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The Society of Fools
Amrita Gupta-Singh features the initiative called ‘The Gobbet Society’ (The Society of Fools) by the Santiniketan based artist Sanchayan Ghosh and says that it is one of the innovative alternative platforms that helps the ‘uninitiated’ to produce and engage with their own works of art.
Santiniketan, the site of Rabindranath Tagore’s experiments of an alternative education based on the ancient Gurukul system, a holistic amalgamation of modernity and tradition, nature and culture, urban and folk aesthetics is posited in the cultural map of India for various aspects. The doyens of Modern Indian Art, Nandalal Bose, Binode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij transformed Santiniketan via their progressive ideals and interventions in public art. This site also has a history of theatre and stagecraft, music and cinema, presenting a cultural legacy that is multi-dimensional. In the present context, Santiniketan, like Kolkata is on the throes of change with the penetration of real estate, the increase in cars replacing the environment-friendly bi-cycles and confrontation with new urban cultures like the media and information technology. It would be pertinent to ask the question how artists in Santiniketan are negotiating with these penetrative realities.
An assessment of cosmopolitan cultural forms in this ‘heritage site’ is of considerable and intrinsic interest for those concerned to understand modernity as a global phenomenon. These cosmopolitan forms raise a larger set of terminological and interpretive problems about the way in which public life and public systems are culturally articulated. How do we hypothesize the arena called public culture in which emergent cosmopolitan cultural forms are re-negotiated? Sanchayan Ghosh, a young artist and pedagogue in the Painting Department of Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, is involved in a unique public art experiment that becomes a discursive site in which the entire community in Santiniketan actively participates. He has initiated a society called “Mono Gobbet Society” which translated means a Society of Fools. Given Santiniketan’s intellectual pride, this term almost seems insulting in its implications, but when one delves deeper, various socio-political and cultural concerns are approximated in these ‘foolish gestures’ that the participants indulge in. As part of the RamKinkar Baij Centenary Seminar, Sanchayan Ghosh presented a video presentation, contextualizing the discursive activities of this society. An overview:
GOBBET DAY: 1ST AUGUST 2006
MONO ACTING COMPETITION- Santiniketan, My Dearest
Organized by MONO GOBBET SOCIETY, SANTINIKETAN
VENUE-NATYA GHAR, SANTINKETAN
Context:
Sanitiniketan given its cultural legacy and the heritage it carries with itself in the recent past has been confronting with new urban cultures of the city and specially the tools of urban culture like media and the digital world. A site which proclaimed the modernity of the early 20th century is on the cross-roads of an urban- rural juxtaposition and it has its obvious mark on the cultural practices in Santiniketan. Interestingly, there is lot of apprehension about Santiniketan and its contemporanity all over India which has always tried to frame Santiniketan from the point of view of a traditional institute (Indian traditionality).But as an insider one always experiences a growing community which is looking towards the appropriation of the urban in the rural context. Today Santiniketan becomes a more vulnerable site with its duality and dialectics and as such it is also becoming a new site for nurturing individual differences and co-existence. The present project evolved out of this urge to map this growing community.
Concept:
Santiniketan has always been an exponent in evolving methodologies in community based interactive events. Since 1930s, with various events like Briksharopan, Halokarshan and other ritualistic activities, it has been practicing a community based cultural activity that has been successful in dissolving the performer and viewer positions. Basically, the most important criteria for any community based activity is to participate in the present cultural practices and disappear, but the most important aspect is the insider-outsider situation. The Gobbet day activity is an attempt to evolve ongoing community based activity that will operate from the position of an insider. Hence, everybody who is a part of the Mono Gobbet Society is equally part of the context and has no space to complain and this is how the society itself is contextualized. This society is at present made up of students of Kala Bhavan with no fixed membership and the responsibility to carry it on depends on individual choices; anybody can leave the society and join at any point. This Society of Fools declared August 1, 2006 as the GOBBET DAY to begin its maiden venture into the fools’ domain.
On the Gobbet Day, the Mono Gobbet Society planned to organize an mono- acting competition to decide the Voice of Santiniketan (an appropriation of popular television events like Voice of India, Indian idol etc) with the theme Santiniketan My Dearest. This event was basically a game and like every game it had its rules. Each actor was given a minute’s time to prove his/her love for Santiniketan but non-verbally. The idea was to subvert the whole existence of an invisible community whose voice cannot be heard or acknowledged. So each participant acted for one minute in front of a camera which was placed in a closed created room on the back stage of Natyaghar, the main site for any cultural activity in Santiniketan. The audience who were all invited as judges saw a projected experience of the performances. Like the performer, the audience was also live documented and projected on a separate screen next to the projection of the actors. Each of the judges/audience was given three different colored fans to decide on the gradation of the performance. Each performance was preceded with a gong (a very common method implemented to begin any cultural event in Santiniketan).
As the event progressed, the whole context of the performer-viewer situation dissolved into the context of who is the real performer. Finally, the three performers were decided according to the grading and they were given Golden Chhatim (1st prize), Silver Chhatim (2nd prize) and Only Chhatim (Third Prize). Chhatim is the leaf of a tree that is considered to be auspicious and is used in various activities of this site. The whole ideation is very organic and open-ended, with no fixed agenda, where the idea of the author, the idea of responsibility and accountability is questioned.
Post-Script:
Sanchayan Ghosh was inspired by the idea of the “Fools Club” that was initiated by Sukumar Roy in the early 20th century and also the Gambhira Song tradition of Malda (West- Bengal) in the 19th century where residents initiated a protest against feudalism and Europeanization of Indian culture via songs; But these interventions were not interrogated but were seen as ‘happenings’ without any fixed political agenda. Sanchayan brings in these ideas in the activities of the Mono Gobbet Society; the future activities of this society consists of identifying the trees planted in Santiniketan over the last fifty years and record the heartbeat of trees via an instrument that will imagine the same, here the intervention will question whose responsibility is it to protect the environment of Santiniketan, given the tourist value that the place has acquired over the years. Another planned activity is identifying sold land in Santiniketan, voraciously bought by the affluent class of Kolkata which equates land ownership in this heritage site to an elevated social status; Most of this land is not functional; The Gobbet Society will “own land for one day” in one of these non-functional demarcated sites and perform foolish gestures, gestures that are not-preplanned but spontaneous.
The penetration of capitalist forces and consumption driven market economy into the sylvan/rural locale of Santiniketan is a part of the ideological transformation associated with the settings and interests of a burgeoning public culture. This term is more than a rubric for collectively thinking about aspects of modern life, and allows us to hypothesize not a type of cultural phenomenon but a zone of cultural debate. Sanchayan Ghosh’s Gobbet Society can be characterized as a zone where other forms and domains of culture encounter, interrogate and contest each other in new and unexpected ways, will these interventions generate a conscious community or a movement/manifesto remains a matter of debate.
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