A panel discussion on art and philanthropy with Kiran Nadar, Sunil Kant Munjal, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and Rajeev Sethi in conversation with senior journalist Shekhar Gupta was held against the backdrop of DAG’s ongoing exhibition, India’s Rockefeller Artists: An Indo-US Cultural Saga. This panel delved into how philanthropy has shaped the arts in India, from ancient times to now.
Shekhar Gupta: Patronage and arts have always gone together. So, there was funding from royal courts in the past. Then came the state, then came the corporates. Now, if you look at the US, the corporates came first. The state came later in the early 19th century, and then corporates have again taken over. And then the museums have become corporatized. If you look at the oldest and the most enduring art museums in the US, they were funded by private capital in the beginning of the 20th century, the Fords, the Rockefellers were part of this. One of the earliest instincts behind this was that of a civilizing mission directed at the new immigrants flooding the American shores, who had to make them American.
And then you had to mould them in an am American idea, which was drawn from western culture. So, museums then played a role. So, beyond charity, they also fancied this as scientific philanthropy, which meant creating knowledge, creating philanthropy. Then the state took over. Smithsonian came up and then came the venture capitalists and banks and philanthropy, and then the debate on whether museums should make money, they should work for profit. And that that led to the corporatization of museums.
In India for a long-time art was trapped in government patronage. The important thing is whether it was in the western world, India, royal patronage, government patronage, corporate patronage, this has never amounted to censorship. Art has remained free. And one reason, the main reason art has remained free is that art has found sponsorship or patronage from people who saw larger value in it.
So, in India, art remained trapped in state patronage for a long time, the Nehruvian and Indira era, but still, there were no footnotes that art will have this and not have this. And then corporates moved in. And then the Indian art market developed, of which DAG is a very good example because international art is a frontier hunter. They’re looking for where new art is available, which might get value, and that’s how artists came up. In the process, Rockefeller also played its role in the, and others got inspiration.
Rajiv Sethi: I feel sad that there is really no patronage that picks up people and takes them, exposes them, through their universities, their grants, which do happen to education, but not enough. So, all these things I think are important. The second part, I think, well, I still think we are completely in the hands of an extremely uneducated government. And we always have been. The IAS doesn’t mean the Indian Art Service. It is people who are in control, and we all have to sell our shops, and they are people who know, who’s sitting on all the decisions.
And we as a group haven’t really come together to fight it all the way. I can’t believe, for example, when I came last to see some of the paintings that Ashish (Ashish Anand, Owner DAG) has bought from outside, that he had to pay tax to pay for Indian art coming back. Forget about smuggling and making a big hooah of bringing back smuggled goods from outside. But we do not have a group that stands up and says, let’s fight all these things. Art still is in the hands of people who know less, and I don’t believe it’s going to get there till there is a movement recognizing issues that are much larger than a few paintings on the wall. It’s about identity. It’s about us as a people, an edge that the world has heard of, has begun to understand. But unfortunately, I think we haven’t begun to understand who we really are.
Shekhar Gupta: Kiran, you look at the picture from the other side, because you are a patron and you are a mega patron now and I see art museum coming up.
Kiran Nadar: I’d like to start with a comment you made that the state has supported the art industry across many, many years in India. I beg to differ. The state has done not that much. The state museums, which are run by the state, are in decrepit shape, and they have for a long time. It is only individuals who are doing something like Tasneem has done in Bombay, which is picking up the museums and giving them a base. The state’s involvement in art has been very, very negligible. So, I mean this concept that the state has done a lot for art, no. Yes, India has a very large history and heritage of art. So, when we talk about, for example, the Mughals’ patronage for miniature painting or that level of state involvement, it was different.
And so that patronage is what brought Indian art to the situation that it is valued as an institution. But going down the line today, what is the involvement of the state in promoting art? It is very, very negligible. I just want to give one example. The government of India gave us as a museum, not only us, but all museums in India who were wanting to import works back to India, would not pay duty. This was done 12 or 13 years ago. Last year, they put in a review of this policy, and the culture ministry was asked to give their opinion on this, which they did. And the finance ministry got back and said, okay, we have studied this, and for the next two years, this policy will be continued with. On the basis of what they said to us, we thought, this is two years, it’s done, and whatever we have imported has never been sold, has never been shown at personal places. It’s only at the museum. But the price of that is dependent on what we can buy at an affordable price. So, if I have to pay 25% duty, because now it is duty plus GST, it becomes very difficult to buy abroad.
