Culture can’t be legislated. By any reckoning, it has an autonomous order of existence—and the best an enlightened state can do is facilitate it, with just that touch of benevolent oversight, or get out of the way. But in India, culture is increasingly what the minister in charge makes of it. Pure bathos, in short—and the very antithesis of ‘culture’, unless we’re talking imitation-stalinist cultures of state control.