By: William Everett

William Everett — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:48:29 +0000

Thanks, Jyoti, for your reflection. Readers may want to visit your site at http://www.jyotiartashram.blogspot.com to get a picture of what you are doing. Over the past twenty years or so people all over the world have been struggling to recover their memory and construct a collective narrative to enable them to act in the face of strange and threatening changes all around us. Unfortunately, we have been caught in the memory work and have not been able to take the next step of constructing a narrative that leads to reconciliation. In Red Clay, Blood River, I struggled with this challenge, drawing attention to the need for reconciliation with Earth in order to advance human reconciliation. I believe that is starting to happen, not only in your own art but in social, political, and eco-nomic life. But there is much to do. In the academic work, Religion, Federalism, and the Struggle for Public Life (Oxford 1997), I tried to expose the religious dynamics hindering as well as helping this struggle for a mroe adequate federalism to link smaller and larger networks of human cooperation. In both cases, creative artistic life in community is a crucial element.

By: Jyoti Sahi

Jyoti Sahi — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:06:25 +0000

Just been reading “Paths in Utopia” by Martin Buber. There is a chapter which has particularly interested me on Kropotkin. Gandhi was particularly interested in Kropotkin’s concepts regarding “mutual aid” as a basis for civilized society. Personally i have been interested in these ideas as a basis for arts and crafts cooperatives. I believe that creativity comes out of a shared enterprise, like the way in which the great Cathedrals and temples of the past were not the work of the individual genius working alone, but rather through a cooperative exercise, that also involved the whole community. I think that this was the underlying reason why the Bauhaus in Germany was so successful, and also Tagore’s experiment in Shantiniketan (the Kala Bhavan was started in 1919, the same year as the Bauhaus), and also Gandhi’s principle of Sarvodaya on which he based his Ashrams. I have been trying to understand how an art ashram can function not just as a place where individual artists can develop their personal skills, but as a coming together of people who mutually inspire each other. The problem seems to be what Kropotkin and others recognized as a Collective Ego. In our work in what was termed “inculturation” I became very conscious of the power of an impulse which might be termed “nationalism” or even “tribalism” where a collective ego loses sight of the universal. We are facing this more and more in India with the rise of nationalist and regional cultures which seem to evolve into a closed world of a collective identity that is no longer open to influences from the “other”. I think this is now for me the great problem of a kind of federalism where local identities begin to feel threatened by what is perceived a a globalized culture that denies freedom of space to the local initiative, and creativity. I would be interested to know what others feel about this trend, especially in relation to the link between art, craft and ethics. For example, in my work over the last twenty years working with different tribal groups across the Indian subcontinent, I was conscious of a deep suspicion of anything which was felt to compromise the particular political and cultural identity of a very self conscious community with a sense of being oppressed and marginalized. The same problem seems to emerge very much in what has now become a growing concern for “Dalit” identity.

Comments on: On Time, Memory, and Reconciliation

By: William Everett

By: Jyoti Sahi