Then they got back to us and we restudied it, and we will give you two years moratorium, which was fine. On the 11th of September this year, they pass a notification that from 7th of September, we have reconsidered this policy and the tax exemption is withdrawn.
Shekhar Gupta: Let me interrupt you for a second, the two years had not passed yet from this moratorium.
Kiran Nadar: We just got the moratorium in June or July. Now the policy is that once you buy a work of art, you pay for it, it has to go to the culture ministry for approval. That is then sent to the FM, then you get to import the work. So, we had a shipment of a certain value, which had come into the country. We’re sitting in customs, we’ve had to pay 25% duty on it, although all the procedures were done before, we tried to speak to the finance ministry. They say we’ve passed this law. So, I am telling you the arbitrariness of what is happening. I have raised this with the finance ministry and also with, we have the new minister of culture. So, we’ve raised it. Hopefully he will take the necessary steps, but he’s just taken over. He wasn’t even aware that this has happened. On the level of bureaucracy and on the level of the state, we definitely need more participation and more support. How can a policy that has been given two – three months ago suddenly unilaterally be changed? This is a very personal thing, which I’ve raised, but it’s a point that which affects all the art world.
Shekhar Gupta: I think that affects everybody. And also, the larger mission of getting your art back in your country.
Kiran Nadar: The point of the thing is not to appreciate anybody bringing Indian art, which has gone out of the country or bringing it back. Firstly, in my opinion, it should be duty free for everybody, not just for a museum, but okay, you’re not giving it to the common person. You’re giving it a museum under the law that they’re not allowed to sell it. They are not allowed to display it anywhere except in a museum, which is okay, we accept that, but the rest of it is just not, not valid. If you look at the state museums, look at what has happened to the National Museum. The National Museum, they are going to junk it and move it to somewhere in Dwarka. Now there’s been a lot of hue and cry about it.
Shekhar Gupta: Tasneem, you’ve actually built one, right? Tell us what enabled you to build it, and was it in spite of the state or did you actually get a supportive state?
Tasneem Mehta: No, so we did have a lot of support from the state, and that’s the area that I’ve worked in, is to try and build a constituency for art, to get the people, to get the larger public involved. Because you see the way the government functions and having worked with the government for 20 years, if you have a very small number of people coming into the museum or attending these festivals or interested in art, it is seen as an elitist preoccupation. And then they completely dismiss it because they think it doesn’t matter. And so, I have tried really hard, and that is what the BDL museum did. I mean, of course, everybody knows the story of how it was restored, won the cultural UNESCO’s, highest award, et cetera. But the idea was the ticket is still 10 rupees.
The idea was to bring ordinary people in, get them to engage, build that constituency and that is what will change. There is that tension when you talk to art historians or you talk to curators, et cetera, many of them are not really concerned with the larger public response, unlike say in the other arts, unlike say with film or something. But with art it is intellectual, it sometimes gets very precious. They’re speaking to their own community. It needs to go beyond, it needs to be reaching out because then when they see the numbers is when they will start to respond. Then there are all kinds of other involvements also, like there has been, I mean, at various institutions that we all know about at the NGMA, at other places. Now the state has taken over and is going to build this Central Vista Museum. What is the intention? How are they going to configurate? What are the premises? I have to backtrack and say Naman P Ahuja and myself are on that committee, but only one meeting of that committee has been held. And I have been on several committees, several states, you know, just a large young national gallery of modern art, et cetera. And you push and you push, and it, a lot of it depends on a bureaucrat who is prescient or who has an interest. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. It’s like banging your head against the wall. So, to combat that, the only way I think of doing it is to reach the public, is to make sure your footfall is there to make sure you are getting attention. Of course, that’s what happened with us in Bombay. I mean, even if I say so myself, the public loves us, the press loves us.
