In recent weeks, if a user opened Sangam, a music-streaming mobile app, they would have been greeted by a collection of 14 songs titled “Durga Puja.” Launched by the union ministry of culture in May this year, the app has a collection of “over 2500 devotional tracks in 24 Indian languages,” as per the ministry’s website. The Durga Puja collection includes songs from the Durga Saptshati—an anthology of songs taken from the Markandeya Purana—and the Amba Ashtakam. An “ashtakam” is a series of eight stotras—a literary genre of Hindu religious texts which are meant to be sung. The Amba Ashtakam is usually attributed to Adi Shankara, an eighth-century theologian, who asserted the divinity of the Vedas and held them as the sole source of knowledge in the world. In August, the landing page of the app featured a collection of 95 items, called the “Shri Amarnath Yatra,” which included slokas and bhajans sourced from Shankara’s Shivashtakam and the Rig Veda. Other collections were dedicated to “Krishna Janmashtami” and “Ganesh Chaturthi.”
The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, a government-funded arts organisation, developed the app under the aegis of a special project called the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives. The NCAA was launched in April 2014, and according to its website it aims to identify and preserve “the cultural heritage of India” by digitising the audio-visual content stored in institutions across the country and “making it accessible to the people.” The app was envisioned as an “outreach of NCAA” and its content has been sourced from the project’s database. According to the IGNCA, Sangam intends to be a “constant companion of millions of devotees both in India and abroad, as part of their daily pooja routines.” Its aim is to draw the tech-savvy generation to the “core of Indian culture,” which includes the “rich and vast tradition of Sanskrit mantras, richas, slokas and Hindi dohas, chalisa and aartis”—various lyrical forms of Hindu rituals and worship. The IGNCA also positioned the app as a platform to promote Hindustani, Carnatic and folk music, in addition to creating an archive of devotional songs, hymns and chants from other faiths like Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Islam.
The IGNCA and NCAA’s lofty ideals aside, the app’s content falls far short of its stated aims. The overwhelming majority of the app’s content comes from the Hindu canon—other than 23 songs in the Sufi category and one song each under the Jain, Buddhist and Sikh listing, the content is mostly Hindu devotional songs. There are even errors in the minimal content related to other religions—the metadata of the sole Buddhist chant erroneously identifies the language as Pali and links it to Surdas, a sixteenth-century Krishna devotee. There is no category called Islam listed in the app. It is also hard to miss the app’s predominant focus on Brahmanical texts and traditions. According to the IGNCA website itself, the “content incorporates recitation from classical texts like The Vedas, Adi Shankaracharya’s Moha Mudgara, Jayadev’s Gita Govinda, Tulsi Das’s Ramcharit Manas, kritis of Thyagaraja,” among others. But the app mostly overlooks the scriptures of other religions, as well as the traditions and folklore of India’s indigenous tribes.
As per the NCAA’s detailed project report, it partnered with 15 government institutes and 15 NGOs to create a digital database of archival content, with an initial target of 30,000 hours of audio-visual recordings. This was the pilot phase of the project and was slated for completion by 31 March 2018. The NCAA finished the pilot phase a few months ahead of schedule, at an estimated cost of Rs 10 crore. Subsequently, in October 2018, the NCAA team, comprised of seven members, started work on the Sangam app. According to Irfan Zuberi, the project manager of the NCAA and the project director of the app, the ministry of culture initially wanted Sangam’s launch to coincide with the 2019 Kumbh Mela. “The ministry’s intent was to create a devotional-music platform which would be useful for people who are going to the Kumbh or participating in the rituals associated with the Kumbh across the country,” he said. While the app has been available on app stores since January, the official launch took place in May.
Zuberi said that the app’s “USP is the use of archival and unpublished content”—as proof, he stated that Sangam has a complete collection of the Vedas. “This has been done by traditional Veda pathins who are the knowledge bearers of their tradition,” he said. Zuberi told me the Vedas were recorded in a traditional format as opposed to the commercial music industry “which uses ambient music to make it fashionable. We have maintained its traditional purity.”
When I asked Zuberi about the selection process for the app’s content, he said that the NCAA team included musicians with an academic background in music who helped curate Sangam’s content from the digitised collection of the NCAA. “It was completely the prerogative of the institutes to choose the content, based on what significant aspect of their archival collection could be digitised or was in need of immediate attention,” he said. One criterion was to ensure that there were no copyright issues. The partner organisations were also asked to select the songs “based on the kind of brief that we had given them on the kind of content we would like to feature, that were then edited in-house,” he said. But the detailed project report of the NCAA clearly lists out the themes for the 2,500 songs on offer during the app’s initial run—“themes such as Mantras, Lord Vishnu (and his various Avatars like Ram and Krishna, etc.), Lord Shiva, Lord Ganesha, Goddess Durga and Devis (such as Lakshmi, Saraswati) etc.”
