Sunil Kant Munjal, founder patron of the Serendipity Arts Foundation, says that the festival has been successful in bringing the world to our regional and cultural arts, rather than us taking them to the world. By Chahak Mittal

What cultural space do you intend to achieve through the festival?

We intend to promote arts and its production from South Asia. It will aim at creating additional centres for arts and culture, while also showcasing the diversity of our cultural heritage to the region and the rest of the world. We also make a conscious effort to make art accessible to all and not to stay confined to a particular section of the society.

Why do you think it is important to encourage arts at such a large scale?

Our identity lies in our heritage and speaks volumes about our deep cultural roots, our people and their shared histories. Art in the South Asian region has been intrinsically inter-disciplinary and to showcase just a fraction of it, we need a large scale infrastructure and production ability.

But as per reports, over the last 30 years, we have lost about 30 per cent of our inherited arts and cultural heritage (one of the largest in the world) because it’s not remunerative and young people are moving away from it. The scale of this initiative not only helps the artist but also brings the required attention towards his offering. Through the festival, we have a scope to create a platform to showcase some of our traditional, modern and contemporary art and craft forms and shed light on the importance of patronage for their future. It’s an attempt to engage with the sector and help artisans with design and process inputs, and connect them with markets both in India and overseas. We also hope to nurture a possibility to build sustainable livelihoods for them and their families. If we can do that, we have the potential to create the largest job opportunities in the nation.

What is new at the festival this year?

Our programming evolves organically every year. With each edition bringing different world views and new partnerships, we hope to develop the idea of cultural spaces. Many of the exhibitions, performances and/or visual art pieces are either commissioned or comprise original content, curated specially for the festival. It is an experience that provides an opportunity to engage with never-seen-before projects in public spaces.

This year, we are looking at a few new venues for the festival and a much tighter operation in terms of the volunteers’ programme. We also are introducing an app for the visitors and people associated with the festival. The app will principally have all the aspects of registration and event-scheduling to make the experience smoother. It’s our attempt to reduce the use of paper and create a mandate for sustainable measures for events like this by making an efficient use of technological solutions.

What is your intention behind including businessmen in this festival?

It’s to raise the attention of the patrons, because worldwide, whether it’s education or healthcare or arts or any other cultural activities, they grow, stabilise and thrive on patronage. Be it any major museum in the world, a university or a research institute, they all have support through philanthropy and corporates. This is one of the reasons why we want to introduce the festival to the corporates and the big businesses in India. If you go back in history, the patrons of art used to be royalty. At some point, the government became the patron and it has done what it could do. But it’s not enough. Today, we are using e-commerce to reach out to customers around the world. Why should our traditional arts and craft sector not have an access to this after all? If it can be branded and positioned appropriately, it will truly build India’s soft power.

Along with arts, the festival also blends educational workshops with it. Any specific motive behind this?

We have been emphasising on the need for arts education as a means for community-building and encourage community-led and engaged learning. Also, largely, these workshops are meant for making the experience of the festival more immersive and inspiring for all the demographics and especially, the younger generation. There are workshops and talks about preservation of the ecosystem and encouraging sustainability practices through arts.

The workshop models look at an enhanced proposition of driving creative inclusion, which greatly includes the differently-abled and address their requirements too. In fact, as part of our festival curation, ever since our inception, we have been offering complete accessibility to the arts through a number of workshops and special projects like Senses by Siddhant Shah. The purpose here is to have a broader spectrum of engagement for the people attending the festival, from different age brackets. We will also have workshops on theatre, film, music, dance and photography among others, which would be very informative and educational on its own.

Why do you think it’s important to bring various genres together?

Conversations about arts in India have mostly concluded one thing — art is either seen as elitist or mediocre. Serendipity was set up to change this perception. Also, we felt that India’s arts, over the centuries, had somehow lost their inter-disciplinary nature. It existed mostly in silos, like the West. It’s quite evident with today’s generation how several arts have been dying or losing their essence. Serendipity was developed to address issues like — bringing back inter-discipline, reviving ancient arts through support and proper documentation, re-introducing patronage and injecting enthusiasm in the arts among the youth. We also aim to initiate conversations across fields, disciplines, experts and genres. It acts like a cultural platform that can make art inclusive, immersive and accessible to all.

How do you see the Indian arts and culture industry evolving and spreading to a global audience?

The arts and culture of our country has been inseparable from our individualistic identities. We are a diverse nation with broad offerings in traditional and contemporary arts. Through Serendipity, we have been trying to demystify the isolated clusters and bring them together by building more cultural centres in the country.

Goa was a conscious choice when it comes to naturally interfacing the global audience with the arts from the South Asia region, all at one place. We have been successful in bringing the world to the arts, rather than taking the arts to the world. Such festivals give us that chance to promote new art experiments in the South Asian region and support art production of local and tribal artists. Perhaps, we all have to think in that direction of creating that sense of intrigue in the global markets and recognised centres of arts and culture. They can prove to be a better exposure to South Asia. It can also become India’s most powerful strategic weapon in the 21st century.

India needs a robust policy environment that promotes culture and makes it easier to host world-class art and cultural events. We need the private sector, citizens and the government to work in unison. Flow of financial resources into this sector must be encouraged, and the government at the centre, state and civic level must remove all forms of bureaucracy and red tape when it comes to permissions and use of public facilities.

Promoting culture is not the responsibility of a single person or entity. It is rather a national responsibility. What will also help the arts and culture of this region evolve and spread, is more cohesion, along with purpose. Multiple ministries and government departments currently handle different aspects of art and culture; their efforts must become more coordinated with each other and more sustainable practices must be put to a regular use.

(The Serendipity Arts Festival 2019 will be held in Panaji, Goa from December 15-22.)