Hi Vandana, your article, which I read as soon as you send it, makes things much more clear to me.

I have been thinking about this for quite some time now myself, but I am not really good at analysing, being more of an intuitive person. So my way of saying things reflect this. I wanted to write more to you immediately, but truly, I am still not fit enough to think properly. What I find myself doing is agreeing with you. I grew up, in the years I was in India, partially in an intellectual and quite influential family in Kolkata. I listened to a lot of talk about greatness and fame and I was always averse to that. When I went back to Germany, I realised that the standard of everything, including the Arts, was much more evolved and mature there, and this led to a critical reflection of what I had experienced in India. I recognised what you too state: that the artist in India is greater than arts, or as I used to put it, that fame of an Indian is often greater than his actual achievements. Yes, indeed, the role of the media in creating an infrastructure of knowledge (not just in cultural sphere) has been abysmal. Definitely by the time Mrs Gandhi came to power, we in India were much too happy to create our own alternative world based on a fictional Indian cultural (or was it political?) identity. We never cared if any of the things we did matched any international criteria. We intentionally ignored developments in the world and created an alternative reality and ego for ourselves, heaping a selected few with prizes, calling ourselves great and so on. Truly, the ego of an artist can easily be satisfied if he/she gets so much free praise, and he/she has a media willingly ignoring global trends and discussions to help him/her pretend he/she are unique. You also say something important, that the role of the artist in defining cultural modernism (and in doing so: national aspirations and identity) in independent India can not be compared to Latin America, as I think also in Europe or the United States, later Japan and Korea, now China. Here too my memory of the childhood: while in Kolkata the discussion was still on Brecht and Tagore, in the rest of the world there was a cultural revolution going on! Old ideas and loyalties and politics and yes, achievements were being questioned, attitudes were being thrown overboard. I remember an essential discussion in Germany about Thomas Mann, luckily later revised by the same people who started it. I remember questioning the role of parents and family. I remember radical feminism and the Red Army Fraction. I remember Buoys and Warhol giving us all the right to be artists and our 15 minutes of fame. I remember Philip Roth and Susan Sontag and Heinrich Boell and all that, essentially, being overhauled too, and punk and post-modernism and post post-modernism, and Godard and Fassbinder and 'Paris Texas' and Jim Jarmusch movies. If our media in India went anywhere near these vibrant and ever changing developments, well we did take on Godard for a bit and read some Grass, we talked about the Beatles/Maharishi angle and Allen Ginsberg in Benares, but generally we felt too scared of this "Western decadence". It seems to me that in today's India, we have just skipped all this and jumped on a Bush-Tea Party wagon; but yes, this is because we failed to put ourselves up there with the others in the world, matching, discussing, judging ourselves, having the courage to put ourselves up there on equal footing with the others. The people, the artists, the intellectuals of the 60ies and 70ies failed us. The media failed to reflect world culture and define a legitimate space for India and the intellectuals and artists

went with that because hey, we are a great nation of hundreds of millions of people with our own market, our own media. We have our own rules, our own prizes, our own methods of gratification. We can just copy and pretend we invented all this ourselves. So if today we are often stuck with an subversive version of Indian-ness and Hindu culture that would make Coomaraswamy shiver, the reason can be clearly traced back to this lack of courage and maturity to establish an independent space for modern Indian culture that stands on equal footing with the rest of the world. In today's world I am not too sure how much national cultural identity really matters anymore; maybe more than ever, maybe not that much. We deal now in a world that has major things common to all of us and the interesting thing is to see how these things reflect individually for each nation, for each artist, and how they on their part manage to convey through their work the universality of their struggle to anyone, anywhere in the world. If India is to participate in this world, painting doeeyed multi-facial rural beauties wont do anymore, that is one thing I am sure about. In this world, the roles of Tagore and Vivekananda and Sree Arobindo are overhauled. In this world, diaspora sentimentalities and fixations only point towards a longing for the good, old, safe place India once was for intellectuals. If a Vietnamese or Iranian movie or an Chinese or East German artist is a voice transported to all of us through modern media and we find that their sensibilities matters to all of us these days, the question that can legitimately be asked is: where are the Indian voices? (For the sake of this polarizing argument, I will leave out the exceptions.) It seems to me-- also in view of your analysis of the mistakes done in the past-- that new Indian artists have a very difficult task cut out for them. To be truly confident and reflective, they have to do a crash course in world culture, they have to find a short cut around all the essential developments that others have gone through, they have to (this is very difficult in India) learnt the value of disrespect, of overhaul. And above all, after all this is done, they have to know that copying the Western or the Chinese or any other model will not get them there. At ShopArt/ArtShop, many of these things were in my mind, and I did try sometimes to convey some of this to my artists. I think as before that they were, mostly, a fine lot, and Shristi helped them along very well. But I am not sure how much of all these things are really conscious in their mind, and consciousness is absolutely necessary to create anything lasting. Maybe one day we can make this conversation accessible to them and hope that they care. Finally: I admire you for the way you have portrayed ShopArt because I can see in that that you understand and above all care. I also understand your frustration about the lack of media culture (in any magazine or newspaper in the West, there is always a separate and substantial section dealing with arts and culture) . But maybe this can also be said (to the defence of the media, journalists etc): the quality of critique can only be as good as the actual work of the artists. In Europe, Latin America etc, it was the artists who defined their spaces, this led to the existence of whole generations of interpreters of arts and culture because it became necessary. In India it was never really necessary, was it? I think it is, like in

so many spheres of India, a development that lies before us, and for that your voice, Vandana, is absolutely essential.