| Told by | Mangla Prasad Sharma |
| Obtained by | Suranjita Paul |
| Date | 14th September 2016 |
| Place | 128/1A, Raja Ram Mohan Roy Sarani (Amherst Street), Kolkata – 700009 |
| About the speaker | Mangla Prasad Sharma is a renowned manufacturer and exporter of Indian traditional musical instruments. |
| Tags | Heritage, Instrument, Demand, supply, Delhi, 2014, Work shop, Sangeet Natak Academy |
| Language | Bengali, Hindi, English |
Mangla Prasad Sharma speaks:
Verbatim:
Dr. Suranjita Paul: Now your business is growing and is changing with time… Please tell us a few words about it…
Mangla Prasad Sharma: Because everything is on the verge of being known as heritage, we the musical instrument makers are also going to be heritage very soon. We are destroying our selves by destroying our own culture. Nobody these days come to learn to how to make musical instruments. If demand for these instruments in the market is not there, then we shouldn’t expect there to exist a supply, right? How can we make instruments if we are not getting enough income? I must say that India is losing in this regard, and not I as an instrument maker. I had been very verbal about it at Delhi to, when in an interview in 2014, I was asked to speak about my profession. It was at a workshop conducted by the Sangeet Natak Academy. Now you can see me making these musical instruments, but I am very sure that in a few years, people will read about it in books and only get to see it in photographs. Coming generations does not want to engage in this profession because there is no opportunity to flourish. It is a great tragedy for us that we cannot impart this knowledge about the making of these instruments to the young, and I think that we are very helpless in this regard. The government offers no help for us, though we can see them spending so much money, in lakhs and crores for music colleges, for the PSD, etc. But when it comes to the musical instrument makers, we are left with nothing. The Central Government or the State Government, both have proven to be highly inefficient in providing us with any sort of support. The Sangeet Natak Academy at Delhi had given me the opportunity to attend the workshop there. I was very happy to attend it, and I am very obliged to the Sangeet Natak Academy for this. In today’s world, no one has time to play these instruments, thus the fact that the Sangeet Natak Academy had called me for the workshop is itself a great thing for me. What I feel is, today, foreigners are more interested in Indian musical instruments than Indians themselves are, maybe because they get the opportunity to play these.
Translation: Ankana Das
Data processed at SAP-DRS Lab, Department of Instrumental Music, Rabindra Bharati University.