the form

of “multilateral” agreements as and efforts to reduce

Much of this was achieved through a series of eight

multilateral negotiations known as “trade rounds”, the

Global P

henomenon

63

WTOintergovernmental body that deals with the global

rules of trade between nations through multilateral

agreements adopted by member states, serve as a forum

for trade negotiations, handle trade disputes, monitor

endorsed the results of the Uruguay Round and the

GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TRADE IN SERVICES (GATT)

through telecommunications or regular mail),

maintenance work), known as “consumption

branches to provide services in another country

TRADE-RELATED ASPECTS OFINTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (TRIPS)

to adhere to minimum standards for protection of

intellectual property rights – essentially, the standards

introduce the system and adapt their laws and practices

circuits

secrets

and other international intellectual property

agreements should be applied;

property rights

64

the period when the new system is being

TRADE RELATED INVESTMENT MEASURES TRIMS)

that certain measures can restrict and distort trade, and

states that no member shall apply any measure that

discourages measures that limit a company’s imports or

SOME CONCEPTS AFFECTING FLOW OF GOOD, SERVICES AND INVESTMENTS

BETWEEN COUNTRIES IN THE WTO REGIME

FREE TRADE:

based on the notion that consumers can access good

protection mechanism is to allow the market to operate

trade takes no account of the fact that not all trading

do, as trade in services is surging exponentially and

new barriers are replacing conventional barriers such as

productions)

of directors, restriction of repatriation of

MOST FAVOURED NATION (MFN)

trading partner, it has to give the same “best” treatment

favourable or discriminatory – to goods and services

countries within a region can set up a free trade agreement

Global P

henomenon

65

NATIONAL TREATMENT

as well as to foreign and local trademarks, copyrights

treatment as one’s own nationals is also found in all the

National treatment only applies once a product, service

CULTURAL EXCEPTIONS

some countries expressed concern that enforcement of

treatment rules – on goods and services as well as on

copyright protected products would undermine their

survive due to import restrictions and other support

mechanisms facilitated by certain public administrations,

which consider it a priority to preserve domestic cultural

Negotiators felt mechanisms were needed to maintain

and develop a viable degree of domestic production to

the Uruguay Round’s concluding negotiations, which

tacit understanding has been known as the “cultural

status, nor does it exist as such in any agreement or

treaty), the ‘cultural exception’ is based on the principle

that culture is not like any other merchandise because

it goes beyond commerce - cultural goods and services

Cultural Protectionism:An Appropriate Strategy?Protectionism will back. re. Besides creating a fertile ground for corruption and political

censorship, cultural protectionism will help develop mediocre, parochial and less com-

petitive creative industries, which will have an even harder time conquering the global

market.

Andres Oppenheimer, The Miami Herald, Jan. 26, 2006

U.N. Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity, which gives

member countries the right to “take all appropriate measures to protect” their “cultural

expressions.” The convention was approved in October at UNESCO by 148 states with

2 opposing - U.S.A and Israel. It will become a binding treaty once 30 countries ratify it.

Canada has already ratified it, ed it, and several Latin American countries and the EU are

taking it to their parliaments.

“We need to do something to avoid being suffocated by the unscrupulous presence of

foreign (cultural) products in our countries. Countries must find a way to sustain their

industries… and if quotas, or positive discrimination, can be a helpful mechanism to im-

prove national production, they should be used with moderation, with good judgement,

but assertively.”

Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Culture Minister

A global phenomenon....

Status Of Cultural &Creative Industries

INTERNATIONALACTION

distinct area of interest for economists, statisticians,

a growing awareness of their economic potential

and their role in fostering cultural diversity through

for the purpose of public policy making remains

very young and not all governments are convinced

of the need to address this sector with targeted ini-

consuming cultural goods and services easier than

-

-

derlines that during the last decade a number of

-

was once considered a sector of marginal interest,

which received limited attention from researchers,

has led to a growing body of analysis, statistics and

mapping exercises on the relationship between cul-

ture, creative industries and economic development

-

-

velopment policies, the demand for more precise

and sophisticated cultural statistics at international,

regional and national level is set to grow and gov-

ernments should support and encourage initiatives

“The need for a coherent and robust framework for analyzing cul-

tural industries is underpinned by an understanding of the rapidly

expanding knowledge economy as the immediate context for the devel-

opment of these industries. As the knowledge economy encompasses

the whole of the arts and sciences, the potential for cultural industries

is in fact far greater that the traditional notion of their “limited”

potential that still lingers in many planning schemes”.

