THE sound of a shuttle on a wooden loom or bare feet with bells moving on dust can easily be lost in a shrinking world that wakes up to the din and clutter of machinery. The onslaught of rampant industrial growth reaches out with its tentacles as rapid globalization becomes more accessible. The space for creativity, as most know it, shrinks palpably and a new culture responds to envelop its ubiquitous resonance. The South Asian subcontinent, living in many centuries rolled into one, continues to transform as it experiences unprecedented flux. More rapidly than ever before, most people unfeelingly embrace new phenomena with limited comprehension.

Factories, railways and the wireless served as engines of a ‘new’ modernity in the centuries before. The fast changing world then witnessed effacing and effective marginalization of skill based communities with their networks of closely linked professions. Surviving indigenous modes of production and services were seen to be obsolete and people hankering for them dubbed Luddite or sentimental. Mass production replaced all that was produced by the masses. The machine made goods churned cheaply and the advent of seductive media to ease consumption added to the impending doom of local genius with their time honoured transmissions. Generations of skilled artisans and practitioners were marginalized and left to fend for themselves, seeking survival elsewhere in emerging livelihoods or crowding urban slums.

In the 1940s, an era when technological developments such as cinema, the photo-illustrated press and broadcasting were making rapid inroads into individual homes and society as a whole, the term ‘cultural industries’ was originally coined by a Marxist cultural theorist, Theodore Adorno in the USA, as a critique of mass media and the beguiling, but ‘superficial’, ‘machine culture’ it had created.

 

However, the popularity and unprecedented reach of audio-visual technologies made it a lucrative commercial venture as well as a potentially powerful tool for cultural and political dissemination. State policy soon began to address this issue. In capitalist countries where policies were aimed to generate employment, culture meant quick economic returns; in socialist countries, mass media and culture, subject to extreme state intervention, became a vehicle for ideological propaganda; in newly independent post-colonial states, culture was mostly bureaucratized and devalued as a non-negotiated means of preserving national identities. Despite the antagonism of purists to one-way cultural instruction, the ‘new’ came to stay, impelling a rethink of information and broadcasting for the public.

However, not all was lost. In parts of South Asia (Sasia), the search for identity became linked to the struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Thanks to the prescience of committed artists, curators and visionaries who were quick to notice the paradoxes of industrialization and creative expression, salvaging traditional know-how from brutal onslaught was equated with a new modernity. This lost generation rethought the means of preserving and promoting languishing art forms by marrying traditional practices to contemporary needs.

This became one of the many ways in which the ancient and rural was linked to the more modern modes of production and distribution and had a two-pronged effect. While the clairvoyant measures helped preserve the sanctity of artistic and aesthetic values, they also ensured a renaissance of sorts to the degree that today cultural and creative productions and services can be repositioned as a potential sector for sustained economic growth.

The market can only ignore the direction offered by pioneers of Sasia’s (South Asia’s) post-colonial era at its own peril. The significance of this sector can now be further gauged in the change in terminology itself where the creative and cultural is aligned with more contemporary livelihoods such that it can almost universally be referred to as ‘creative and cultural industries’. With the more recent shift from a manufacturing to a service based knowledge economy that is largely content driven, creativity and originality have become the basis of competitive advantage in a global market.

 

At the cusp of a new millennium, enterprises with an interface of the creative and cultural have become the most rapidly growing phenomena across the world, carving impressive proportion of national economic out-put and employment with contributions to GDP ranging from 2-11 % depending on the definitions and sectors studied. Following the UNESCO charter, a large number of countries initiated a slew of policies, programmes, pilot projects and administrative mechanisms to tap the potential of these content driven enterprises. While each of these nations formulated their own context specific definitions, most countries acknowledge the synergy of the cultural and creative as an industry seeing them together as the primary drivers of their economy.

Not so in South Asia. In India alone, for example, many ministries, doing less with more, address linked issues without knowing what the other is up to. In the maths of governance, two plus two has never been more than four. The alchemy of culture and creative combine recognized internationally is the key to a more sustainable development model for the Sasian hemisphere. Geocultural specificity means social inclusion and contextual relevance.

 

Culture based enterprises are generally small, decentralized and mobilize marginalized communities for self-empowerment (especially women and the poor). They require less capital and grow with more grassroots labour intensive participation than any other employment guarantee. Furthermore, they utilize resources that are geo-friendly and ecological, drawing up on skills that are entrenched in indigenous ways of life.

By 2012, having listed about 4,000 skill-sets under its national mandate for development and having created one million jobs, KOCCA aspires to command a content market share of 100 trillion dollars with an export volume of 7.8 billion dollars in ‘content products’ alone. As a super body covering all areas of content, its vision is to assist Korea to be one of the world’s top five content providers by establishing a comprehensive support system to foster the content industry with the aim of leading the world’s content market, which takes the lead of a creative and forward-looking economy. Therefore, they are more effective in building sustainable livelihoods and human capital than agriculture, IT or large industry – all increasingly turning to efficient automation and fast evolving robotics. In 10 years from now most of the skill development we have started to take on at a war footing, may well become obsolete.

