“It is by far the biggest audience I have played for,” said santoor pandit Shivkumar Sharma. “This is a historic thing happening here.” That sums up the last five nights of the Bengal Foundation Classical Music Festival here in Dhaka – a sentiment repeated especially by all the Indian musicians who performed here.
A free event with no government involvement that, I’m willing to wager, has generated far more goodwill and appreciation among people across multiple tiers of society here than anything more formal or official that the Indian government might have tried to do recently to build bridges between our countries.
Clichéd perhaps, but an event like this brings home the fact that nation-state boundaries may exist in this part of the world, but they are a relatively recent artifact.
If our musical and other cultural traditions can freely flow and evolve across those borders, as they used to for hundreds and thousands of years from the Khyber Pass to Kanyakumari to Comilla, that may well be the easiest and most effective way to moderate more extreme ideologies that attempt to create simplistic “us” and “them” divisions based on mono-dimensional differences.
So, how can the Indian government best assist this process? In addition to expanding ongoing formal cultural exchanges, perhaps the most important thing they could do is to grease bureaucratic wheels. Streamline the dreaded visa process with longer term multiple-entry visas for people in cultural spheres, who obviously pose no economic or other threat. In effect, treat the entire region as a source of human capital in the performing and other arts.
Someone from Chittagong who wants to spend a couple of years studying Bharatanatyam in Chennai should be able to do so with the active support of the Indian government machinery, not in spite of it.
There are enough entities like the Bengal Foundation and their counterparts all across the region who will do the actual work of making these things happen. Strengthen such institutions where needed, facilitate behind the scenes, and step out of the way.
In the process, our awareness and appreciation of our similarities will be strengthened hopefully at the expense of pessimism in our differences, which can only be good for the whole region.