66

-

tion of statistics on a wide range of arts and cultural

industries, began to be done, stimulated initially by

emerged from this process, it became obvious that

one country’s ‘cultural industry’ was another’s ‘sub-

sidised art’ sector and that any attempt to compile

knowledge of each participating country’s cultural

and academics many governments remain uncon-

-

tor and creative industries still do not rank high in

the competition for public funds within their bud-

within policy-making is further hampered by an un-

made by many governments to develop the creative

industries systematically through a mapping of the

“stand-alone” and largely un-coordinated

internationally, they have nevertheless

demonstrated the strength and depth of

-

veloped and emerging economies of the

initiated programmes, policies and plan-

some of the most prominent ones in de-

-

ing played a groundbreaking role in developing ana-

lytical models on “creative industries” from an eco-

as all industries along the value added chain related

to cultural and artistic products and services as well

were originally referred to as “cultural industries”

in economic policy circles in the UK and in the

-

some cultural activities which were outside the pub-

lic funding system and operated commercially were

important creators of wealth and employment in

order to craft a economic policy to promote and to

was also observed by many as a device to differenti-

Europe though it constantly a subject matter of

-

dustries were found in Blair’s Labour Government’s

The role of creative enterprise and cultural contribution ... is a key

economic issue … The value stemming from the creation of intellec-

tual capital is becoming increasingly important as an economic com-

ponent of national wealth ... Industries, many of them new, that rely

on creativity and imaginative intellectual property, are becoming the

most rapidly growing and important part of our national economy.

They are where the jobs and the wealth of the future are going to be

generated.

Global P

henomenon

67

set about mapping current activity in the

creative industries, and identify policy

measures that could promote their fur-

-

industries as ‘those activities which have

their origin in individual creativity, skill

and talent and which have the potential

for wealth and job creation through the

generation and exploitation of intellec-

tual property’

Unlike the United States, where private philanthro-

py plays a key role in the cultural scene, arts and

cultural development in the UK is largely govern-

-

need to ensure, both in the formal school system

and also through life, that artistic creativity forms a

central part of what is offered as the learning expe-

that creativity and those enterprises that rely on cre-

ative ideas for their added value are an increasingly

html

emergence of the creative

economy and alongside the

UK, France was one of the

interest in gaining a better understanding of the

economics of culture and in the development of a

-

cation and other government bodies, France partici-

pated in a series of international conferences on the

generated a number of papers discussing conceptu-

al issues on the economics of culture and the means

to capture the sector statistically and included one

of the earliest proposals for a possible satellite ac-

-

analysing the processes involved in the production

of cultural goods and services served as a major

cultural indus-

tries research was developed

and informed the Keat-

-

ative Nation cultural policy statement, released in

as being important in terms of their contribution to g p

In recognition of their (cultural industries) essential role in our na-

tion’s life, in 1993 the Commonwealth Government made the arts

a full Cabinet portfolio. Early this year the Government decided to

combine the Arts and Communications portfolios, because in the

modern era there are natural synergies between them. These two mea-

cultural issues into the mainstream of our national life, and accord

them their rightful place in all decision- making. This cultural policy

is another major step in that direction

68

national economic development, and pointed to the

value-adding possibilities arising from effective pol-

icy development, particularly in relation to develop-

ing the cultural industries value chain, or ensuring

that the products and outputs of artistic creativity

were better distributed and marketed to audiences

as a form of cultural policy, in line with shifting

notions of culture from aesthetic excellence to the

also sought to reach sectors, such as popular music

that had typically not been well served by traditional

arts policy as well as emergent sectors such as mul-

-

ing economic importance also led to a burgeoning

literature on the economic value of the arts, that

-

‘image’ of cities and regions, tourism, and ancillary

and social eco-system and had allocated an exten-

sive administrative, regulatory and monitoring sys-

had borrowed the UK Model per-se and added key

-

proach with cultural sector as a sub-domain of the

-

-

-

-

-

pore have been particularly

progressive in analysing the

creative industries sector in

an effort to maintain their economic dynamism

in the face of the competitive challenge posed by

-

-

-

sively from UK with respect

-

dustries with changes to suit

their local economy and its

Singapore followed the US

-

create an interdependent economic and social eco-

-

tensive policy spaces within their governments for

started to concentrate on statistical data collection

and focus on the creative industries to drive forward

Global P

henomenon

69

countries which have not taken this sector seriously

domestic markets and have overlooked the impor-

tance of a sustained program to target high-value

-

ment and cultural industry strategies have prevailed

highly synergetic cluster of activities as an industry

-

cent facilitative action from the government have

comprehensive and cohesive policy framework is

-

from these economies also in way expedited gov-

-

dustries and are working on detailed statistics pro-

own realignments within, while Korea adopted the

of the fast eroding cultural frameworks within the

it adopted after the Korean

-

tential as the fastest growing

and wealth creating sector in

-

ties created by these industries and their economic

-

-

-

sive gamut of activities from research to advisory to

recently constituted a working group to restructure

and revamp the administrative mechanisms govern-

-

tion of creative industries, promotion policies do

in fact exist in various forms, including the arts and

-

try’s content industry policy and promotion policy

Starting from these policy trends, below we consid-

Recently, attention has often focused on creative in-

have enjoyed remarkable success internationally,

they inevitably leave a biased impression when the

-

ative industries essentially need to be nurtured from

From this perspective, some areas have not ap-

pealed for funding agencies in the market econo-

performing arts such as theater and dance, music

70

industries is the government’s concerted efforts in

-

-

ters for intellectual property strategy was also es-

to promote the creation, protection and use of

drastically expand the content business by enhanc-

ing the creative environment and protection system,

the drafting of a parliamentary document on this

‘new’ industry, a report that will be adopted by the

commissioned to do a research report on the topic,

cultural industries policies is carried out by the Min-

EU

could be that is seen as being associated so strong-

Europe we notice an emphasis on broader issues,

stands for telecommunications, information, me-

dia, entertainment and software, which is certainly

a very broad series of sectors - broader than the

Global P

henomenon

71

When does India step in to stake her claim??

