Rashmi Dhanwani has spent more than a decade working across India’s cultural and creative sectors. She is the Founder-Director of Art X Company and Festivals From India, and Conference Director of CultureCon India.
Her work spans research, consulting, cultural platforms, and events, with a focus on the systems and infrastructure supporting India’s creative sector.
Following the fourth edition of CultureCon India, Dhanwani shares her views on the business of culture, AI and creativity, and what is needed to support the continued growth of India’s cultural and creative sectors.
For those less familiar with CultureCon India, can you tell us about the thinking behind it, how it has evolved, and the role you see it playing in India’s cultural and creative sector?
CultureCon came out of a fairly simple observation: the creative sector in India talks to itself in silos. Music people talk to music people, museums to museums, designers to designers – and the problems everyone is facing are largely the same.
There was no space where the whole community could sit together and talk about culture, creativity, careers and commerce as one conversation, alongside funders, policymakers and institutions rather than separately from them.
What it’s become is a working space and network for the creative economy – this is where the industry gets organized. If someone leaves with a collaborator, a mentor, a client or a next opportunity, CultureCon has done its job.
Over the past decade, you’ve worked across research, consulting, cultural platforms, and events. How has that range of experience shaped the way you approach your work today?
Let’s think of all of those experiences as making a scaffold. My educational background was in Mass Media (Journalism – BMM) followed by Creative Industries (Master’s in MA), all dotted with some fellowships and courses in between. Each of these have contributed to shaping my work today.
Journalism taught me structure, rigor, brevity in communicating clear thought and most importantly, ethics. My Master’s gave me the theoretical background and underpinning I needed to connect all my professional and educational experience to build my work at Art X.
Journalism taught me structure, rigor, brevity in communicating clear thought and most importantly, ethics.
Finally, working across research, consulting, platforms and events means seeing the same problem from several sides at once – what a funder needs to see, what an artist needs to survive, what an institution can realistically absorb, and finally how all of it sits together informed by evidence. Most of the failures in our sector happen in the gaps between those.
It’s why CultureCon is programmed the way it is: every session has to work for more than one of those people simultaneously, which means building for tension rather than agreement, and asking speakers and the audience for participation rather than a panel.
How has the conversation around the business of culture in India changed over the past decade, particularly around questions of sustainability, careers, and growth?
The conversation used to be almost entirely about survival and subsidy – who will fund this, will the grant renew – and talking about money felt faintly like it compromised the work. That has definitely changed.
People now discuss pricing, IP and business models without apology, and there’s a generation treating what they build as businesses and social impact rather than causes. Capital has moved beyond grant funding to investment funds, impact investment, institutional funding and service contracts.
People now discuss pricing, IP and business models without apology, and there’s a generation treating what they build as businesses and social impact rather than causes.
What hasn’t caught up is the infrastructure underneath. We still don’t have a policy framework that treats the sector as a whole, and the route from education into employment remains largely informal.
That’s why this year’s program put pricing, contracts and investment on the main stage rather than treating them as back-office concerns.
‘The Big Fight’ at CultureCon put Kommune founder Roshan Abbas head-to-head with an AI debater. What was the thinking behind the format, and what did it reveal about the wider debate around AI and creativity?
The format itself was born out of an unexpected change. When Vijay Subramaniam, who was scheduled to debate Roshan, could not make it as he was under the weather, the team chose not to abandon the format.
Instead, they built an AI avatar overnight, turning a last-minute challenge into a live demonstration of the very question the session set out to explore: what happens when AI moves from being a subject of debate to becoming the debater?
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We wanted to make the argument literal. Everyone is debating about AI and creativity; almost nobody has debated it with AI, live, in front of a room. So the format became part of the point, with the audience able to watch SAGAR.Ai under discussion, defend itself in real time, and respond to challenges as they came.
We shouldn’t confuse the speed of production with the depth of creation.
What it revealed is that the real disagreement isn’t about capability at all. One side of the argument is that creativity comes from lived experience, and that we shouldn’t confuse the speed of production with the depth of creation. The other is that the sector’s persistent problem has never been technology but gatekeeping, and that AI lowers barriers. Both are serious positions.
What was telling was how quickly the room moved past “can it make things” to consent, copyright and regulation – which is where the actual argument lives.
What do you think the creative industry is still not talking about enough?
