Let ‘Kirtan’ Carrie sing

The Left and the Right have more in common than they’d imagine. Both are ideologies with reductionist approaches. The Left’s favourite word is ‘hegemony’ (of gender, race, class and caste); while for the Right, everything is reduced to ‘cultural nationalism’. Both believe in indoctrination; autonomous thinking is discouraged. Both believe in propagation by bloodline. The children of Marxists usually grow up to be Marxists. The children of shakha types grow up into Right-wing adults who take RSS fictions to be the ultimate truth. Both also believe in a mob mentality. This gang of believers then goes after whoever they think is in the wrong — in their eyes. Whoever disagrees with them is a villain and deserves to be whipped into submission. Both ideologies tend to absolutism.

The new fad of the Left is ‘cultural appropriation’. Their latest target: a white woman called Carrie Grossman aka Dayashila who was singing bhajans in Brown University. Let’s call her Kirtan Carrie. According to a report in IANS, her performance was disrupted by a mob of demonstrators ‘spewing left-wing rhetoric’. Apparently, only brown Hindus have the right to sing kirtans.

What is cultural appropriation? Anyone who uses elements of a culture not their own is guilty of this. It happens when a ‘privileged group’ adopts the symbols and practices of a ‘marginalised group’. Susan Scafidi, in Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines cultural appropriation as: ‘Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized (emphasis mine) use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols.’ Does this mean that if such use is authorised by a bunch of patriarchs, who are usually the custodians of religion and culture, then it would make it acceptable? 

Earlier this year the British band Coldplay’s video  Hymn for the Weekend was criticised for the same reason. The video showed band members playing Holi and the pop star, Beyonce, wearing a sari and a bindi. The only problem I had with it was an aesthetic one — Beyonce looked awful in Indian clothes and jewellery.

Those against cultural appropriation are against the idea of ‘borrowing’. In the 1950s, white musicians borrowed the ‘musical stylings’ of black musicians. This is considered wrong. What about rock bands in India or anywhere else in the non-white world for that matter? By this logic, they are guilty of cultural appropriation, twice over, and should stop making music.

‘Borrowing’ is not such a horrible word. It lies at the heart of all great art forms, especially great literature. Books, ideas and artefacts travel. To be against borrowing is to be in favour of a mythical purity of culture, dangerously close to what the Right would like us to believe.

Take the Arabian Nights, for example. The stories were collected over several centuries by scholars, authors and translators in Central, West and South Asia and North Africa. These tales — like all folk tales — have multiple roots, and can be traced back to Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian and Egyptian folklore. Some of the best-known stories, Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, though Middle-Eastern in origin, were not part of the Arabic versions but added later by European translators like Antoine Gallande. None of this would have happened without ‘borrowing’.

Or take the Panchatantra. Scholars have commented on the similarities that some of the stories have with Aesop’s Fables. Composed in pre-Islamic Sanskrit in 6th century C.E., the Panchatantra, over the centuries, was translated into Middle Persian, Pahlavi, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Spanish. There are as many versions as there are translations. It was ‘appropriated’ by a rainbow of literary cultures. 

The American linguistic scholar Franklin Edgerton writes: ‘Over two hundred different versions are known to exist in more than fifty languages, and three-quarters of these languages are extra-Indian. Its range has extended from Java to Iceland... [In India,] it has been worked over and over again, expanded, abstracted, turned into verse, retold in prose, translated into medieval and modern vernaculars, and retranslated into Sanskrit.’

In more recent times, Dilip Chitre, in the introduction to his Anthology of Marathi Poetry: 1945-1965, writes about the ‘cross-pollination’ brought about by ‘the paperback revolution’ of the 20th century. This impacted Marathi poetry hugely, unleashing ‘a tremendous variety of influences that ranged from classical Greek and Chinese to contemporary French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian. The intellectual proletariat that was the product of the rise in literacy was exposed to these diverse influences. A pan-literary context was created.’

In an interview with Eunice de Souza, the poet Arun Kolatkar, who wrote in both Marathi and English, spoke about his reading habits. Kolatkar didn’t see himself as belonging to one narrow lane of tradition; instead, he saw himself as riding on a highway that cut across continents and cultures. He saw himself as a citizen of the world, free to borrow whatever from wherever: ‘I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition. I am particularly interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, clothes, people, the evolution of man’s knowledge of things, ideas about the world or his own body. The history of man’s trying to make sense of the universe and his place in it may take me to Sumerian writing. It’s a browser’s approach, not a scholarly one; it’s one big supermarket situation’.

Those arguing against cultural appropriation are nothing more than cultural fundamentalists. They are fighting for a cause that doesn’t exist. In other words, let Kirtan Carrie sing.

The writer’s new book House Spirit: Drinking in India was published this month