By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, 08.11.2016 (Scroll.in): Cultural diplomacy is putting a positive spin to the India-Australia bilateral relationship and also enriching the Australian economy.
The first ever Confluence Festival of India in Australia, touted as one of the largest ever foreign cultural festivals to be organised in the continent country, rolled out 25 productions showcased over 70 different events at iconic landmarks across seven cities.
For decades, India’s soft power potential has remained largely untapped, but the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government has been focusing on raising India’s profile in the international arena through cultural diplomacy. Indian High Commissioner to Australia, Mr Navdeep Suri, strongly believes that “India is a super power when it comes to soft power and Prime Minister Modi has been adroit in recognising the potential of yoga and cultural diplomacy in raising India’s profile around the world”.
The country is leveraging culture as a tool of diplomacy to strengthen its reputation as an innovative, creative and culturally robust nation in this age of likes, tweets and hits.
As former Australian High Commissioner to India, Mr Peter Varghese says, “Public diplomacy is an essential handmaiden of traditional diplomacy and its importance will only increase in a global economy and a global media stuffed full of rapidly changing images. For our relationship with India, public diplomacy is essential if we are to build the strategic partnership which both governments desire and which our converging interests makes necessary”.
“But in the end the hard yards of public diplomacy are gained not by governments but by individuals and groups. It is the networks in the arts, in business, in education and in all the other nooks and crannies of community life which underpin a people-to-people relationship”, Mr Varghese adds.
The 12-week long festival of all things Indian – dance, music, theatre, visual arts, cartooning, puppetry, khadi, and ofcourse yoga – has struck a chord that will endure long after its curtains with a performance of Jatayu Moksham from the Ramayana by The Kalakshetra Foundation in Canberra on November 8th.
Sponsored by the Indian government, the Ministry of Culture and Indian Council for Cultural Relations [ICCR] have pitched in more than INR 2.5 crore and the Australian Government has granted AUD 250,000 for the festival. In addition, there has been plenty of support in kind from state and local authorities. This includes the gala opening at the Sydney Opera House, which was supported by the New South Wales state government. Some of the venues were made available on a discounted or revenue sharing basis and this has helped bring down the costs considerably.
“The total in kind support that we received, including the media support from the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], would be worth well over a million dollars”, says Mr Suri, who decided to use the Public Private Partnership model, riding high on the successful festivals he had previously organised in South Africa and Egypt. It resulted in hosting an international class show unbridled by bureaucratic constraints.
“By supplementing government resources with private sector and local contributions, we got the flexibility to work with local groups and forge the kind of collaboration that one saw in Sydney Opera House on September 18. We were also able to do special media launch events for the festival and reach out to new audiences via social media. This would be much harder if we were only reliant on government funding”, Mr Suri adds.
In return, the festival has made a substantial contribution to the local economy. “On a conservative scale the festival has contributed over AUD 2 million to the Australian economy from venue hires, sale of tickets, hospitality etc.,” says Mr Sanjoy Roy, Managing Director of Indian-based entertainment company, Teamwork Arts, that was entrusted with the responsibility of organising the events.
Securing iconic venues, such as the Opera House in Sydney, the Federation Square in Melbourne, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane, Festival Centre in Adelaide, the Old Parliament in Canberra, the State Theatre in Perth, was a challenge.
Mr Roy says, “Once the mainstream venues understood what we wished to present they were enthused and welcoming and created gaps in their plans to host festival programmes. What helped was that we reached out to them well in time and discussed jointly what would or could work in terms of audience engagement and what would drive ticket sales”.
Teamworks has been working in Australia since 2002. Mr Roy says, “The professionalism that technology and production crews displayed in their dealings with artists and my colleagues was always in keeping with best practices and Australia’s reputation of having excellent sound engineers, technicians and theatre staff. We have always found that the arts going audiences in Australia have both welcomed and celebrated the diversity and richness of Indian performing and visual arts”.
So did the festival catch the fancy of mainstream Australians and succeed in going beyond the stereotypes – cricket, Bollywood, Kashmir, poverty? Mr Suri says, “I feel that perceptions about India are changing anyway, thanks to the growth of the Indian economy and the impact made by Prime Minister Modi in the international arena. But through the festival, we wanted to convey that in addition to the well-known classical art forms, there is also a youthful and vibrant India that is comfortable in its own skin, happy to experiment with different art forms and quite unselfconscious about borrowing from others”.
The above was reflected in Raghu Dixit’s Kannada rock, Sonam Kalra‘s Sufi Gospel project, in Piya Behrupiya – a uniquely Indian take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and cartoonist Ajit Ninan’s talk about political humour. While the Raghu Dixit performances were dominated by audiences from the Diaspora, all other shows had 60 to 65 percent mainstream audiences.
As Christopher Zinn, a consumer campaigner and former foreign correspondent residing in Sydney’s iconic Bondi beach area says, “While many Australians might be hard pressed to realise there was a specific festival, few might have overlooked the many and varied ways Indian and Indians have been active, alive and on display in our public life over the past few months. As a result, the exotic energy of India, which contrasts so sharply with average Australia, is becoming both more familiar and welcome to the mainstream”.
The High Commission had worked with selected journalists from Australia’s main print outlets, arranging a few to visit India before the festival to interview artists and capture the stories behind renowned institutions like Nrityagram and Kalakshetra. Publicity about the festival in specialised outlets like Time Out also played a major role in driving audiences to the shows.
“Our media partnership with ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] clearly played a big role in generating so much coverage for the festival in mainstream media. I am delighted that I could persuade Michelle Guthrie, the new CEO of ABC, that our festival would fit well into her own plans to bring greater diversity into ABC content”, Mr Suri adds.
The response has been gratifying even in the remote town of Alice Springs, where Confluence partnered with the Desert Song festival and in Perth, where Delhi-based artist Vibhor Sogani’s art installation Mahatma in Me was showcased at Elizabeth Quay. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s saying, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”, the installation has subtle images of Gandhi and some impressions of his thoughts expressed in mirror finish stainless steel. Mr Sogani says, “It attracted people to see their own reflection in the image of the Mahatma, pause and possibly introspect… a moment of self-realisation and the responsibility we all carry to bring about the change”.
Similarly, Sunaina Suneja’s exhibition Bapu: The Craftpersons Vision in Brisbane and her Khadi fashion show at the India Australia Business and Community Awards [IABCA] in Sydney were warmly received. She had styled the garments for an Australian audience, for Spring-Summer 2016-17 and beyond, enforcing the natural fibre’s versatility and global appeal.
“The architecture for Confluence to become an annual event has been put in place and I am pretty sure it will be back in 2017”, says Mr Suri, who is moving on as Indian Ambassador to Abu Dhabi after a brief 18-month stint in Australia.
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