New Delhi: President Droupadi Murmu presented Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowships and Awards for 2024 and 2025 to eminent artists at a ceremony in New Delhi on Thursday.
Speaking on the occasion, the president said the performing artists honoured at the event collectively represented a cultural map of India, woven with stories and songs native to the soil and encompassing the country’s diverse dances, festivals, languages and dialects shaped over centuries.
She said India possessed a multitude of musical traditions, dance styles and folk theatre forms, adding that Indian culture remained deeply rooted in the land, with its cuisine, attire, dance and music all drawing inspiration from nature.
Artists, Murmu said, drew on chirping birds, waterfalls, trees, clouds and rivers to shape their art, calling the bond between diversity and unity one of the greatest strengths of Indian arts, according to an official statement.
The president further said the Guru-Shishya tradition had played a vital role in sustaining India’s diverse art forms, describing the Guru as the most important book for the arts. She noted that many folk art forms faced the threat of extinction in the current fast-changing times and stressed the need to not only document such forms but also make dedicated efforts to keep them alive.
She welcomed the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s ‘Kala-Diksha’ programme launched with this objective and urged senior artists to systematically train the next generation.
Nature, she said, was the most natural training ground for enriching artistic sensibility, with folk and tribal arts reflecting a natural zest for life and a deep communion with nature.
She said community memory and collective consciousness found spontaneous expression through these art forms, making folk arts a vital foundation of India’s cultural identity.
Congratulating the award recipients, Murmu said that as bearers of Indian tradition, they were guardians of the country’s collective memory and creators of its future cultural vision.
She described the Sangeet Natak Akademi as an important centre of India’s soft power and expressed confidence that it would continue to enrich the world with India’s cultural energy in the years ahead.
