The Delhi Urban Platform
invites you to
Made in Delhi : Post-1947 Cultural Institutions
http://delhiurbanplatform.org/2011/04/made-in-delhi-post-1947-cultural-institutions/
Speakers:
Ashok Vajpeyi, Hindi poet, critic, cultural administrator; Currently, Chairman,Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi
Kaushik Bhaumik, Historian and Senior Vice-President, The Film House, Osian’s
Vidya Shivadas, Art Critic and Curator, Vadhera Gallery, Delhi
Ram Rahman, Architect and Photographer
Ravi Vasudevan, Film Historian, CSDS/SARAI, Chair & Discussant
Date : 13th April, 2011 Time :4:30-6:30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, New Delhi
This panel will interrogate an important aspect of Delhi’s identity as a hosting site for a national imaginary about culture as it emerges, post-1947, via the realms of policy pertaining to language/literature, the arts, media and higher education. Arguably, these domains were key to the articulation of an official vision through which the divergent logics of democracy, development and regional interests could be reconciled into manageable equations within the national-federal space.
And yet for all its centrality within the Nehruvian imagination, the making of cultural policy has proceeded without significant debate, in largely ‘commonsensical’, un-reflexive ways, while the field has remained somewhat stigmatized within the social sciences and the newer inter-disciplinary fields.
Seeking to move away from a facile view of policy as ‘mere’ application, this discussion will focus on the ways in which Delhi’s urban identity as a modern city has lent itself or, in turn, has been derived from its historic role as a space of mediation over key cultural and political issues.
An enduring part of Delhi’s legacy to the nation, the making of cultural policy and its institutional elaboration in/via the national capital defined categories and mechanisms through which social hierarchies and regional differences were negotiated and linked to structures of patronage that would impinge on cultural and intellectual production. The location of these processes in Delhi has thus resonated profoundly in spaces far beyond the capital’s city limits.
Highlighting the elemental links between cultural policy interventions and the making of institutional cultures in the decades after 1947, or their remaking, both, post-Emergency and after liberalisation, our panelists will thus seek to explore possible continuities between the rationale and rhetoric of key policy junctures/documents/ statements, institutional forms and ongoing processes of democratization and marginalization.
Conceptualised by Veena Naregal, IEG
