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The Arts as Education 17
outcomes of social activity. They are
expressions or applications of creative
skill and imagination through visual
mediums such as painting or sculpture,
or through performance such as music
and dance, or acting. An art form is a
conventionally established form of
artistic composition, such as an oral or
written text, which could be presented
as a narrative composition depicted
through a pata chitra 8 or rendered
through kathagayaki 9 , as is done in the
Pandavani 10 . Thus, the arts are subjects
of study concerned primarily with human
culture. This makes it necessary to
investigate them “against the
background of physio-geographical
realities, racial strands, agricultural
functions and social organisations which
have contributed in giving them a
distinctive character” 11 . Parallel
existence of variegated, complex streams
of performing and visual art forms has
created multicoloured pictures. If one
views the arts as a creation that has no
purpose or meaning beyond itself, it
becomes what in popular parlance is
known as art for art’s sake. Antithetical
to this is the view that the arts are a
blueprint for a better society. They have
a purpose beyond being a mere display
of creativity. Each of the arts –
irrespective of whether they are
performing, non-performing, visual – has
inherent values. This makes each art a
source for education, holistic in nature.
Performing and non-performing art
forms in India have, down the ages, been
coupled with the community’s world
view. They have been handed down from
one generation to the next, creating an
oral tradition of transmitting knowledge.
Within the performing arts, singing,
playing of musical instruments, dancing,
acting, recitation, narration, acrobatic
feats along with visual components such
as crafts, attire, weaving, drawing and
painting, make-up, design – these merge
into a single whole. Ironically, down the
years, each integral unit has been,
segregated from the other. This
segregation might have achieved the
small aim of giving these areas an
individual status as solo art forms. But
it has, in the process, tended to reduce
their size and stature. Each of these
areas has a philosophy, sociology,
history, language, vocabulary and a
cultural idiom, fusing to become an
integrated whole through rendition or
depiction.
The Cross-curricular Character of
the Arts
There are two ways of looking for a
relationship between the performing arts
and the other subjects. One way would
be to look for the arts and aesthetics in
areas of other subjects, for investigating
to what extent the arts have been
Economics
Commerce
Language
Arts
History
Sociology
Geography Technology
Science
Environmental
Studies
Fig. 1: Looking for the arts in different
subjects