Post World War II – focus on transfer of technology and the establishment of industrial

production in the competetive developing economies.

Malaysia, Republic of Korea, China, India and Thailand secure economic growth and

trade by meeting an increasing global demand for medium/high-skill and specific

technology -intensive products.

Today’s consumption driven lifestyle – Focuses on new products and possibility of pen-

etrating an increasingly global and easily accessible market. Copyright based industries

become the key economic driver.

The emerging power of creative industries is most evident in Korea, Singapore, Taiwan,

Hong Kong and China through their entry into software, publishing, design, music,

video, movie making & electronics.

A global phenomenon....

Administrative Frameworks

INTERNATIONALACTION

-

ernment across the world for the industries cubbed un-

-

tional regulatory mechanisms before the widespread re-

-

various sectors of the creative, cultural industries soon

seemed like fragmented monoliths which were no-lon-

Synergies between the various sets of activities, formed

a web of relationships between one industry to anoth-

er and to another and establishing a common thread

grappling with this issue of overcoming political and

-

forces, working committees, special cells, subsidiary de-

partments, missions, councils and commissions started

void that was created by this lack of holistic understand-

that various countries have put in place for the creative,

Government Departments :

-

Major Institutions supporting the Creative/Cultur-al Sector:

-

stitute of Museum and Library Services; National Gal-

-

-

-

72

-

Recently there is a growing recognition that a new

needed to provide greater coherence and coordination

for cultural policies currently spread widely throughout

-

tions for a mechanism to advise and coordinate cultural

-

ommendations would raise the agenda of the arts and

the overall coordinating and policymaking government

-

tion with both the concerned government agencies and

-

tourism as a major tool in nation building and sustain-

-

tributionto world pence, cultural enrichment, and socio-

formulates and implements policies, plans, and pro-

grams to promote and protect the rights and well-being

of the indigenous cultural communities and indigenous

-

vides leadership in the formulation of policies and set-

ting of priorities and direction of all youth promotion

and development programs and activities; encourages

wide and active participation of the youth in all govern-

and activities, harness and develops the full potential of

Responsibility for research and production of statis-

tical information on culture in France lies with the

-

-

-

four sub-groups to look into the different sectors of the

-

Statistics & Planning1 :

publishing statistics on what is referred to as the creative

industries.2

Global P

henomenon

73

-

Other major institutions supporting culture industries

Statistics and Planning:

Cultural Statistics Program (CSP)3

much of the sector’s data were inextricable from other

-

sure from both the policy departments and the culture

-

Survey, includes a time-budget module from time to time

module in the same survey instrument in order to obtain

a measure of participation in cultural activities that are

-

Expenditures Survey to gather more detail on culture

The National Advisory Committee on Culture Sta-tistics (NACCS)4

-

-

cal activities related to all aspects of culture and the arts

constituencies, and their two-year terms are staggered to

Creative Industries in Singapore are primarily gov-erned by the following ministries:

Ministry of Education, Ministry of Manpower Ministry

-

Principal autonomous bodies that co-ordinate proj-ects and missions on cultural and Creative Indus-tries within Singapore are:

-

velopment and use of historical sites, promoting con-

servation of national treasures and important cultural

properties, maintaining traditional performing arts, and

development and operation of national museums), and

holding arts festivals and similar events, development of

and development and operation of national art galler-

programs and budget for creative activities such as con-

74

-

-

also playing a growing role in nurturing creative indus-

industrial policy, but are focused instead on support and

subsidies for artistic activities in the private sector, op-

eration of national cultural facilities, and promotion of

policy stance is to support and nurture performing arts

-

ments responsible for administering and implementing

responsible for the formulation and execution of the na-

-

-

-

sion for Museums and Monuments, National Library of

-

in charge of cooperation and coordination among vari-

ous bodies at the national, state and local government

-

sive responsibility of each Nigerian state, although the

-

-

Statistics5 :

has been on those relevant to “arts” and “cultural heri-

-

-

including the demand for authoritative statistics on the

sector from government policy makers as well as de-

coverage of statistics relevant to sport and recreation,

but this component of the program is not normally re-

-

tem in an effort to add items of interest to existing col-

-

nership with key government clients, including those

an ongoing relationship with these key clients to assess

-

Global P

henomenon

75

A global phenomenon....

