Culture is an abstract concept which is
illustrated through concrete/ physical matters, instances and situations. It is
a way of life. It is a system of beliefs, values, customs, traditions, thought
and behavioural patterns manifested in various deeds. It is the ethos of a
group of people in a family, a community, a state, or a nation. As for India,
it is the ‘Sanskriti/ or /’Samskara’ of
our Rashtra, and we are proud of our culture—the so-called ‘Arsha Bharatha
Samskara’.
Culture is a blend of many different aspects
and factors with diverse patterns of thoughts, behaviour, and actions
reflecting the character of a people. It can vary from person to person and
group to group. There are many things which constitute culture. Religion,
philosophy, costumes, cuisine, drama, film, media, art forms, artefacts,
sculpture, painting etc.make up the culture of people. It is said that culture
started with agriculture. When finally, after a long period of nomadic life,
people started settling to take care of their crops, cultural practices started
taking shape knowingly or unknowingly. Man was becoming more and more social
and more community-based in his way of life.
Cultural heritage is the legacy which is
passed on from generation to generation. It is a baton of civilization which is
exchanged among generations through films, television channels, art forms, folk
lore etc. It is spirituality embedded in specific performing devices and forms.
Who is a modern man? Modern man is supposed to
be the latest addition to humanity. However, even in the early ages there were
people who thought and did things much ahead of the times. So Modernity is a
late phenomenon with a possibility of early happening. Modernity has been posed against tradition
since time immemorial, and as a result a modern man is always considered
inimical to everything that is traditional. There has also happened an erosion
of values in the modern man’s treatment of culture and cultural heritage.
The individual and the tradition have always
been at loggerheads. What had been collective thinking and gains turned into individual merit and
achievement. A shift of focus has occurred in man’s relation with his cultural
past and heritage. The second and the third generations the world over have a
different perspective to life and the world at large compared to the first
generation. Films are the determining force in the lives of many a young man or
modern man. They are further and farther alienated from the past and everything
that belongs to the past. Values have changed; vision has dimmed. What once was enjoyable and palatable is
no more so for the modern men. They are uprooted from the cultural heritage of
their ancestors and the gap between the two generations is widening every
moment.
However, this is not the end of the story.
Oases of hope are seen here and there. A group is still here who nostalgically
looks back upon the fertile culture of the bygone days and wants to retain the
vestiges of the past. They revive and rekindle the dying art forms which used
to keep humanity together once upon a time. The transition from the crop
economy to the cash and later the paper and eventually the virtual one has not incapacitated them in understanding the
worth of their heritage. They draw amply from the epics and the mythologies and
all other available reservoirs to keep themselves balanced and sedate, rather
than being materialists and shallow.
There was a strong dichotomy between the
western and the eastern culture half a century back. But now the difference is
not as wide as it was in the past. The old world thrived in the melting-pot
theory. Everyone was assimilated in the crucible of a singular dominant culture. But now the situation has changed. The world
has gone for ‘salad-bowl’—everyone, every nation has turned into some
ingredients of a salad bowl. While becoming parts of the whole, each
individual, each nation retains its ethnic value. But, there is the threat of
danger along with the beauty of unique individuality or ethnicity.
Culture is not singular, though. It has
multiple layers and dimensions. It has sub-cultures, mass culture, and popular
culture as well as a mainstream culture. There is a Hindu Culture, Muslim
Culture, and Christian Culture, apart from a Family Culture, Atheist Culture,
Dalit Culture, Feminist Culture, Aborigine Culture, Urban Culture, Rural
Culture etc. When we think of Cultural heritage, whose culture do we take into
account? The mainstream or the sub-culture? Do we consider the “obsolete
citizens” of an “unintended city” as is written by Ashis Nandy in his
introductory article “Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics”
as representative of a cultural heritage?
Films are probably the strongest vehicles of
cultural patterns. But the paradox is that, very often what they represent does
not reflect our real culture. The majority of the people, especially the youth
blindly imitate the trends and the fashions of the film world. Writers who are
the messengers of culture are only secondary figures to the super stars of the
celluloid. Even writers themselves have lost their sense of direction and
values. Does the cultural heritage fully represent the females and the down
most caste? As long as inequality
persists in human relationships, if a modern man questions the cultural
heritage on that respect, he cannot be deemed a rebel against tradition or
heritage. Of all types of cultures, there is something as a human culture which
encapsulates love, equality, liberty, fraternity and justice in all fields.
Whoever values that culture becomes a caretaker of the contemporary generation,
who is grateful of the transcending spirituality of people like Mahatma Gandhi
and Rabindranath Tagore—people who lived in memory of a glorious past. As
Tagore wished in his Gitanjali, “Into that heaven of freedom,... let my country
awake.”
[DR. ANIAMMA JOSEPH]
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