Page 266 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 241

We need radical changes in the way we look at non-western performing
arts. Evidently ‘traditional’ forms should be preserved from western
cultural and commercial domination, although preservation itself is
not the ultimate step: multicultural performances in the West might
quickly turn into a sort of circus exhibition in which specimens of
‘authentic traditional’ art forms are displayed to admirative (or
bored) audiences .… This new vision will grow up by promoting
intercultural experiments in which creative artists and scholars
from many parts of the world deal with the human cultural heritage
as multiple ‘sources of knowledge’ having their own relevance to
contemporary art production. (Bel 1993: 70)

This process of inter-cultural exchange may only take place in a non-
conflictual and non-hierarchic environment—international festivals,
workshops, schools, etc.—and it requires an important investment of
artists and their mentors. It may be seen as a voluntary attitude of the
Western elite in contrast with the spontaneous and market-submissive
phenomenon of world music, dance and so on.
The appropriation of an art form implies a different dynamics
that is more intricately woven on the social–economical fabric of a
particular period of time. Examples of this process will be discussed
in this section.
The first example is taken from the last decades of colonial
India. Modernity in Europe may have conveyed the ideals of liberty,
equality and fraternity. However, in the colonies it merely ‘helped
in undermining the physical and moral sovereignty of the subject
peoples’, as it conveyed the idea of a material and moral superiority
of the European civilization contrasting with the backwardness
and morally degraded state of populations under the colonial yoke.
Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay’s essay, ‘Resisting Colonial Modernity:
Premchand’s Rangabhoomi’, is an illustration of the way an Indian
intelligentsia influenced by Gandhi resisted this Western ideology of
modernism.
Gandhi’s unconditional commitment to non-violence reversed the
oppressor’s viewpoint by claiming the moral superiority of Indian
culture and civilization. However, Gandhians have been aware that
the traditional social order in India is not egalitarian. For this reason
they reconstructed the ideal of a consensual ‘village’ in which class and
caste disparities could be taken care of to the advantage of all concerned