Art & Culture

The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines, such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art.Current usage of the term “visual arts” includes fine art as well as applied or decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term ‘artist’ had for some centuries often been restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the decorative arts, crafts, or applied visual arts media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.   View More

The idea, the word, ‘folk’ has wide range of understanding and connotations – ranging from ‘natural’ to ‘native’ to ‘traditional’ to ‘rural’ and in some cases ‘from the heart.’ The ‘outpourings from the heart’ of native or traditional people later takes the form of folklore. View More

Religions   View More

Music Sangeet Natak Akademi, the apex body in the field of performing arts in the country, was set up in 1953 for the preservation and promotion of the vast intangible heritage of India’s diverse culture expressed in forms of music, dance and drama. The management of the Akademi vests in its General Council. The Chairman of the Akademi is appointed by the President of India for a term of five years. The functions of the Akademi are set down in the Akademi’s Memorandum of Association, adopted at its registration as a society on 11 September 1961. The registered office of the Akademi is at Rabindra Bhavan, 35 Feroze Shah Road, New Delhi. Sangeet Natak Akademi is an autonomous body of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.  Sangeet Natak Akademi now has three constituent units, two of these being dance-teaching institutions: the Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy (JNMDA) at Imphal, and Kathak Kendra in Delhi. JNMDA has its origin in the Manipur Dance College established by the Government of India in April 1954. Funded by the Akademi since its inception, it became a constituent unit of the Akademi in 1957. Similarly Kathak Kendra is one of the leading teaching institutions in Kathak dance.  Located in Delhi, it offers courses at various levels in Kathak dance and in vocal music and Pakhawaj.  Besides the constituent units, the Akademi presently has five centres: Dance Bharatanatyam, Tamil Nadu (Southern India) Bharatanatyam of Tamil Nadu in southern India has grown out of the art of dancers dedicated to temples, and was earlier known as Sadir or Dasi Attam. It is the first of India’s traditional dances to be refashioned as a theatre art and to be exhibited widely both at home and abroad. Bharatanatyam rests on principles of performance and an aesthetics set down in classics such as Bharata’s Natyashastra. It has a rich repertoire of songs in Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit. The present-day format of a Bharatanatyam recital, as well as a valuable part of its musical compositions, were created by the famed ‘Tanjore Quartet’ of the nineteenth century: the brothers Ponniah, Chinnaiah, Sivanandam and Vadivelu. Bharatanatyam has a highly evolved language of Nritta, abstract dance, and Nritya which unfolds the narrative. The themes have a wide range spanning human and divine love, and are generally classed under the rubric of shringara (romantic love) and Bhakti (devotion). The music of Bharatanatyam belongs to the Carnatic system of southern India. The musicians accompanying a dance recital include at least one vocalist, a Mridangam (drum)-player, and a flutist or violinist or Veena (lute)-player. The group also includes a Nattuvanar, or dance conductor, who recites the dance syllables as he plays a pair of small bronze cymbals. Manipuri Dance, Manipur (North-eastern India) Manipuri dance, evolved in Manipur in north-eastern India, is anchored in the Vaishnava faith of the Meiteis, or people of the Manipur valley. The temples of Manipur are still among the principal staging venues of the dance. Therefore the predominant theme of Manipuri dance is devotion, and the rich lore of Radha and Krishna lends it episodic content. Over a period of centuries, the traditional art has gone through various stages of development to become the sophisticated theatre art it is today. Manipuri dance is introverted and restrained compared to most other dances of India – the artist never establishes eye contact with the audience. The movements are circular and continuous, each merging into the other. Mudras or hand-gestures are subtly absorbed in the flow of the movement overall. The facial expression is subdued and never exaggerated. These features are evident even in the more vigorous masculine dances. Jagoi and cholom are the two main divisions in Manipur’s dance, the one gentle and the other vigorous, corresponding to the lasya and tandava elements described in Sanskrit literature. They constitute independent streams and an artist spends a lifetime perfecting any form within the spectrum. The jagoi element is predominant in Ras Leela and similar votive performances. In such dances the legs are bent and the knees held close together. This helps the feet land softly on the ground and lends a floating swing to the movements. The footwork is never audible as in several other dances of India, where it is often used to mark the rhythm. The Pung, a drum, and flute are the principal instruments used in Manipuri dance. Kathak (Northern India) Kathak is the principal dance of northern India, and is widely practised in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and even parts of western and eastern India today. It is believed to be connected with the narrative art of Kathakaras or story-tellers who have expounded the scriptures, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and puranic literature to the lay masses since ancient times. Expanding and refining its movement and vocabulary of expression, this art possibly transited to a courtly milieu in medieval India, and achieved its finest flowering under Mughal rule. Later, in the nineteenth century, the princely courts at Lucknow, Jaipur, Raigarh, and other places emerged as leading centres of Kathak dance. During the twentieth century, as training and practice of Kathak increasingly received the support of public institutions, choreographic work involving groups of dancers has claimed more space in Kathak practice. Kathak’s thematic content today straddles various worlds, even though the lore of Krishna still has a special place in its repertoire. Kathak is characterized stylistically by its footwork and pirouettes, and is pre-eminently a dance of rhythm-play. A recital opens with an amad and moves on to that, Gat Nikas, paran and tatkar, segments that offer scope for dance to varying rhythms and tempos, and both abstract and expressive dance. The music of traditional Kathak consists of the Thumri and other lyrical song-forms, and the essential musical instruments are the Tabla, Pakhawaj, and Sarangi. The sitar and other plucked strings are also associated with Kathak performed today. The Thumri is a popular genre of Hindustani music characterized by a lyricism that gives expression to various shades of romantic

