FUNDING / Raags to riches?: Misdirected subsidy is endangering South Asian music in Britain, argues Naseem Khan

It must have looked serene. It was a Sunday morning in an airy west London art gallery. One of the major figures of Indian classical music, Amjad Ali Khan, was quietly tuning his sarod on a low dais. Around him - partly on the floor in the old style, partly (to cater to Western muscles) on chairs - was an attentive and tranquil audience. Calm it might have looked, but it hid deep passions, keen frustrations and mounting anger.

A clue to the nature of this anger came in a different setting the following week - a packed meeting of musicians protesting against the Arts Council's funding priorities. In a crowded hall, under the banner of the new Main Music Agenda, musicians of all persuasions - jazz and folk, experimental and contemporary, African and Indian - were linked by the common sense that, as the financial noose tightens on venues and project- funding wanes, fewer and fewer platforms and opportunities are available.

It is a situation that Indian musicians know particularly well. The Arts Council does, in fact, have a policy of supporting 'non-Western' music. In 1989, it took the unusually proactive step of setting up and funding a unit within its own walls to promote South Asian (or Indian) music. Once on its feet, the Asian Music Circuit was made independent, taking with it funding considered princely by the beggarly local musicians outside its gates. There can be little question that the Asian Music Circuit has added to the quality of musical life. But at what cost?

The AMC uses its yearly pounds 195,000 (the lion's share of all the Arts Council's funding to South Asian music) to promote tours of musicians from the Indian sub-continent. The result of the Arts Council's big-fish policy, say critics, is, firstly, that small promoters are often forced to the wall. People like Jay Visva deva - who has been organising high-quality concerts for many years with minimal support, including Amjad Ali Khan's delightful Sunday concert at the Kufa Gallery - are unable to compete with the terms the AMC offers. The musicians the AMC brings over include great masters like Pandit Ravi Shankar who, critics suggest, could fill halls without subsidy. Instead, the AMC offers concerts at very favourable rates, and venues snap them up.

The second consequence is that local talent is marginalised. Dharamvir Singh, lecturer in Indian music at Leeds College of Music, one critic of the AMC's policies, says: 'The prospects for musicians are very poor. At times I just sit back and wonder what is the point of teaching? There are people with the talent to become players, but where do I send them? Where are the chances?'

Hardly anywhere, answers Viram Jasani, sitar-player and chairman of the AMC. 'I'm a sitar player and no one gives me an opportunity in this country. So I fully understand the cause of the British-based artist and I sympathise with it.' But at the root of it, he says, is the position of the goalposts. When the Arts Council hived off the AMC it 'lumbered' it with an extraordinarily wide brief, insisting that the AMC should cover the entire area between the Persian Gulf and Japan. What critical local musicians do not understand, in Jasani's view, is that the organisation has been officially taken to task for spending only 20 per cent of its budget on Far Eastern music. The Arts Council might have felt they were empowering expertise: from the musicians' side of the fence it looks like something else. 'They have made a mini-Arts Council for the Asian community. They are absolving themselves of further involvement in this area by creating us,' said Jasani.

There are lessons here, and signs now that they are being taken on board. South Asian dancers also faced a wall of ignorance some years ago and responded by organising and lobbying. South Asian dance forms still have their problems, but they are now said to form one of the fastest-growing bodies of dance in the UK. Can the same approach work for Indian music? The establishment of the new umbrella organisation for South Asian music, Kalavati, will test the water. One of its first acts has been to sign up under the Main Music Agenda's banner, joining in the general groundswell. Their instruments and voices will increase the growing chorus of overall musical discontent protesting at the Arts Council's declared retreat to the musical 'heartlands'. It is not a matter of ethnicity, they say, but a response to the real scope of music in this country.