The grand finale of the three-day Sufi Sutra festival in Kolkata earlier this month began with a brief rendition by an Egyptian team which raised an invocation to Allah and ended with the Baul team from West Bengal chanting "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna". You can hardly do better than emphasise the oneness of faith in today's India.
At another level, the finale also had a Samba dancer from Brazil improvising to the robust beats of a dholak player from West Bengal. Sufi Sutra, a yearly international Sufi and traditional music festival started in 2011, is a celebration of cultural diversity and plurality. "It is music for all and music for peace," says Amitava Bhattacharya, the spirit behind it all, an IIT graduate-turned-Silicon Valley techie-turned-social change agent.
Sufi Sutra is distinctive in several ways. Admission is free. It is held at Mohar Kunja, the large garden area next to the Victoria Memorial which earlier used to host the annual book fair and lie derelict for the rest of the year till the courts threw it out. An audience of thousand listens, mostly standing and often rapturous, for three hours.
Over the years audience participation has changed. First people came to try out a novelty; now, it has become a congregation of music lovers who come for something in particular, an important item in the city's cultural calendar. At the core it promotes acoustic music, that is music that grew from the world and life around us until computers and microprocessors or chips began to synthesise something that was once spontaneous.
The event would not be possible without help and support from several official organisations - Kolkata Municipal Corporation (it's held on their turf!), the power utility CESC (power for light and sound at commercial rates can cost a fortune) and, you will not guess, Kolkata Police. They even put up one of the international visiting teams. There were six international teams this year and this is how the body that actually organizes the event, banglanatak dot com, founded by Bhattacharya, managed: "ICCR, or the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, funded the visit of the Tunisia and Morocco teams; we funded Egypt and Brazil; and Spain and Denmark took care of themselves."
"We keep control on costs by not going in for any five-star hospitality (for the visiting teams), we have no event manager and we do all our publicity, fabrication and design work ourselves. Sufi Sutra now has high visibility without going in for media publicity, not even hoardings. It now plays to packed houses enabled mainly by word of mouth and social media like Facebook. But for all this, an event like this would have cost Rs 80 lakh," explains Mr Bhattacharya.
Sufism in the popular mind is often linked to religion but it also lends its name to a genre of devotional music. The Baul of rural Bengal is a bearer of a tradition of music and it is his songs that take him to god. "This is how we can link the Sufi way, traditional music and the Baul," says Mr Bhattacharya.
Sufi Sutra is now going places. It has been held in Dhaka, Goa, Patna and Delhi. Audiences have different ways in different places. In Dhaka they applaud within a song or item, in Goa there is a standing ovation after every number, and in Patna people are very exuberant.
When Sufi Sutra began there were around 50 global Sufi festivals, but Bauls were not called to any of them. Now they get called to nine. The achievement so far is - 21 groups from 17 countries have come to India and 12 from India, with 55 rural artistes, have gone abroad. This is the international footprint that has been developed. The troupes that come render both Sufi and their traditional music.
It all began in 2004 when banglanatak started "Art for Life" which sought to make performing artistes with traditional skills employable and focused on six traditional art forms. The aim was also to link Bauls to the international market for Sufi culture. Over the years not only have the livelihoods of over 3,000 traditional performers increased manifold, their self-esteem has changed beyond recognition.
Unesco found in an assessment in 2011 that the project had succeeded in aiding income generation for artistes, and using traditional artistes and their income skills for a source of livelihood was "a viable development model for rural India".
My final takeaway from the last day's programme was a remarkably post-modern line from a Baul song which went something like "in that Vrindavn, the peacock still dances." When a free song and dance event does not attract noise-makers, much maligned public agencies actually help out, and traditional impoverished artistes are literally rejuvenated and find a place in the sun, things can't be all that bad.
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