Policy Frameworks& Mapping Of The Cultural & Creative Sector

INTERNATIONALACTION

subject of intense debate over the last few years, espe-

cially within the framework of local, national and Eu-

growing interest in this subject there are currently few

framework for the cultural industries does present real

organisational and administrative problems, but many

-

-

stantly shifting between economic, social and aesthetic

in the world of publicly funded arts and culture since the

-

-

and constraints faced by the subsidy systems in the dif-

intent is not to deny the need of a debate on the value

whole issue of the cultural industries as a fundamental

Legal instruments enable States to more effectively

instruments in the form of declarations, recommenda-

-

ing to achieve the goodwill and co-operation of member

a Recommendation is intended to encourage them to

adopt a particular approach or to act in a given manner

-

dation does not create a legally binding obligation on

an accord implies the joint will of the parties upon whom

-

-

-

76

Culture, Creative Or Copyright Industries:

Many countries especially the developed ones which have also been

and establishments as an “industry” have done it with a view

to retain their edge in a fast globalizing economy realising that

“knowledge” and not mere labour or capital will drive growth.

Economies in Europe, America and South East Asia and have

-

ments though not free from political interventions have more or

within their cultures, their strengths and weaknesses and their eco-

nomic potential. Three major point of view have emerged as a

world order in this sector :

(a) Copyright based industries:Countries that view these industries as one generating copyrights

or intellectual properties a majority of which are based on cultural

content presented in creative ways which are used for economic le-

veraging. USA which pioneered this model for still dominates the

global creative industries economy.

(b) Creative & Cultural Industries :An experimental term originally coined by GLC (Greater London

Council 1980s) to differentiate high-end creative/cultural goods/

services from mass-produced cultural goods, later on adopted to

differentiate high-end technologically improved, produced and dis-

tributed cultural content which were called creative industries from

subsidized art which were categorized cultural industries. However

it was soon realized that the creative industries are a set of eco-

nomic manifestation of a cultural eco-system and has no individual

Cultural Industries. UK which parented this approach also did

noteworthy detailing of the systems and modeled an economic sub-

subsystem around this which was later adopted by many economies

including Singapore, Hongkong, New Zealand etc.

(c) Cultural Industries :The European Council around the same time as GLC had started

-

ture” as a common thread connecting all the industries that could

be clubbed under the head of creative, leisure or heritage industries

Most countries of Europe, Canada, Korea & Tai-

wan have adopted the term with regional variations

and adoptions to suit their culture and economy.

However as UNESCO observes - there is still a

lack of consensus and ad-hocery prevails. Most

countries which have recognized this class of indus-

tries as creative or copyright industries have done so

with an eye on their export potential and very large,

culturally rich developing countries such as China,

India, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, South Africa, SE European

countries, Other African and Latin American countries etc. have

till now lagged behind due to their large domestic markets for these

goods and services. But with the growing globalisation every country

has started working towards a common platform which will en-

able cross country comparison, establish industry standards, and

to enforce regional/local exceptions which cannot be internationally

exploited to preserve cultural

as ‘those industries which produce

tangible or intangible artistic cre-

ative outputs, and which have the

potential for wealth creation and

income generation through the exploitation of cultural

assets and the production of knowledge-based goods

cultural industries have in common is that they all use

creativity and cultural knowledge to produce products

be referred to as “creative industries”, sunrise or “future ori-

ented industries” in the economic jargon, or content indus-”

industries generally includes printing, publishing and

multimedia, audio-visual, phonographic and cinemato-

some countries, this concept also embraces architecture,

visual and performing arts, sports, manufacturing of

With its cultural mandate and a dedicated statistical unit,

placed to take the lead in developing effective statistical

methodologies at an international level to provide na-

tional governments with the tools necessary to study the

creative industries sector and to encourage countries to

“The industries of the imagination, content, knowledge, innovation

and creativity clearly are the industries of the future….They are also

important contributory factors to employment and economic growth”

Global P

henomenon

77

-

dards and nor can it force countries to collect these

-

ing so themselves at national and sub-national level and

statistical standards emerge organically through a long

should be an active advocate of studying this growing

disseminating best practice in the collection of data and

development of indicators as well as supporting coun-

Framework of Cultural Statistics (UNESCO)1

-

hensive attempt to develop common methodologies to

capture information about cultural activities, but it des-

-

date goes far beyond an economic evaluation of cultural

common structure to collect data on cultural activities

that could be ultimately lead to cross-national compari-

-

• cultural heritage;

• printed matter and literature;

• music and the performing arts;

• visual arts;

• audiovisual media

• cinema and photography;

• radio and television);

• socio cultural activities;

• sports and games;

