Can creative genealogies be owned?

Indian traditional arts are largely centred around community experience or samajikta and have been transmitted for centuries through tradition, as embodied craft, paddhati. This throws up some inherent challenges for practitioners today, with regards to emerging ideas on intellectual property and ownership.

What are the notions of knowing and doing that rule such practices? How does their transformation now, into objects that can be owned and sold, stand in contrast to their stated purpose for centuries? As artists and art enablers we ask the question, where and how to locate traditional arts within 21st century performance contexts while conserving not merely formal but also their conceptual bases?

A bold step to appropriately represent Traditional Indian Arts within the new paradigm of Intellectual Property Rights.

A series of dialogues and consultations to understand nature of knowledge and stakeholdership.

In this first consultation we frame the problem with the help of practitioners, scholars and observers of Indian traditions in knowledge, art and jurisprudence. This includes a deep dive into how artists understand art as traditional knowledge and the challenges they face today with regard to ownership, intellectual property and livelihood when performing, teaching/learning, archiving, experimenting and recording music as part of newer spaces both live and digital. Over these two days we will also enable conversations with legal experts and practitioners in digital technology and AI, to further the questioning into the future of art performance contexts.

A collective consultation about challenges and concerns such as:

1. Is there a mode of ownership of knowledge and practise in Traditional Indian Music and Dance?
2. How do practitioners learn with a Guru, get inspired to experiment and extrapolate, improvise and perform? How does this process transform into lineages and genealogies – sampradaya and paddhati?
3. How does knowledge become artistic expression in a performance?
4. Who owns art knowledge? Is it collectively owned by composers, artists and audience communities etc.?
5. How has Indian Traditional music and dance knowledge been re-contextualised and objectified in the current performing arts market?
6. Do we need a radical conceptual rethinking that can be used by traditional arts practitioners in the digital space and which can influence future policy framing?

Over the two days dialogues will be initiated by conducting four panel discussions. The position of the panels is as follows:

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We request your generous support to enable this symposium. Donations of any amount are welcome! Following are a few options available. All donors can claim tax exemption.

Donations below INR 10,000 will be accepted via Razorpay/UPI. If you are making a donation above INR 10,000 please do it by electronic transfer (NEFT/RTGS) only. Please write to dakshayani@baithak.org for account details, receipts etc.

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