Shekhar Gupta: Sunil how are you managing? And what exactly is it that you are doing? Tell us about your contribution, the challenges, plus you can answer some of the points that they’ve raised.
Sunil Munjal: So let me go back to where you started. The early patrons were the royalty, and this was the case in many parts of the world, not just in India. From there, we got the temples coming in, became patrons, and then the traders came in and became patrons. And then, when we got colonized, we were actually told that you have to follow the company rules. So, they started a company style, which is what Ashish has had shows about, okay? There was a company school style of painting. So, we had the Bengal School, we had the Baroda school, and then we were kind of directed that this is the way it has to be done. So, it’s quite interesting actually. The artists that you spoke about were in effect, the pushback as India became independent. You think this is the Bombay progressive group, and by the way, as a progressive group, my style is my individual style, and yours will be yours and yours will be yours. And that actually set a very interesting tone for a shift in how art got developed, distributed, and perceived.
We are focusing more here on visual arts, but I do also want to bring up a comment. I think Rajiv made this a little bit earlier. The arts in India and going back in history did not have the partition and the silos that we currently have. Arts were taught and practiced as one; all arts by the way. And so that is one of the things we attempted to do when we set up the Serendipity Arts Foundation. I had a regular event in Ludhiana to start with, the city which I belong to. My friends would say, why don’t you do them here? And I said, why would you need to do it in a city like Delhi? It’s a big city. It has theatre, it has galleries. But when I looked around, I actually found it does not have access for everybody to everything at all. Actually, this is highly limited and limiting. For some reason it has become an exclusive domain of a few. So, if you get invited to an art show, you’re considered special. And I’m not. So, the exclusivity of art became one of its selling points. Which I thought was a little bit unfair because all our, all of us have similar interest, aspirations, desires to see things which are nice, which we enjoy. And in many ways, the education of the arts is one of the things we let it go by the wayside. It became engineering medicine law, have to be the primary education medium in the country. Actually, just to address that, we’ve just set up something called the Steam House. The Steam Houses arts, in addition to the STEM subjects, even in our university that is just outside Delhi. All teaching is done in a completely interdisciplinary manner.
And even engineers have to earn credits in the arts. So, the idea is to open people’s minds. And all over the world, the most successful leaders had right side and the left side of their brain functioning. None of them had a single unitary focus. And this is true for most successful leaders across the globe, which is why I think it is important, especially for a country with its history like ours, with almost, I would say the richest cultural heritage in the world for us, not just to preserve it, but to also contemporize it, to make it relevant today and for tomorrow.
So, we work with multiple objectives. One is to make access available. So, the festival that we do in Goa now over nine days gets a footfall of roughly a hundred thousand a day. And it focuses on all art forms at the same time. And we keep the same focus to visual arts as we give to performing arts, as to culinary arts and performance arts is distinct from performing arts. And in each one of them, we’ve also tried to make it experiential. So, it’s enjoyable, it’s fun. People get engaged. So, we have workshop in every art form.
We also have a conclave going on, we invite academics and researchers from around the globe to come in and, and talk to us about what’s going on in their world on these same themes. The idea also is to see if we can build a bridge as a track to connect the world, especially a world which is getting fractured right now. When you connect people across sports, across music, across theatre, it is a win-win. Nobody seems to lose. So that was the second stream that we were trying to set up. So, we now have visitors coming from about 50 countries to the festival in Goa.
We also have artists now from about 30 countries. The idea is that India is not an isolated island, and we never were. This was a temporary isolation that we created for ourselves. So how can we use the arts as a vehicle to bring India into the global mainstream? So, access is one, education is the second one. And we encourage artists with very little experience, to the top end of the spectrum those who are globally recognised. We also take parts of it to places like Mumbai, to Hyderabad, to Delhi, to Dubai, to London.
So, in May of next year, we are taking the Serendipity Arts Festival to Birmingham UK, to demonstrate what Indian art or South Asian art is and what it can do to connect the rest of the world in a happy, easy, friendly manner.