-

-

emergence of the creative industries as a distinct area

framework needs updating to capture the new and varied

ways that culture, and particularly cultural goods and ser-

-

lar has profoundly changed the way people create, work

methodology, with particular attention devoted to cre-

commissioned the London School of Economics, the

a private British consultancy specialising in cultural sta-

tistics, to review the intellectual framework that under-

-

-

creative sector as a key driver for socio-economic de-

establishing a policy framework and an accompanying

appealing to creative communities, policy-makers, civil

society and the private sector to cooperate to ensure the

-

upon international agencies, national and local authori-

-

tivities designed to support the development of cultural

-

endorsed at the symposium, establish a policy frame-

78

-

tion is intended to facilitate recognition of the cultural

industries sector and its needs, as well as to encourage

the conditions conducive to the development of the cul-

tural industries sector, through coordination and invest-

-

frastructure, intellectual property rights regimes, small

-

-

1. Coordination:Support for a regional, integrated policy development

coordination mechanism to promote cultural industries

as a strategy for poverty alleviation and socio-economic

2. Best Practices:

-

3. Networking:

research and proactive policy development pertaining to

cultural industries as a strategy to strengthen the cultural

4. Creativity Matrix:

to track and measure the effectiveness of policy initia-

5. Data:

project, for the establishment of baseline data pertain-

ing to the socio-economic development potential of the

“those industries which have their origin in individual

creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for

wealth and job creation through the generation and ex-

Culture & Creative Industries

-

-

Core Copyright Industries

Partial Copyright Industries

Distribution industries

Global P

henomenon

79

matter

matter,

Copyright-related industries

Cultural Sectors :

-

dustries which have their origin in individual creativity,

skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and

job creation through the generation and exploitation of

Creative Industries

generate copyrights, patents, designs or trademarks”

Copyright Industries/Creative industries

Core Copyright industries4

Partial Copyright Industries

Distribution Industries

80

of economic activities that exploit and deploy creativity,

skill and intellectual property to produce and distribute

products and services of social and cultural meaning

- a production system through which the potentials of

-

the creative sector, namely - creativity, intellectual prop-

erty, the production and exchange of social or symbolic

meanings and the idea of creative industries production

-

Creative Industries

“production of the means of production”, “reproduction and

mass distribution” and “sites of

applied to a number of studies on creative industries, for

Global P

henomenon

81

Creative Industries Production System (CIPS)

Copyright Industries

Core Copyright Industries

and periodicals

Partial Copyright Industries

Distribution Industries

services to the arts

82

traditional and ‘new’ industries in the knowledge econo-

Cultural-Creative Industries

1) Publishing

d) Records

f) Other publishing

g) Software publishing

2) Film & Video

a) Film production

b) Film distribution

c) Film screening

d) Film industry

The Taiwan government uses the term ‘Cultural -Creative

Industries’ to cover three broad categories: ‘Cultural Arts

Industries’, ‘Design Industries’ and ‘Peripheral Indus-

such as social education centre (museums, galleries and

cultural facilities) and ‘Creative Living Industries’ (tea

house and wedding photography etc.)

Global P

henomenon

83

e) Recorded programme production and

distribution

3) Craft products and materials

b) Sculptures

4) Antiquesa) Stamps and coins collection

c) Mediaeval collections

d) Stamps and coins collection

5) Broadcastinga) Broadcasting industry

6) Television

7) Performing Arts (Music, Drama, Dance,Traditional Performances and Circuses),Festivals

c) Other performing companies

d) Live music performances

e) Management of concert halls

performance agents

g) Music agents

i) Literature and arts industries

8) Social Education Services (Museums,Galleries and Cultural Facilities)

d) Other advertising

10) Design (commercial furniture, Fashion, Landscape and Interior, Product andPackaging, Industrial)

c) Monopoly commercial logo design

e) Landscape design

g) Garden design

11) Architecture (incl. Design, Publication)

d) Electrical circuit design

12) Software and Digital Games (Computerprogramming)

13) Creative Living Industries – Tea Houses,Wedding photography

-

work has been developed by working groups for con-

model of UK to a great extent but selectively limits or

enlarges the scope of some component industries de-

-

recordings

84

-

dian Government has given priority to practical aspects

such as measurement of statistics, their conformity to

can include economic systems, political ideologies and

processes, educational institutions, social programs, the

environment, technological systems, recreational prac-

tices, artistic and heritage activities, transportation and

communication industries, religious and spiritual activi-

-

-

poses, establishes boundaries around what is included

generally accepted as distinct within the national statisti-

-

ered in the socio-demographic statistics program within

-

goods and services produced by it and the preservation

-

-

-

Core Culture Industires

support services)

newspapers and periodicals)

Non-core Culture Industries

-

ing new terms to describe the industry, Norway has so

far chosen to employ the term cultural industries rather

-

Global P

henomenon

85

Cultural Industries

entertainment and recreation

bookshops

newspapers and periodicals

pictures and videos

sound recordings

Culture and Leisure Industry

86

A global phenomenon....