Tangible Heritage Intangible Culture Heritage Culture plays an important role in the development of any nation. It represents a set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices. Culture and creativity manifest themselves in almost all economic, social and other activities. A country as diverse as India is symbolized by the plurality of its culture. Article 29 of the Constitution of India, 1950 forebears the dictum of Unity in Diversity to which this ancient civilization adheres to: “…Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same”. Article 29 (2) of the Constitution of India speaks of Cultural and Educational Rights also refer to the protection of interests of minorities: “…No citizen shall be denied admission into any educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them”. The plurality and multiplicity of the Indian Culture is evident to the whole World as India has one of the world’s largest collections of songs, music, dance, theatre, folk traditions, performing arts, rites and rituals, languages, dialects, paintings and writings that are known, as the ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ (ICH) of humanity. Thus, on this premise was born the philosophy and the concept of having academies of national importance. The year 1950 was a milestone to an epoch-making decade in India’s history, since that was the year India declared itself as a sovereign republic. The Planning Commission of India was set up on 15 March 1950. This Commission in its very first plan envisaged that culture is integral to the Planning process as a whole. That it is intrinsic to the concept of planned national development. With every subsequent Plan periods, the Government of India founded a number of institutions that determined its cultural policy and also thereby determined, for several other agencies, the dominant paradigms for the ‘arts & culture’ field as a whole. Among the major ones are the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (1950), the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1953), the National Museum, the Sahitya Akademi, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit Kala Akademi (all set up in 1954, following a Parliamentary Resolution initiated by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and first Education Minister, Maulana Azad), the Film Institute of India (1959), the National School of Drama (1959) and the National Institute of Design (1961). The role of these cultural institutions fits mainly within a very different concept of cultural nationalism. In brief, national cultural policy, as guided by the Planning Commission of India, in the period right after Independence adhered to the following five definitional criteria: Based on these guiding principles Government of India has formulated and undertaken several measures to take care of the development of Tangible/Intangible Arts of the State. After ratification of the Convention of Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2005, Government has placed further serious efforts through its various agencies, Semi-Government agencies, and Regional Government agencies, NGOs that support the elements of Intangible Cultural Heritage by various ways for their growth, sustenance, further visibility, and development. The intangible cultural heritage constitutes a set of living and constantly recreated practices, knowledge and representations enabling individuals and communities, at all levels, to express their broad conception through systems of values and ethical standards. The following multi-pronged system has been delineated to safeguard the Intangible cultural heritage of India: