The Greater Common Good

One of the most vibrant events recently was a festival of popular culture, seher.com, organised by the non-profit organisation, Hazards Centre, based in Delhi but working on governance, urban poverty and livelihoods nationally.

The stories this festival sought to bring together play themselves out in kuccha homes, unlit streets, grey and dusty parks. The issues—slum demolitions and the lack of rehabilitation after demolitions—come from years of being pushed to the corners of the city. When this happens with renewed intensity, cyclically, communities find ways of expressing both anger and optimism about their participation in a vision of their own city. This was the basis of seher.com, an angry slab of song, drama and stories, layered with humour and lament.

Initiatives like these tell us many things. Most obviously, that the terms of artistic expression can be altered and audiences should lend these changes their ears. Instead of an individual artist rendering unique skills, artistic expression flowed from the experiences of a community.

Even more of a relief was the challenge such an event posed to what often passes off as community-based art. That term is problematic, suggesting that the artist bases himself or herself within a community and gets the community to participate in creating art. The impulse for creating such art comes from the individual who dictates the intellectual exercise initially and also gives it its

final shape.

So, frequently, community-based art is reduced to actually dressing up urban villages or creating art in spaces that belong to other people who don’t object and humour you. It’s interesting how, in India, community-based art is generally initiated by artists outside that particular community. For these reasons alone, I’d vote against community-based art. Instead, let mine be community art of the seher.com genre.

More quietly, the festival pointed out a third issue: Artists everywhere glean ideas from their surroundings. Often these are from other art forms, such as signboards or artisan productions. But if we’re looking at collaborations, very few ever actually work with communities to enable them to express things as they see them.

What tickles me the most, however, is how, by their very nature, festivals like seher.com subvert the art market. Nothing can be sold. It’s not an individual showcasing his or her works to seek more funds for further explorations. If anything, it shows us that art is possible outside of the market as well. The tingling irony of the title, seher.com, can hardly

be missed.