In South Asia, agriculture networks employs roughly 37-40 per cent of the workforce fulltime, while related and other industries together employ around 17-20 per cent; the skilled and semi-skilled people that constitute the region’s legacy, could form the bulk of the balance 36-40 per cent (approximates collated from various transnational resources).

Alarmingly, each year more than 20 million educated youth in South Asia are out on the streets not knowing the future of work. Of all the employment opportunities generated, only about four per cent are addressed by the corporate sector that is celebrated in media’s pink pages. The remaining 96 per cent have to self-organize themselves for their livelihoods. The high and increasing preponderance of a sector considered and treated as ‘unorganized’ can pose a serious threat to matters of social security and the future health of one of the fastest growing economic regions of the world today.

 

Most developed nations have already lost their traditional skills and are now attempting to nurture what is left as heritage to boost tourism (mostly from ‘third world’ countries) with rural-urban conservation. While simultaneously capitalizing on outsourcing their homework for digital design-led industries, ‘developed’ economies are redefining neo-colonialism as ‘coolie-tech’. The key to sustaining growth in any context is building on distinctive advantages of the most contemporary while sharing and protecting vital experiences of a unique subset of knowledge that is part of the region’s known source of strength.

It is here that statistics reveal the edge for South Asia. Sasia has an enviable repository of a huge variety of living, skill-based traditions with a growing number of highly versatile creative people capable of carrying its unique legacy much further. Although unmapped, it could well be over 300 million, skilled and differently abled practitioners. Together this wealth of indigenous competencies ought to form the basis of work and dignity for the rural and urban poor.

 

In the subcontinent’s effort to advance, society has instead relegated traditional knowledge to a ‘sunset’ sector – ridden with lip service and made sick with sentimental subsidy, inefficiently doled out. It is foolish not to look at the ‘traditional’ sector as dynamic and evolve what is derogatorily dismissed as ‘unorganized’. Their ‘elusive’ efforts may not yet reflect in conventional indices of national income but are nonetheless critical to vital human resource component yet unrecognized. Most people living in villages possess skills to meet their own needs and are doing so notwithstanding the belittling of jugaad. Thumping our chests while digging holes in the sand, employment guarantee schemes have also contributed to de-skilling the countryside. Escaping responsibility by extolling migration to cities as an inevitable ‘exit factor’ is a patronizing copout.

Tenacious symbols of resilient but vulnerable enterprises require ground level support, similar to that offered on a platter for privileged initiatives such as IT. Sasia’s contemporary but nascent design and robust media industry can creatively reposition indigenous knowledge systems creating original inroads into global markets. Bringing about imaginative cross border collaborations as economic cooperation for the whole region would jog jaded perceptions and bring it at par with international strategy. Influencing this conversion with an edge of sunrise requires a new mindset amidst South Asia’s mandarins who hold both the purse and policy.

There is little time to push for a place of best advantage, to launch distinctively indigenous brands with unique products and services – a heritage interfaced with universal advances made in technology. Sasia’s original contribution can hold its own against the best the world has to offer – village painters and animation, folk expression and electronic media, crafts and contemporary architecture, ancient pharmacopeia and integrative medicine, traditional foods and contemporary packaging, yoga and soft power, the possibilities are endless.

 

To this end, there is a pressing need to encourage grassroots planning, investment and engagement in key areas such as mapping, access data and statistical analysis, human resource development, capacity building, design innovation, creativity indices and quality benchmarking systems, infrastructure development, protection of intellectual property rights and copyright regulation (specially for products invented by hand like the sari or the stolen melodies of the anonymous popular ballads) and finally, required targeted promotion, more promotion… and more.

Simultaneously, urgent assistance is also required to structure support policies for developing businesses, cottage and small enterprises, export facilitation with unprecedented tax deductions private-public cooperation to reach this dispersed sector. Banks to access credit and loans, state of the art market research and the deployment of information and communication technology to ensure cross-sectoral linkages. Local and global agora awaits this arrival of Sasia’s creative content providers!

An example of how economies the world over are becoming aware of region-specific original content as a prime driver of economic leverage in the global market, is the ‘Geographical Indicator’ (GI). Note for example that 85 per cent of French wine exports are backed by vast pedagogic net-works and use GIs. 80 per cent of EU exported spirits use GIs. GIs are the lifeline for 138000 farms in France and 300,000 Italian employees. Major educational institutions of culinary art in each region support the creation of manpower for the industry.

In the Indian case, however, while only 10,000 million kg of ‘Darjeeling’ tea is produced in India, 30,000 million kilogrammes are sold under the same name around the world. Although not devoid of controversy and confusion, the Geographical Indications Act (1999), finally came into force in September 2003. For the first time in South Asia the Government of India has registered the following community-owned GIs under ‘handicrafts’ among about 200 others that are registered under process: (i) Pochampally Ikkat – Andhra Pradesh; (ii) Lucknow Chikankari – Lucknow, UP; (iii) Pipli Applique work – Orissa; (iv) Upada Jamadhani – Upada, AP.

Till March 2014, 215 Indian goods had been awarded GI status. A detailed study of the reasons for this award is the substance of the exchange between neighbouring countries – a process that needs to be strengthened and expanded to build on our rich legacy of living skills and craft traditions.