Money and labor, specifically. We talk about funding endlessly, but not about pricing, margins, contracts or what people actually earn – those conversations still happen privately and a little awkwardly.
Second is about labor – the challenges of gig life, lack of sustainable career pathways, and the gap between education and employment. Employers spend months, sometimes years, teaching graduates skills they were expected to arrive with, and employees spend years figuring out how to navigate and grow in the sector on their own terms.
Which is also why careers form such an important theme at CultureCon.
As India’s creative and cultural sectors become increasingly visible internationally, what do you think still needs to be strengthened at home to support their continued growth?
Three things. A stronger policy framework, because a lot of the remarkable work happening in India happens despite the system rather than because of it.
Connecting education far more directly with industry, so graduates leave with skills employers are actually looking for, and parents can see a clear career pathway.
And international collaboration approached deliberately and in a decolonized fashion rather than opportunistically – the countries that have broken through globally did it with a vision for long-term investment, institutional backing and coordinated strategy, not by accident.
Connecting education far more directly with industry, so graduates leave with skills employers are actually looking for, and parents can see a clear career pathway.
We have extraordinary talent. What we need are the systems that carry it outward. More importantly, we need to build systems that bolster the uniqueness of Global South collaborations and economies rather than merely replicating the models and systems of the West, which may not always survive the complexity and diversity of our cultures and creative industries.
You said at CultureCon that “inclusion is intentional.” What does it take to turn that idea into something people actually experience?
It means inclusion is a set of decisions with costs attached and built in seamlessly into the conference, rather than a token session you announce.
Let me give you a few examples of how this works. First is our partnership with Access for All, which allowed us the use of two Indian Sign Language interpreters throughout the conference, along with menus and schedules printed in Braille. With this collaboration, we were also able to host three persons with disabilities with complimentary all-access Season passes.
For programming, an extension of this conversation was a data audit – a session on ‘Who’s Arts Infrastructure For?’ seeking the intersectionality of diversity: age, with musician Geetu Hinduja; disability, with influencer Karn Malhotra and Rohan Marathe of Access for All; and institutional inclusion design, with Meghana, Head of Inclusion at Museum of Art & Photography.
Our closing evening was led by B-Spot Productions’ Lavani dancers performing ‘Rang Birangi Lavani’ on queer themes. The programming choices are deliberate for inclusion but not solely because of it. They are excellent performers and speakers on their own.
India is far too diverse for inclusion to ever be finished. We haven’t solved it. What we can do is make sure those voices are in the room and that the room listens.
When we spoke to Royal Enfield Social Mission or Kathiwada City House, our ask was: how can we work with you to make the conference more inclusive? RESM sponsored a creative professionals’ delegation from four states in the Western and Eastern Himalayas, while Kathiwada City House helped us bring in 30 students to CultureCon.
Someone traveling from outside a metro or in the throes of entering the sector may have fewer resources, but may also feel genuinely uncertain about walking into a conference in Mumbai – so it means covering the travel, yes, and also making that first invitation possible and making sure the room is one they can actually speak in.
In practice, it looks like complimentary passes for persons with disabilities to spread awareness to their communities, sign language interpretation, accessibility partners involved in planning rather than consulted at the end, and giving practitioners from outside the metros the floor to ask hard questions rather than a slot to be inspiring in.
India is far too diverse for inclusion to ever be finished. We haven’t solved it. What we can do is make sure those voices are in the room and that the room listens.
What advice would you give to someone starting out in India’s cultural and creative sector today?
Build communities, not just skills. Technology has made knowledge extraordinarily accessible and it can also make you very isolated. You still need collaborators who challenge your assumptions and tell you when you’re wrong.
Technology has made knowledge extraordinarily accessible and it can also make you very isolated.
And take creative destruction seriously: every major technological shift removes some kinds of work and creates others. Rather than resisting that, work out which of your skills are becoming automated and which human capabilities are becoming more valuable, and go where that second list points.
Quick Hits
A useful app or tool you’ve started using recently:
Urm, Claude AI, and now Vapi AI, which we used to build the SAGAR.Ai avatar.
Book, podcast, or resource you recommend:
Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers; B.R. Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste; and the First Principles Podcast by The Ken.
Something you want to learn or get better at:
Singing Hindustani Classical. In the last 15 years, I have joined and left it after 12-18 months of riyaaz. I really need to get back to it.
To learn more about CultureCon India, go here.
