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Background:-
West Bengal’s Durga Puja was inscribed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of Humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2022
UNESCO Intangible Heritage List of India :-
Durga Puja
Durga Puja — celebrated predominantly by Bengali communities in India and abroad — is regarded as a classic blend of culture and religion. One of the most important festivals in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, it showcases the dynamism of art, music, culinary and much more during the 10-day celebration.
Kuttiyattam
One of the oldest living theatrical traditions in the southern state of Kerala, Kutiyattam was inscribed in the list by UNESCO in 2008. Traditionally performed in sacred theatres called Kuttampalams located in temples, it is a blend of Sanskrit classical items and local elements of the state. This highly codified theatre form is based on netra abhinaya, or eye movements, and hasta abhinaya, or hand gestures. An actor must undergo 10-14 years of training to master this art form. It is performed by elaborating an episode and presenting the minutest details of an act. One complete Kutiyattam performance may take as many as 40 days.
Ramlila
Inscribed in 2008, the traditional theatrical performance of the epic Ramayana is called Ramlila. Widely performed in North India during Dussehra, the plays are based on the life of Hindu god Rama who was exiled. With brightly coloured costumes, the performances include the epic battles between Rama and god-demon Ravana, Rama’s return from exile, a series of dialogues between the gods, saints and other characters. Ramlila brings the entire community together with no barriers of caste, gender and creed. Ayodhya, Ramnagar and Benares, Vrindavan, Almora, Sattna and Madhubani are some of the most prominent places where Ramlila is performed.
Ramman
The villages of Saloor and Dungra in Uttarakhand light up to the occasion of Ramman where villagers gather to worship the local governing god Bhumiyal Devta. The festival was inscribed on the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009. With complex ritual practices, villagers dance, play music, recite prayers, make offerings and much more during the festival that represents many environmental, spiritual and cultural aspects of the community. Adhering to their respective roles, people from various walks of life and occupational groups unite to celebrate the festival. For example, the Brahmins lead the prayers, Bhandaris wear the sacred mask of the Narasimha — half-man, half-lion Hindu deity — while the youth and elders perform songs and dances during Ramman. Additionally, the family hosting the Bhumiyal Devta follows a strict daily routine.
Chhau Dance
The folk dance from eastern India, which was included in UNESCO’s list in 2010, is mainly based on three distinct styles that emerged from the villages of Seraikella, Purulia and Mayurbhanj. Typically taught to male members of traditional artist families, the Chhau dance is performed in open spaces at night. Performers from Seraikella and Purulia wear masks, depicting the characters from the scenes of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. Uniting nature with music played on reed pipes called mohuri and shehnai, the dance is mainly associated with the spring festival of Chaitra Parv. It has religious connotations and bold movements, including mock combat techniques using props, movements of women doing daily chores, and gaits of birds and animals. An integral part of the community, the dance form brings together people from various sections of society.
Kalbelia songs and dance
Included in the list of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010 is Kalbelia folk songs and dance. The Kalbelia community of Rajasthan takes pride in their traditional dance and songs, which are performed wearing dazzling outfits and black tattoo designs. Once professional snake charmers, the men use a unique woodwind instrument called poongi used to capture snakes and a percussion instrument called khanjari, while the women dance to the beats. The community is also well known for improvising lyrics and poems during performances, and they are part of the oral tradition passed down through generations.
Mudiyettu
Another cultural heritage that made it to the list in 2010 was Kerala’s ritualistic theatre, Mudiyettu. Enacting the mythological story of the tussle between Goddess Kali and demon Darika, this theatrical performance is held at temples called ‘Bhagavati Kavus’ across villages along the rivers Chalakkudy Puzha, Periyar and Moovattupuzha. Divine figures like Sage Narada, Lord Shiva and the spirit of Goddess Kali, or Kalam, are invoked at the site while Mudiyettu performers go through a rigorous purification process. The entire community comes together for this annual spectacle, and it makes for a sight to behold.
Buddhist chanting
The holy Buddhist chanting from the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh was inscribed on the UNESCO’s list in 2012. In every monastery and village in the region, Buddhist priests or lamas recite the teachings and philosophy of Lord Buddha in the form of hymns. The monks wear sacred masks and use special hand gestures, or mudras, that symbolise Lord Buddha. They use instruments such as drums, cymbals and trumpets to add a musical rhythm to the chanting.
Sankirtana
This traditional art form from Manipur was inscribed on UNESCO’s list in 2013. It is performed mainly to portray tales and episodes from Lord Krishna’s life by the Vaishnava community of the region. Sankirtana involves dance and music replete with nature and mythical motifs. A typical Sankirtana performance takes place within an enclosed courtyard or temple with two drummers and around ten dancers and singers. The aesthetic and fluid movements make the dance a divine performance as if it is a manifestation of the deity. Sankirtana performances bring the community together and usher in harmony and unity among the Vaishnava community in Manipur.
Traditional brass and copper craft of making utensils
Inscribed in 2014, this intangible cultural heritage is extremely unique. Pioneers of this craft are the Thatheras of Jandiala Guru of Punjab. They use copper, brass and other alloys, which are believed to have health benefits. Artisans use solid metal plates, which are hammered to get the desired utensil. Hot plates are moulded under careful temperature control, using underground wood fire stoves to render the texture. The utensils are then polished using natural elements like sand and tamarind juice. This tradition of metalwork is orally passed down the generations.
Yoga
Yoga needs no introduction. Inscribed on the list in 2016, this age-old Indian practice unifies the mind, body and soul. The free-hand exercises are aimed at achieving a calming effect and a sense of being at one with nature. Yoga comprises several postures called asanas, which are directed to benefit the body and the mind. It also includes controlled breathing patterns, chanting and meditation. Earlier, it was transmitted directly from the guru (teacher) to the shishya (student), but options of yoga ashrams and wellness centres offering training to anyone who wishes to practise it are available these days. 21 June is observed as International Yoga Day around the world annually.
Kumbh Mela
Inscribed in 2017, Kumbh Mela, or the festival of the sacred Pitcher is the world’s largest peaceful congregation of people. A rich and culturally diverse festival, the Kumbh Mela is held every four years in north Indian cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik. Millions of people, including saints, sadhus, kalpavasis and visitors, from across the globe come to these cities to witness the mammoth gathering. It is one of the holiest events, and people take a dip in the Ganges to cleanse themselves of all sins and free them from the cycle of rebirth. Kumbh Mela also incorporates values of astronomy, astrology, spirituality and other scientific avenues, making it a melting pot of knowledge.
Novruz
New Year is often a time when people wish for prosperity and new beginnings. March 21 marks the start of the year in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It is referred to as Nauryz, Navruz, Nawrouz, Nevruz, Nooruz, Novruz, Nowrouz or Nowruz meaning ‘new day’ when a variety of rituals, ceremonies and other cultural events take place for a period of about two weeks.
Tradition of Vedic chanting
The Rig Veda is an anthology of sacred hymns; the Sama Veda features musical arrangements of hymns from the Rig Veda and other sources; the Yajur Veda abounds in prayers and sacrificial formulae used by priests; and the Atharna Veda includes incantations and spells.
Although the Vedas continue to play an important role in contemporary Indian life, only thirteen of the over one thousand Vedic recitation branches have survived. Moreover, four noted schools – in Maharashtra (central India), Kerala and Karnataka (southern India) and Orissa (eastern India) – are considered under imminent threat.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.