TRENDS
The creativity mantra
SHARADA RAMANATHAN
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Can the concept of Creative Industries be transformed into a new vision?
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The Creative sector is ... a way of life that generates wealth as a sustainable resource.
Not a new concept: Traditional artists have been creating and trading their wares for centuries. Photo: Sandeep Saxena
RWANDA, a small land-locked country in Africa, is remembered by its epical civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis. But Rwanda has moved on, and 10 years hence, welcomes you as a stunningly transformed nation that is transcending discrimination and conflict with the maturity of a developed society.
Rwanda's early efforts to reach out to the world have been through its cultural identity. At a global conference on Creative Economy in Kigali, President Kagame reiterated that Rwanda's greatest healer has been art and culture. And this conference was set in the annual Festival of Pan-African Dance, Rwanda's biggest national event that celebrates individual and collective African identities through the arts.
The Rwandan Prime Minister, in his opening remarks, pronounced that the creative industries would be a primary economic activity. He publicly declared that his country would develop its own model of cultural enterprise, and not submit to western paradigms in its reconstruction project. And his assertion was worthy of his experience in a society that had healed with such sensitivity and swiftness, by drawing from its own cultural resources.
New global mantra
Creative Industries is a new global mantra. Its sudden surge in the last decade as a business sector suggests that even the champions of capitalistic globalisation admit to the Creative sector as filling an unstated gap in an already crowded global agenda.
Creative Industry as a concept is not new to the realm of arts and culture. Traditional craftsmen, dancers and musicians have been creating, wandering and trading their wares for centuries, and inventing new cultural contours that blur political boundaries.
The 7th century Silk Route epitomised this. But today, the dominant blueprint for Creative Industries is driven by the new globalised media age and has boomed as an "Industrial" sector with unprecedented momentum. Predictably, this blueprint is driven by the western world. Europe is way ahead. According to a report released by the Mayor of London in 2005, the Creative Industry is the core business of London and contributes more than 50 per cent of London's core business activity.
The U.S. is developing a replicable "Creative Economy" model in Philadelphia, based on `creative' professions ranging from software to fashion design. In most European countries, Australia and New Zealand, "Creative Industries" is integrated with universities' curricula as promising career options.
In the fast lane
Predictably again, the Global south is trying to level with the fast lane. Brazil has been the hotbed of discourse on world policy for Creative Industries. The International Forum for Creative Industries, backed by the UNDP and UNCTAD, will be headquartered in Brazil.
In China, Creative Industries has become a core sector of engagement and interestingly, does not entirely follow the western model. China's approach separates the treatment of general cultural activity from performing arts and literature to design) from the electronic media and film. In contrast, Japan and Korea have strategically developed the Animation and Game Industry to gain a global competitive edge in the technological sector and categorised it as a creative industry. In Africa, the Creative Industries Development Framework, launched by the government, will promote Gauteng as a creative Mecca.
In India, the unorganised creative sector has traditionally referred to performing and fine arts and crafts, but quickly adapted itself to the new `Industry' definition by including the range from film to fashion. The Planning Commission set up a committee for Creative Industries only in 2004 and it is early days yet to speculate as to how it will address the complexity of its cultural sector.
The current trend of the Creative Industries sector has created a new hierarchy of the dominant versus the dominated leading to appropriation and exploitation of human creativity. Arguably, one of the keys to the success of the new media entertainment business is that it is recycling audio-visual cultural material created by the grassroots genius, exploiting their intellectual property and generating a standardised business sector that excludes, and even distorts, its very sources of business.
Is Creative Industries sector is burgeoning in this framework at the cost of creativity itself? Could the emergence of the Creative Industries sector be a new opportunity to challenge the nature of the discourse and advocate an alternative global vision?
Creative expressions are manifestations of tradition, and the imagination of social, cultural and civilisational memory. Creativity evolves its own identity. For example, the Langar and Manganiyar folk singers of Rajasthan perform the repertoire of two vastly different traditions: Hindu and central Asian Sufi music. And their identities lie primarily in their musical experience.
Cultural expressions enable relatively unsullied communication even among politically tumultuous societies. Right here at home in south Asia, cross-border cultural activity sustains Indo-Pak communication even when diplomatic negotiations are turbulent. This has led to unfazed artistic synergies including joint ventures in Cinema.
All great civilisations demonstrate that the creative industries are embedded within their traditional environs and are nurtured by the grassroots communities. The Creative Industries have to enable the grassroots genius not to be merely a source and beneficiary, but a partner in change.
Embedded in this vision, the Creative sector is not merely an industry that generates business and capital, but a way of life that generates wealth as a sustainable resource.
Within the dominant globalisation agenda, capital formation is confused with wealth creation, as much as growth is equated with development.
Wealth creation
The Creative sector has the capacity to not merely expand, but shift the basis of wealth creation to include wisdom and knowledge traditions, spiritual traditions, cultural wealth, environmental wealth, and economic wealth as only one aspect; and the basis of wealth creation can only be pluralism and grassroots opportunity; and maximisation, not exploitation.
Can this nascent trend called Creative Industries be transformed into a new vision? Or will it be yet another missed opportunity? Will some of the bigger and older countries take a leaf out of Rwanda's book? Will we see the emergence of a new global force that will enable a Rwandan Prime Minister to fulfil his promise?
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