Who Can Afford to Compete for Culture?

Heard, Unheard: Stories from the Roots

Gopal Singh Chouhan I gopalpostbox@gmail.com

I recently read an essay by Emily Marks, Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and a national arts leader, titled “Who Can Afford To Stay In Arts Leadership?” It's a question I haven't been able to shake since.

Reading it from the Indian cultural ecosystem, it led me to a question of my own. But before I get there, I want to ask a more basic one: Why did our cultural sector become this competitive in the first place?

To be clear, this isn't an argument against large cultural organisations or corporate art companies. India needs them. They've professionalised cultural production and brought Indian artists to bigger audiences. But that is not the question I want to examine here.

The competition itself is relatively new. There was a time when a cultural organisation could approach a local business, a philanthropist or a government department and build a relationship around a festival or programme, often without having to compete through a highly structured process. That world has not entirely disappeared, but it has changed significantly.

As CSR became a formal, budgeted and board reported line item, and as more organisations, corporate, institutional and independent, entered the cultural funding space, a genuinely useful pool of money turned into a genuinely competitive one. More applicants chasing more structured and better documented processes naturally produced competition.

None of that is a conspiracy. It's what happens when funding professionalises faster than the ecosystem does. But it raises the question I actually want to sit with: Who can afford to compete for culture?

The professionalisation of cultural funding has created a new imbalance. The organisations best equipped to access CSR budgets and institutional funding are increasingly those that already have the machinery to compete for them. A small festival organiser in a town or village is often chasing the same pool of money with a fraction of that machinery, no fundraising team, no proposal writers and no communications department.

Looking fundable now requires infrastructure that many genuinely valuable cultural initiatives simply don't have. I've experienced this myself. I organised the Bikaner Art & Culture Festival for two editions. The challenge was never ideas, artists or audience. It was continuity. There was no multi year sponsorship structure, so every edition meant restarting the funding conversation from zero. You can't build a team you're not sure you can pay next year. You can't build an archive when funding only covers the event itself.

Momasar Utsav makes this concrete. This community festival in a small Rajasthan village ran for eleven editions from 2011 to 2023, bringing together over 200 folk artists and craftspeople, free and open to all. Its organisers announced that the 2023 edition would be its final one. Eleven years of authenticity, community trust and deep cultural relationships and yet it ended. Because authenticity doesn't automatically translate into a sponsorship deck.

The Rajasthan Kabir Yatra tells a similar story.

For years, this travelling festival has carried the poetry of Kabir and the Bhakti Sufi tradition into villages and small towns. Its journey has depended heavily on community hosting, volunteer effort, partnerships and a continuous search for modest and often uncertain support, rather than a stable, long term funding structure. It has introduced audiences across India to folk and Sufi singers who might otherwise never reach a stage of that size.

But a festival built this way lives with the same precarious year to year uncertainty as many other independent cultural initiatives. Its depth of cultural relationships doesn't easily show up as a number on a CSR dashboard and its survival often depends on whether enough people care enough, every single year, to keep it going.

The real problem is when scale becomes a proxy for value. "We reach millions" fits neatly into a CSR presentation. "We've worked with the same community for fifteen years" doesn't. Even though both are valuable.

A rural festival that transformed one village's cultural life may be just as important as a national one that reached five cities, but our funding systems know how to measure the second far better than the first. This isn't about taking money from large players and it isn't about handing money to small ones simply because they're small. The question is whether we can build an ecosystem where different scales of cultural work coexist, where one model doesn't become the only pathway through which resources flow.

There's a hidden cost to being small that we rarely discuss. A founder is also the fundraiser, producer, administrator and communications person, expected to compete with institutions that have entire departments for each of those roles. That isn't simply a difference in size. It's a difference in access to the infrastructure required to access money. Perhaps CSR needs to ask different questions. Instead of how many people will you reach?, what if we also asked, how deeply are you embedded in this community?

Instead of funding only the annual event, what if we funded the organisation behind it, its people, its archive, its governance and its capacity to survive long enough to become an institution? Culture doesn't work in one year cycles. Traditions take generations. Audiences take years to build. Institutions take longer still. A small regional organisation with guaranteed five year support could employ people properly, document artists, build young audiences and actually experiment, rather than spending every year proving it deserves to exist for one more.

This brings me back to Emily Marks' question. If the first question is who can afford to stay in the arts, perhaps Indian culture needs to ask: Who can afford to compete for the resources that let them stay? There is immense cultural work happening in villages, small towns and community spaces, with artists whose names may never reach a national stage.

Some of these initiatives don't need to become large. Their value lies precisely in their intimacy and rootedness. The answer isn't choosing between big and small. It's building an ecosystem where scale doesn't become the price of survival. Because when a small festival disappears, we don't just lose an event. We lose relationships. We lose institutional memory. And sometimes, we lose a cultural ecosystem that took decades to build.

Culture needs both the large stage and the village square. Our funding ecosystem should make room for both.