Written by Laavanyaa Joshi
Edited by Nishtha Chakraborty
Illustrated by Deepshikha Banerjee
Our country has always been open to diversity and it can be seen with our cultural, artistic, and literary influences. India has managed to further enhance its cultural landscape from influences that come from its own diverse culture and from around the world, it also left its mark with its rich heritage. This is the continuing interchange that has modeled the artistic, musical, and literary spheres within and outside India.
The concept of cultural confluence in India spans many centuries. For instance, the era of the Mughals introduced to India the artistic styles of Persia and Central Asia, which later blossomed into Mughal art, characterized by minute and highly intricate designs on architecture. Great artists, like Ustad Mansur, a master painter of the Mughals, combined Indian and Persian techniques to create minute works full of vibrancy. Presently, the influence of modern Western movements of art, such as Impressionism and Cubism, is noticed even in Indian art. In music also, one can see an accommodation of Persian and Arabic styles in Hindustani and Carnatic music. Probably the best example of this is the sitar, a bulky, rather bulbous long-necked fretted instrument with sympathetic strings, played by the genius Ravi Shankar and introduced to the rest of the world. It was Shankar's collaborations, like the one with George Harrison of The Beatles, that introduced Indian music to the global masses.
If we look a little bit further into the Colonial Era to understand the impact of globalization on Indian culture in the colonial period by reading works like those of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; he wrote both in Bengali and English, merging Indian themes and Western forms. In this period, the colonial period introduced to the Indian education system the works of writers like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Wordsworth. The influence on the Indian writers was immense, and it urged them to adopt and adapt to these styles.
More recently, Bollywood music has been under the visible influence of Western pop, hip-hop, and electronic music. Artists like A.R. Rahman have fabricated the above styles in his compositions effortlessly, turning them into global hits. The Oscar-winning soundtrack that he created for "Slumdog Millionaire" was a quintessential example of this cultural fusion.
It is clear that a part of our culture consists of adopting influences from the world and fusing it with our own; but conversely, India has a lot to give back to the world too. It's not without cause that intricate patterns and motifs in Indian textiles and crafts have been serving as inspiration to designers the world over. It is in the work of such diverse talent as British artist Anish Kapoor that one sees an almost worldwide appeal of Indian art. His many works borrow from or allude to Indian spiritual and aesthetic traditions. In any case, the use of Indian instruments and melodies could be felt as far away from India as in international artists such as Madonna, who used Indian sounds for her album "Ray of Light," and through the popularity of yoga music worldwide, where one can hear Indian chanting and instrumentation. The influence of Indian literature can also be observed in the works of Western authors. Of course, contemporary Indian writers, like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, have gained worldwide popularity. Their works resonate with a fusion of Indian and Western literary traditions. In this way, this inborn philosophical depth and richness of the narrative characteristic of Indian epics, from the Mahabharata to the Ramayana, have generated a number of influences all over the world. It is in the way that the cultural confluence between India and the rest of the world erupts so vibrantly in art, music, and literature, underlining a two-way current of ideas and aesthetics in a state of flux. In that respect, this interaction enriches both Indian culture and global artistic expressions in the making of a vibrant tapestry of interlinked cultures. The more vigorously we embrace and celebrate such influences, the more creativity and understanding will thrive in a multicultural world.
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