On Culture: It needs to be conserved. They shout!

Cultural institutions usually conceive culture as a specimen that needs to be preserved in formaldehyde. Seminars after seminars, and journals after journals, depict culture as a snowflake preserved in time. Culture needs to be conserved. They shout!

Not only is this notion a misleading understanding of the complex and fluid past, but also a fractured break with the lived reality of those who inhabit the culture. No one is a conservative beyond a certain date. When you wish to force the clock backward, one must ask – How far? Where exactly in the past do you draw the line; from where an un-adultered culture is to be retrieved? In this backward journey, you soon realize that there are no clear demarcations. ‘Ages’ and ‘Periods’ vanish in history.

There are ebbs and flows, movements and lulls. But no clear cultural demarcations. What you might consider as chaste vernacular now, would most certainly have counted as gross adulteration a couple of centuries back.

Acts that might be construed as emblematic of your culture may as well have originated in some unsavory and unintended pasts. As such, the idea of an ‘Eden of Past’ is essentially flawed, and practically irretrievable. British historian Peter Burke had a point when he critiqued the well-established notion of the ‘Renaissance’.

Despite the desire of 14th or 15th century Venetians and Florentines to revive Roman antiquity, remarks Burke, they were far closer to their immediate ‘medieval pasts’ and far distant from the ‘classical ages’; than they would have liked, or presumed, to be. From the historical side, let’s turn to the practical aspect.

The idea of culture being an artifact that needs excavation draws a wedge between popular culture – the lived reality of people - and the refined museum academia. Popular expressions of culture - say language, its forms, uses, and idioms - do not originate in university ballrooms. They trace their birth to the pangs of daily life. Their mother is necessity.

Africa, here we must consider, which has a long history of being not only under European political subjugation, but also under cultural tutelage. African writings on the subject provide a deep insight into the idea of culture, not as an artefact, but as a sight of contest. Frantz Fanon in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Amilcar Cabral in his seminal address National Liberation and Culture(1970) point to the issue of national culture and its role in their struggle with deft, and what the Harvard literary critic Homi K. Bhabha would call - revolutionary wrath.

They make a two-pronged attack on the aforementioned alienation from popular culture. One - the internalization of Western culture as being superior, and a gauge to mark native cultures. Another - the distancing of the national bourgeoisie from popular culture. These two combine to effect a worn-out, and spectacle-based, sedentary understanding of what the word ‘culture’ implies. They object! Culture is not only annual folk dance.

Culture lies at the very heart of the people’s struggle. It is not an ancient artifact to be dug out, cleaned, and then displayed in a museum. It is the lived reality of the masses. It evolves with their struggles and carries a dialectical relation with their lives. Hence culture, as a living entity, is not showcased in galleries - it is lived at the very eye of the storm. Culture, therefore by its nature, cannot be preserved. It never has been. The best you can do is to engage with it.

Carrying the baggage of colonialism, we feel the feelings expressed above. Native languages (the most prominent aspect of culture) were systemically degraded and denigrated through colonial language. It is still not fashionable to speak, read, or write in the native tongue. Social mobility and fashion rest with the language of the masters; with their dress, design, and culinary habits. Reading native literature, however relatable, is downmarket.

Poetic quotes may be peddled around. Poetic reflection in the native language, though, is a waste of time. Indigenous works of art may provide profound insight into the reality of our social fabric. Nonetheless, these have to be derided as obsolete, in comparison to the vogue commercialism of metropolitan novels and novellas.

The other edge of this sword is the alienation of culture from the actualities of life. Life is life and culture is culture, it posits. Life has to be lived and culture has to be discussed (also played). As bad as the internalization of colonial cultural superiority may be, this exoticization of culture is equally cruel.

Both result in the effective alienation of people from the catharsis that their culture provides. What is Catharsis? Czech-American literary critic Rene Wellek poetically frames it in his 'Theory of Literature' – To express emotions is to get free from them – Catharsis! Culture provides such an outlet - In folklore; in poetry; in popular idioms; in language; in music, in literature, in local assemblies; in architecture; in the very nature of daily existence.

This is where the true essence and transformative nature of culture resides. To interact with it, to engage with it, to inhabit it, also to critique it, is to rejuvenate not an imaginary golden past, but the very act of our being. That seems a sensible goal. Not archaeological restoration.

Irony has it that I am writing this diatribe in colonial language itself. While I cannot escape my past, I must add that every language is beautiful in its way. ‘Cultural allegiance’ does not imply xenophobia towards other cultures – which in any way are fluid and continuously intermingling with each other.

The purpose is not to advocate the fortification of cultures. Not even to preserve them. But to live them. To engage with them. My submission intends to point at the dangerously flawed notions of internalizing cultural inferiority complex at one end, and exoticizing culture as a museum artifact on the other.

The alternate lies in providing cultural expressions with a common, inclusive, and real-life platform. It is only with such engagement that culture can become a framework for catharsis, self-reflection, and social evolution.

Shafakat Hassan Mirza is currently a research fellow at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.