THE CULTURAL &CREATIVE ECONOMY: Size, Contribution To GDP, Growth Rate, Employment & Funding

INTERNATIONALACTION

-

derstand the value of the in-

ternational trade that cultur-

al industries give rise to, the

-

that analyses cross-border

countries on selected prod-

-

-

-

culty of collecting complete information and concede

markets as a single master copy and then reproduced

exports may bear little relation to the volume distributed

as a good has an almost negligible value at customs,

is copied and distributed and this value is captured by

the services data through the balance of payments as

to illustrate the above is of - India, whilst being a major

customs statistics.

launch and update its biennial survey on the Statistics

-

-

barometer surveys for their two studies titled - “Euro-

Market values of these outputs have been estimated at

-

-

-

that the data presented are based mainly upon customs

Global P

henomenon

87

three percent of the total trade of cultural goods in

any progress, with a combined share of less than one

countries to share their cultures and creative talents, it

is clear that not all nations are able to take advantage of

-

tries participate in this trade, their cultural voices will

Recorded media - primarily consisting of music, sound

-

is dominated by video

the lack of data, particularly for cultural services, togeth-

er with the complex nature of cultural products, means

Size of Economy and Employment:

annum, which was higher than the average growth of

-

ing software )

Funding :Funding reforms undertaken by the present government

NESTA -

-

-

-

-

gramme design, although a number of areas of its work

-

• Innovation programmes: transforming the

UK’s capacity for innovation – focusing on

data shown here are the numbers of people employed in both

the creative industries and in creative occupations outside the

creative industries in Great Britain

88

• Financial programmes: to increase the

co-ordination to the development of early

• Policy programmes :rich innovation policy, making it dynamic and

responsive

Other sources of Funds :-

-

-

Micro-credit -

Micro-credit provides loan and sometimes savings ser-

vices to entrepreneurs at either start-up or growth stag-

donations or investments are made by organisations

-

-

nations to the fund, which is then distributed to a local

then transferred to businesses as micro-credit or banks

-

fund manager), providing small business development

sector, providing a useful stepping stone towards larger

SFLG

-

es where a retail bank is unable to invest in a proposition

due to the lack of security, though favourable otherwise,

-

within syndicates, who seek investment opportunities in

OLBAN -

gel Network that operates within Greater London En-

-

Business angels often commit amounts of between

-

Venture Capitalists:very ‘service based’ and thus people-centered and reli-

-

cialist investors in the sector, which does not breed con-

-

evance, because they provide opportunities for smaller

syndicates in ways that collectively raise investments be-

Size of Economy and Employment :

-

-

copyright industries achieved foreign sales and exports

Global P

henomenon

89

Funding :

-

-

-

funding takes place from local to state all the way to the

federal level as a matter of concern for the policy mak-

-

viduals and corporations which support arts and cultural

-

tion that new policy tools are needed to support the

substantial impact of cultural policies on “trade nego-

tiations, anti-trust enforcement, copyright and patent

law decisions, public broadcasting operations, access to

has won greater support in recognition of the enormous

-

-

-

Other Investments

in the Arts Culture & Humanities:

cultural capital has been built by a sustained investment

in arts and humanities education and research begin-

ning with the focus on interdisciplinary humanities in

the schools system to the investments in humanities re-

cultural activities are often embedded in the education

-

porations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Forbes,

Even smaller companies have active arts and sponsor-

ship schemes as part of their community and staff wel-

-

nors, foundations and corporations go towards support-

federal sponsorship, and other funding from founda-

-

stimulate the local economy, to attract visitors to the area

and to provide entertainment experiences for employees

Size of Economy and Employment:

-

Funding :Finance for the arts and culture comes from both the

in the public sector are central and local governments

private sector corporate members of Korean Business

-

-

-

90

-

investment for cultural infrastructure such as building

-

porate cultural spending is allocated to the own cultural

-

porting the artistic activities including art, music, theatre,

Size of Economy and Employment:

-

-

-

services

software development and maintenance, followed by

-

-

-

-

number of establishments and employment has also

-

-

-

-

-

ture and engineering services, and music and performing

-

[Hong Kong] Employment in CI 1996-2002

Global P

henomenon

91

of the cultural sector is also evidenced by its contribution

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

wealth expenditure is estimated to be over one billion

-

opment is provided through other portfolios, including

-

include, for example, limited investment and loans pro-

-

-

which compensates the creators of works used in public

libraries; and programs which fund companies and in-

-

support through the taxation system; partnerships with

other levels of government, communities and the private

sector; and legislative and regulatory provisions, such as

protection of intellectual property through copyright,

-

ciated with these core creative industries added a further

-

-

-

92

worker in the creative cluster amounted to about

Growth of the creative cluster during this period

-

tries had consistently grown faster than Singa-

creative industries had maintained a relatively high

which have grown more weakly in recent years,

are taken into account, the growth of the creative

Global P

henomenon

93

A global phenomenon....

Special Efforts &Government Policies And Programmes

INTERNATIONALACTION

public sector in the development of Finland’s “design

system”, which is to enhance competitiveness through

the development of education, training and research in

seeks to develop a national design culture of interna-

tional renown to strengthen the national identity and

design and promote the value of design in all aspects of

aim of taking a number of prototypes to production and

working with local manufacturers to create products that

The Opportunities and Challenges to the Creative cluster in Singapore

and telecommunications infrastructure,

and stable governance, etc, stand Singapore

in good stead to develop the creative

tion can serve as a test-bed for innovative

products and services

arts and cultural infrastructure

that industry growth will have to be driven

94

by an export-driven approach targeting

global markets

off potential investors

partnership and sponsorship for arts and

cultural events in Singapore limits the growth

Singapore’s Targets for 2012 include:

and multi-talented global city for arts and

Levels of Education

work

Singapore Biennale to Enhance Singapore’s

design industries

pore’s wealth of heritage resources to go into

merchandising and arts and heritage

consultancy

- National Library Board to venture into

global knowledge concierge service,

develop the information services sector

and provide library consultancy services

“A Global Cultural and Business Hub for the Design of prod-

ucts, content and services, where design consciousness and creativ-

ity permeates all aspects of work, home and recreation” [Design

Singapore]

products and Services

Excellence

Strategy

“A Global Media City with a thriving media ecosystem rooted in

Singapore with strong international extensions” [Media 21]

Media

Media Services

Global P

henomenon

95

Exchange

Media Materials

to World’s Best

Environment

Responsiveness

Empowerment

Developing Hong Kong’s creative industries – An action-oriented strategy

no single body is representative of creative industries as

various stakeholders in a productive dialogue, so as to

-

-

-

ter, which should be launched as a joint venture between

government and the business sector; however, we draw

Whatever model is adopted, the key is for clear leader-

is to have a clear vision and strategy, and an actionable

Brand-name projects

(a) A Major Conference :

is not a one-off event, but a more lasting

very well prepared if it were not to become a

(b) Flagship projects.Singapore is developing “MediaLab” as one of her

be created anew; instead they can be built upon some

can be promoted well in advance, to height

more immediate results should also be

96

(c) Regular programmes :

sectors on their own, but the challenge is to coordinate

and sustain these activities to build up a cumulative im-

creative industries practitioners, such as

artists and designers, to undertake small-

industries corner” with an emphasis is on

overseas outreach programme for our

be to arrange an informal roundtable discus

promotion;

(d) Development projects

encouraged to plan and execute their own development

programmes, making use of existing funding schemes

may present an obstacle, hence it is important to have

a champion for creative industries among the various

funding departments, to lobby for the inclusion of the

“creative industries” concept in the funding guidelines

-

on the market opportunities, the needs of the respective

-

tries themselves, the scope of regeneration could be

-

Clustering Of Industries ForThemed Developments

Following the preliminary spatial mapping of the cre-

ative industries, certain clustering effect could be identi-

-

rior design companies with the distribution of retailers

and suppliers of building materials and products; cer-

-

tion of these districts should therefore take into account

the existence of these patterns of business activities as

not happened spontaneously, it is worthwhile to study

whether a clustering strategy would provide synergy for

-

lated businesses, as in the concept of art or artist village,

to develop such clusters in disused factory buildings in

-

-

Lumpur and the cultural industries satellite centers such

Heritage/tourism Related Developments

Global P

henomenon

97

will be indispensable in developing cultural tourism as

-

bination with business development plans are currently

-

-

Flagship Projects

-

ship projects become symbols of cultural status, and have

-

Gallery in London and the Esplanade in Singapore are

-

-

-

-

according to the actual needs for the purpose of dem-

The Ceramic Project Flagship Plan:

rooting of ceramic culture, ceramic product annual re-

-

wan ceramics and design abilities, this plan is expected to

solve the problems faced by the ceramic business opera-

uplift the general energy level of the cultural and cre-

Taiwan Culture Style Fashion Design:Clothing Party:

-

tile, fabric, and fashion in the country, and open a new

-

formation of a fashion designer team, international ex-

-

-

-

-

-

creativities and coagulate a consensus in the industry

through various aspects of the culture and actively seek-

Metal/Jewellery and Paper ArtsPromotion Project: Following the effects of special projects in upgrading

-

98

series publications, seminars, demonstration,

-

music, television, books, publishing to make a

major contribution in closing the gap between

• We have found new ways to increase our par

responsibility to accelerate growth in these

• Launch ‘Hubs’ in craft and music

• Boosting publishing through promoting lit

an enabling environment is being createdfor

small scale music recording labels to grow their

-

1) ‘Local is Lekker!’ :-

-

2) Closer collaboration within government and associated institutions:

-

-

-

3) Employment through Skills Empowerment: -

vide opportunities to train cultural workers such as tour

guides, musicians, dancers, choristers in groups, orators

intervention that adds value to this industry and brings

4) Training Opportunities in Design, Fashion & Film-making:

-

link in the chain joining artistic practice and economic

Monash University satellite campus in Sandton to train

-

links have been developed with a United States-based

to ensure the transformation of the sector and promote

Global P

henomenon

99

11) Launch of African World Heritage Fund:-

-

12) Sustainable income for Artists:Establishment of four ensembles that provide sustain-

