The fort that rocked!

checked out the performances"" and the pitfalls.

At last fortnight's music festival in Jodhpur, the maharaja "" fondly called Bapji "" and Mick Jagger made an unlikely pair. One was the host of the festival "" it was his fort after all; the other was his personal guest, latest girlfriend and beefy security guard in tow.

The group would wander around the fort every evening, usually to attend the evening performances that were the highlight of the day.

Bapji was supremely relaxed: late one evening, as our media party was sprawled in one of Mehrangarh's many courtyards, listening to a colleague sing, he stood attentively by and listened. (The colleague has since been making frantic attempts to give up his day job and concentrate on music. "It has the maharajah's stamp of approval," he squeaks excitedly).

And Jagger charmed the few people he came into contact with. "He has read everything, knows everything, and is so down to earth. I never expected him to be like this," gushed a member of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, who shared a dinner table with Jagger one evening.

Bapji and Jagger were apt brand ambassadors for the Jodhpur Riff, the festival with multiple objectives. It seeks to put Rajasthani folk music on the map, both locally (rich traditions are dwindling) and internationally.

In fact, Mick Jagger admitted to me that it would be wonderful if the Jodhpur Riff metamorphosed into what the Glastonbury festival is: edgy, alternative and wildly popular.

If the objectives of the festival were laudable, the format was inspired. Dotted around the fort were the venues: a verdant, secluded garden for Langa and Mangniyar performances, a covered courtyard for workshops, a nearby cenotaph for Sufi performances, the highest point of the fort "" the old zenana courtyard "" for the main stage and an intimate courtyard called the Zenana Deori for late night sessions.

The result was that visitors managed to walk about a considerable amount and saw virtually the whole fort. You could enter the fort at 10 am and leave it at 2 am the next day, and not be far from the sounds of music the entire time.

You could be enthralled at the interplay between international musicians and Rajasthani folk musicians jamming together, at colourful costumes and sheer spectacle or at the felicity with which Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia played with folk musicians "" unrehearsed.

On the minus side, the steep slopes of the Mehrangarh Fort and the high steps meant that it was out of bounds for the elderly and the physically challenged. It was difficult getting to the fort in the first place: either you had your own taxi or you walked up in not too user-friendly conditions. There was no glimmer of a shuttle bus service.

The price of the daily tickets kept out all but a handful of Jodhpur residents. And prior advertising was woefully inadequate, but was better than the possibility of being able to buy tickets on the Net.

The upshot was a distinctly elitist gathering where everybody knew everybody else and kept referring to the Jaipur Virasat Foundation's performances earlier this year: most people who had attended one had also attended the other.

The real pitfalls lay elsewhere. It escaped nobody that most of the musicians were above a certain age. More depressing was the age of their instruments: most looked as if they'd been borrowed from a museum.

Not surprising because after Partition, most of the musicians of the desert have stayed on our side of the border, while the musical instrument makers have gone to the other side. It makes one wonder what they must do for a livelihood!

The Langa and Manganiyar singers, Bhopa reciters and Kalbeliya dancers at the festival may not even come from a particularly deep resource pool: it is quite possible that successive festivals will see the same faces over and over again.

Even our own media group had but one bona fide music critic apart from a lone writer who specialised in culture; the rest of us were a rag, tag and bobtail lot who helped the cause of folk music by propping up the bar.

A British national who sat next to me at the electrifying performance by the Indian Ocean was all complaints. A resident of New Delhi, she has visited several dozen concerts by important musicians free of cost, and was aghast that residents of Jodhpur did not have the same privilege. She told me of the convoluted manner in which she came by four tickets, only to find that there were many empty seats.

Bapji is not unduly worried about our concerns of dwindling resources. Neither did he fear that taking the musicians out of their natural theatre, the desert, into the Mehrangarh Fort, would alter the context.

In his opinion, the best folk music in Rajasthan comes from the western part of the state, where the desert is, so Jodhpur was the natural site for the music festival. International musicians who were invited were told clearly that they'd have to perform with local folk musicians.

There is no doubt that the Jaipur Virasat Foundation and the Mehrangarh Museum Trust are doing a much needed service by hosting the desert music festival at all. The question is: whether it is the classic case of too little too late.