Our culture, our identity!
Our identity, our right!
Cultural Diversity Commission
Context
Tamil Nadu is uniquely positioned as a hotbed of diversity in India and the world, with many indigenous, nomadic, coastal, and occupational communities calling the state their home. Regrettably, however, there is little to no recognition of the full extent of the cultural heritage of these marginalised communities. Both law and policy only recognise material properties of exceptional value, ignoring lesser known local sites (used for worship, burials, and community ceremonies) and the rich intangible heritage. Such interpretations leave no room for the community’s self-identification of their culture(s) and the centrality of culture for their social and economic development. As a result, many indigenous cultures face the risk of erasure by threats such as colonisation, Sanskritisation, and capitalism.
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Overview of the Cultural Diversity Commission
The Cultural Diversity Commission hopes to be the first-of-its-kind effort to document, preserve, and protect cultural heritage and cultural identities of the people of Tamil Nadu. The Commission will usher a paradigmatic shift in the policy and legal perception of culture, throwing light on its significance for cross-cutting governmental agendas (from the economy to crime to environmental protection to rural development) and the incorporeal and metaphysical/spiritual elements of culture.
Purposes of the Commission
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The Commission is being envisioned as a forum that can regularly undertake sociocultural geo-mapping, offer policy advice, and contribute to capacity building. The initial functions of the Commission will include:
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Identifying, enumerating, and documenting the intangible and tangible cultures of communities;
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Creating an artist directory and cultural atlas for the State of Tamil Nadu;
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Tracing settlement patterns of communities in order to facilitate real-time disaster response mechanisms;
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Drawing correlations between geo-social patterns such as crime rates to devise community-centric conflict resolution processes; and
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Collectivising young members of cultural communities in governance processes (including the work of the Commission)
Policy and legislative framework of the Commission
It is hoped that the Commission can be established using the legislative framework of the Tamil Nadu Heritage Commission Act (2012), which was enacted to institute a protection regime for material heritage. This narrow framework of defining cultural heritage as just physical structures will disallow the law from extending protection to cultural identities and practices that govern the day-to-day lives of people as mentioned in the context above.
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Hence, Kaani Nilam, led by cultural-political activist Radhika Ganesh, is working to improve and amend the Act of 2012 to better reflect the conceptual premises of the proposed Commission. In this process, we are utilising their past experiences of implementing pilot-scale culture mapping to expand the meaning of cultural heritage, and are using the findings in innovative ways for building youth leadership, delivering effective response to climate crisis and even conflict resolution.
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An expansive amendment to recognise all aspects of culture as heritage to the existing Tamil Nadu Heritage Commission Act (2012) could potentially create the intended protection regime for Tamil cultures.