-

light world class talent but to nurture and keep South

13) An Art Center in Every Locality: -

marketing and labor relations to emergent and estab-

14) Promote National Identity & Pride:-

15) Youth & Vuku-Zenzele:-

opportunity to involve youth volunteers as helpers and

16) Renaming Programme:

will be done in the spirit of the building of a new nation

17) Training in Indigenous Languages:-

part skills to local communities in research methods,

18) Anniversaries and Special Projects: -

batha Rebellion);

Students Uprising

Gandhi’s ‘Satyagraha’

-

spirit, cultural life, and the preservation of its cultural

four structural recommendations that are intended to

-

advise and coordinate cultural affairs in the

and integrated approaches to policies

-

manities, and cultural preservation often has been frag-

create focal points for cultural policies within govern-

ment that will be better informed, better integrated, and,

above all, more suitably aligned with the demands of a

100

T H E W O R L DC U L T U R A L

F U N D

A N I N D E P E N D E N T O R G A N I S A T I O N

T O S U P P O R T I N T E R N A T I O N A L

A D V O C A C Y F O R L O C A L

C U L T U R A L A C T I O N

Global P

henomenon

101

103

• Bibliography & References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Mass Communication and Society,

Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China,

The Soviet Political Poster 1917-1980,

Culture, Society and the

Media,

Culture: A Reformer’s Science,

Art and Revolution,

Geoforum 31,

New Art of Cuba,

Creative Industries,

India’s Craft Tradition,

Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and

Culture,

Media Information Australia

Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910-1990,

!Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art,

Convergence Review: Issues Paper,

l

Mapping the Creative Industries, l

The Soviet Propaganda Machine,

A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement,

104

Music Industry Development and Brisbane’s Future as a creative City,

Cultural Sits, Cultural Theory, Cultural Policy

Critical Passions,

Cultural Studies,

Media International Australia,

Cultural Industries: A Challenge for

the Future of Culture,

Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Mexico, 1929- 1950,

Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera: The Murals,

Services Industry Journal,

The Creative Economy: How People make money from Ideas,

Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution,

The Creative City, Earthscan

Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance,

media International Australia,

Cultural Industries: A

challenge for the Future of Culture’,

Selected Readings from the Work of Mao Tsetung

Mao Zedon’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: 1943 Text with Commentary,

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects,

China’s Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship,

Media International Australia,

The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism,

Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922, Occidental Orientations,

Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and

Survival on the Utopian Isand,

The economic importance of the Arts in Britain,

The Definition of ‘Cultural Industries’,

m

Creative Cities,

105

Cultural Policy: Rejuvenate or Wither?,

m

The Knowledge based economy,

Cultural Economics: The Arts, the Heritage and the Media Industries,

Harvard Business Review,

The Cultural Industries Sector: Its Definition and Character from Secondary Sources on Employment and Trade, Britain

1984-91,

Geoforum 31,

New models of social participation in an authoritarian environment : Mass media, Technology and Democratization

within regional societies in Mexico,

Interface of Cultural Identity and Development,

The Global City,

Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng, Seattle and

Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural

Industries,

India’s Culture: The State, The Arts and Beyond,

Threads Woven: Ideals, Principles and Administration,

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900,

Ideologies and Modern Culture,

The Cinemas of India 1896-2000,

Economics and Culture,

Some Aspects of Cultural Policies in India,

Nationalism in Contemporary Latin America,

Culture and creativity bibliography

Distinction

The Social Life of Information,

The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,

Critical Education in the New Information Age,

British Journal of Sociology

The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on Economy, Society and Culture,

International

Labour review,

Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage

106

Cultural Sits, Cultural Theory, Cultural Policy

Economies of Signs and Space,

Living on Thin Air: The New Economy

The Definition of ‘Cultural Industries’,

m

Creative Cities,

INTERNATIONAL ACTION

i

t

Proceedings of the

4. International Symposium on Cultural Statistics,

5. Symposium on Cultural Statistics,

Statistical Indicators for Arts Policy

Arts, Minister? Government Policy and the Arts

Cultural Statistics in the EU: Final report of the LEG,

Towards a System of Social and Demographic Statistics, Studies in Methods,

107

DCMS Evidence Toolkit – DET – Technical Report

Canadian Framework for Culture Statistics

1993 System of National Accounts

Économie et Culture :Les outils de l’économiste à l’épreuve

1993 System of National Accounts

Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework, United Nations, New

Handbook on Non-profit Institutions in the System of National22. Accounts l

OECD Statistics on International Trade in Services: Volume I, Detailed Tables by Service Category, 1994-2003 Spadaro,

Europeans’ participation in cultural activities, Executive SummaryStatistiques Culturelles en Europe, Tome 1: Rapport final

Notes de l’Observatoire,

f

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Attendance at Selected Cultural Venues and Events, Australia 2002

Arts and Culture in Australia

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Year Book Australia, 2005

Patterns in Culture Consumption and Participation

Economic Contribution of Culture in Canada

Canada at a Glance Focus on Culture

Chiffres Clés 2005Notes de l’Observatoire de l’emploie culturel

Les Notes du Deps

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