Last week-end, an intensive two-day programme, consisting of play readings, a documentary, speeches and critiques, organised as a tribute to the veteran playwright and theatre personality Badal Sircar, played out to a packed auditorium in Pune. In Mumbai, at the same time, a festival of Asian cinema was inaugurated and has been drawing crowds even through the working week. A fortnight before that, an esoteric presentation by a visiting anthropologist on Mumbai’s cosmopolitanism had eager listeners traveling in from the distant suburbs.Open the papers and the fraternity that is best represented in the celebrity events section is likely to be that of artists: The painters and sculptors who would have had to struggle even to merit a two paragraph review of their works in the newspapers a couple of decades ago. Today, in terms of coverage their field is rivaled possibly only by the written word. Books have never been as ‘in’ as they are today with well publicised launches and reviews in every publication.What is all this hectic activity an indication of? Is it merely a natural outcome of the middle class revolution that we have been witnessing in recent times — a growing market for culture? Or is it a crying need for intellectual stimulation in a widely dumbed down world? The answer would probably be a little bit of both. The numbers of the urban elite have swelled, providing consumers for a wide range of durables and expensive lifestyle goods. With more money, more education and more leisure time available, culture understandably, has joined the list of profitable commodities. The changing shape of Hindi cinema — moving from the old hold-all formula to different films for different audiences — is probably the best indicator of a maturing market.But the expanding audiences for more intellectually challenging cultural products also point to the presence of another explanation, one that is a far more compelling motivation then the ones described so far. It is an explanation that is difficult to sum up in a phrase or even to describe in words. And were one to make the attempt, it is likely it would be an unpopular exercise. In fact, put it to people, the purveyors of culture themselves and they would probably be appalled at the suggestion, even be at pains to deny it. For it concerns a concept much maligned these days, the concept of ambiguity.When did ambiguity become a bad word? Perhaps back in the ’70s when the education system and so much else around it started to change. When calculators took away the need for arithmetic, when examinations turned essays into multiple choice answers, when specialisation reared its cold head, when clocks became numbers and not faces and hands, when management became a codified science, when the humanities gave way to technical education and cricket turned into a fast and furious game. All these developments brought about a definiteness to things. They inculcated a reverence for exactitude, for limits and results. It is a striking indication of our adaptability that today we can hardly recall these events that were so controversial not so long ago.If India’s energetic young work force (and cricket team) is an indicator it is possibly because those changes appear to have served us well. The air of positivity, of growing prosperity, at least for a section of people, seems to reassert the benefits of the new path.At the same time, we have failed perhaps to understand the transformation brought about in the way we think. Sometimes, when young people kill themselves, regretful attention is drawn to the excessive emphasis on examination results. But these are cases of an extreme reaction. Most of us have adjusted without question to a world of certitudes and camps (you are ‘‘for or against’’ an ideology, a political party, an action, as Bush put it on Iraq), targets and short cuts. The shift towards a so-called objectivity demands that we aspire only for the tangible, the easily achievable, the commercially viable. To do otherwise is to be foolhardy and unrealistic.There is no place in this mindset for doubts and hesitations, searching or mystery. ‘‘We no longer see the world’’ writes the African writer Ben Okri, ‘‘we no longer marvel at something beautiful. We’ve stopped noticing. We can’t really remember the last time we experienced the quickening of the unknown. The realisation drives away sleep.’’It is perhaps in the realm of art and certain pursuits such as ethnography that the ambiguous still finds a place. Where imagining, creativity and strangeness are tolerated without being forced into taggable categories. It is perhaps why we flock back, seeking the uncertainty that we have forced out of our lives.