This focus on the Brahmanical tradition is reflected clearly in the Amarnath Yatra collection which includes a hymn from the Yajur Veda called the Purusha Sukta—Cosmic Being. One of the verses in the hymn is:
“brāhmaṇo'sya mukham-āsīd bāhū rājanyaḥ kṛtaḥ/ ūrū tad-asya yad vaiśyaḥ padbhyāgṃ śūdro ajāyata”—The Brahmaṇ was his mouth, the Kshatriya was made of his two arms, then his two thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Shudra was born.
Many scholars, including BR Ambedkar, have pointed out that the Purusha Sukta made the division of Hindu society into four classes a matter of dogma and laid down an official gradation of society—fixed and permanent—with an ascending scale of reverence, and a descending scale of contempt. “The principle underlying the Purushasukta, is therefore, criminal in intent and anti-social in its result. For its aim is to perpetuate an illegal gain obtained by one class and unjust wrong reflected on another,” Ambedkar wrote.
Since the IGNCA’s inception in 1985, it played its part as a resource and research centre for the arts and as a means of dissemination of information on tribal, folk and contemporary arts. But since the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power in 2014, the culture and tourism ministries focussed predominantly on projects with religious overtones, such as spiritual tourism and development of pilgrimage sites. Like many other institutes under the ministry of culture, the Sangh Parivar has also co-opted the IGNCA.
Within a year of coming to power, the Modi government reconstituted the IGNCA board with members closely associated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Ram Bahadur Rai, a former journalist who advocates the RSS’s agenda of rewriting the Indian constitution, was appointed the head of the institute. Other members include Satchidananda Joshi, the president of the Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal, an RSS-affiliate focused on education; Vasudeo Kamath, the former president of RSS’s cultural wing Sanskar Bharati; DP Sinha from the Sanskar Bharati; and Mahesh Chandra Sharma, the chairman of the Resources and Development Foundation for Integral Humanism, an RSS think-tank based on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s philosophy.
After the new board took charge, one of the first events that the IGNCA organised was the release of a book titled Agriculture Atlas of Madhya Pradesh. It was published by the Centre for Policy Studies, an RSS-linked think-tank, and written by JK Bajaj, the director of CPS. Events associated with the RSS are a routine affair at the IGNCA now.
The ministry of culture has also been actively promoting Vedic content through IGNCA’s Vedic Heritage portal. Its uncritical approach to the text of the Vedas is evident in its description of the Vedas as “unique in its purity and sanctity.” According to the portal, “The text of the Veda is preserved in its pure and original form without any alteration or interpolation even after thousands of years. The Veda is the only unadulterated treasure house of true knowledge. So much so, that even UNESCO declared it as part of the Intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”
It is pertinent to note that apart from the tradition of Vedic chanting, the UNESCO also lists 11 other items ranging from the Sanskrit-theatre tradition from Kerala known as Kutiyattam, to the brass and copper utensil-making craft of the Thatheras community in Punjab, to the Parsi new-year Nawrouz and even the Kumbh Mela. However, out of this “intangible heritage,” Vedic chanting, Ramlila, Yoga and the Kumbh Mela have received disproportionate state-patronage since 2014. The Vedas are also the only cultural icons that have a dedicated portal and documentation project.
The ministry’s vision of IGNCA’s mandate is evident in its “demand for grants” submitted since the financial year 2015. In 2015, the ministry’s budgetary request for IGNCA included two projects—Rs 50 lakh for the Vedic heritage project and Rs 25 lakh for a puppet show on Vivekananda. In 2016, the demand was for Rs 63 lakh for the puppet show on Vivekananda, which was now going to the United States and Canada. The following year, there was a single item in the budget proposal—Rs 50 lakh for the Vedic heritage portal.
When I questioned Zuberi about the focus on Hinduism in the app’s content, Zuberi said that “it’s not as if we are focussing only on one religion per se.” According to him, “Right now, the majority of content we happen to have is only Hindu content,” and that was because the “music content that we currently have in the archives features primarily things connected to one religion.” Zuberi said that “it’s not as if that is an intended part of implementation ... now that the NCAA will continue to grow over the next five years and more varied content of music will come in, it will find its way into Sangam as well.”
As per the IGNCA, the NCAA will expand Sangam’s collection extensively by adding 4,500 songs to the app by March 2020. The additional content will be a mix of archival material and new recordings. Zuberi said that as the NCAA receives more archival contributions from varied sources, such as the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the app will start reflecting a “pan-religion” ethos. However, he also told me that the NCAA has “commissioned six music composers who are creating music based on devotional texts and content, largely in Sanskrit, such as various sutras and mantras which we thought could be reinterpreted or are missing on other music apps.” Despite the app’s attempts to showcase India’s diversity, the focus on Brahmanical content remains.