Vidya Dehejia, who holds the Barbara Stoler Miller chair in Indian Art at Columbia University, started off the debate by stating that culture is a loaded word. Dehejia said that we in India have an extremely rich culture that has been inherited from the Muslims, British, Portuguese, Jains and others. “All these have contributed to the culture of India and we are custodians of all this and have to pass it on to the next generation,” Dehejia said, stressing that we can’t pass on only part of it. “We can’t treat the culture we have inherited as a loose leaf folder and keep a page we don’t like out,” Dehejia said.
Following up in this, TM Krishna, Karnatic music exponent said, “The question is who inherited what? Is inheritance to be shared with everybody? You have to feel something to own it… We have all inherited a microcosm of the world that we have defined for ourselves.” He gave his personal example saying that as an exponent of Karnatic music, he has inherited that, but questioned whether the man who drives him around has also inherited that part of Indian culture.
Krishna also said, “We cannot discuss culture in this country without talking about religion and caste. How do I negotiate that?”
Giving a wider perspective of culture and inheritance, historian and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi said that on his first visit to Europe in the 1950s he visited museums and saw “these amazing pictures. Part of me was bowled over but part of me was jealous. I hoped that an earthquake would come and swallow all that art. But somehow I overcame that silly notion. In Europe I felt that those paintings were my inheritance too as I am part of humanity.”
Krishna also questioned the need felt by governments to change the syllabus. A government promotes one thing, another comes and changes the textbooks, he said. “I wonder what conversation we can have between generations,” Krishna said.
