Report: The Sacred River Festival

Held at the majestic Ahilya Fort in Maheshwar, the festival immerses its audience in Indian performing traditions and in the town’s weaving heritage

Dressed in white kurtas, pyjamas and Nehru caps, the folk performers are singing a Marathi song dedicated to the hand-woven Maheshwari saree. In English, its lyrics mean, ‘My Maheshwari sari caught little Krishna’s eye’. In the background, 2000 diyas float on the Narmada past the ghats of Maheshwar, a small town in Madhya Pradesh with a rich legacy of stories about the just rule of Ahilyabai Holkar, and of weaving beautiful sarees that are a blend of cotton and silk.

A musical performance in progress at The Sacred River Festival (Courtesy The Sacred River Festival)

The festival in progress within the fort. (Riddhi Doshi)

Over the last 21 editions, the festival mainly featured classical music and dance. But this year, co-curator Richard Holkar opened its programming to folk musicians and other experimental artists as well. “For the longest time, I thought, ‘Who is interested in listening to violin playing classical music?” he says. “But when I heard this young artist (Anupriya Deotale) from Indore, I completely changed my tune. The sound of the instrument is so beautiful and its ability to follow the Indian ragas and all its tones is simply amazing. That changed my perspective.” It also prompted him to open the programme to folk performers. “Folk music is very energising, and also attracts people from Maheshwar, which is important to me,” he adds.

So, this year, the Sacred River Festival hosted a mix of classical, folk and semi-classical performances. There were Kabir’s bhajans, ghazals, Kathak performances, Chitrakathi puppets, and a blockbuster closing by the Maihar band created by the legendary musician Ustad Alauddin Khan (8 October 1862 – 6 September 1972).

Kaluram Bamaniya sang many Kabir bhajans (Riddhi Doshi)

What sets The Sacred River Festival apart are the intimate workshops with artists that are held in the mornings in the pillared courtyard of the fort. With sunlight streaming through a canopy of marigold flowers, these sessions are designed to encourage lively discussions about music, art and artists’ lives.

When Padma Shri Kaluram Bamaniya walked in, participants were keen to learn about his life as a farm worker, and how he managed to keep his artistic practice alive. “I worked in the farms during the day and sang Kabir’s bhajans at night in village concerts,” he says to a loud applause.

Bamaniya is a simple man. He impressed with his humble attire, powerful yet soulful voice, which doesn’t require a microphone, and his ability to play the tamboura (a four or a five string instrument) while singing a number of songs by the 15th century poet-saint Kabir. “I was born to sing Kabir’s poetry and spread his message of love and oneness,” says Bamaniya, breaking into popular Kabir bhajans like Mann Lago Yaar Fakiri Mein, Tharo Maro Manwa Kaise Ek Hoi Re, Jhini Jhini Bini Chadariya. In the evening, he sang the same songs to a packed audience in the grounds of the school within the fort complex.

While Bamaniya managed to get the older people in the audience grooving to his tunes, the school kids, dressed in their best, loved the Chitrakathi puppet show.

A dance performance at the festival (The Sacred River Festival)

Balkrishna Masge, a sixth-generation Chitrakathi puppeteer from Maharashtra’s Sawantwadi, and a graduate from JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, travelled to Maheshwar with his team of singers, musicians, puppeteers, and wooden puppets dressed in heavy silks, ornaments and elaborate headgear. With live music and commentary, the team performed the dramatic episode from the Ramayana where Luv and Kush stop their father Ram’s Ashavamedh horse, challenging the king as a supreme ruler. “I created a new horse for this performance, for which we have been prepping for almost a year,” says Masge.

All members of the team, which includes Masge’s sister, belong to a community of traditional folk performers who once doubled as Maratha king Shivaji’s spies. Despite the key role they played, the community was poor and treated as untouchables. “Even my father faced a lot of discrimination and always struggled for better living conditions and financial stability,” says Masge recalling how his father ran a tiny flour mill by day and performed with his puppets at night. “Survival for him and our family has always been a struggle but we didn’t let go of our art,” he adds.

Balkrishna Masge gave up a lucrative job in Mumbai and returned to his village to build a small museum and promote his family’s art. “But it’s been difficult. I hardly make ends meet doing just this. I hope we are invited to more shows and cultural festivals from around the world. That’s the only way to keep this art and our family tradition alive,” he says.

The 108-year old Maihar band is also finding it difficult to keep its legacy alive. Saurabh Chaurasia, one of the many musicians associated with it, says that most of their band members have already retired and many more will do so in the next couple of years. Finding younger musicians to join the group has become a challenge. Despite this, the instrumental band’s performance that had 20-plus musicians playing the sarod, sarangi, harmonium, tabla, sitar, veena, mridanga and naaltarang was the highlight of the festival.

Incidentally, the naaltarang, which is made of gun barrels, was created as a response to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. The story goes that the king of Maihar, upset at the mass killing, told Ustad Alauddin Khan that guns could only kill. “If everything has God, everything has music,” Khan responded, and asked the king for guns from which he created the instrument, which is still cherished by the band. “Baba was a genius. He converted a tool of mass destruction into an instrument that creates music,” says Chaurasia.

The band, itself an ingenious creation, was a response to a devastating plague that orphaned several children in Maihar. Inspired by Western brass bands, the Ustad decided to create a classical band that employed 22 orphaned boys and girls. “It was the first-ever band that was paid to perform,” says Chaurasia.

At the festival, the group played Baul music, Rajasthani folk, western compositions and classical ragas as part of the festival’s grand finale. “The band has 150-plus compositions. But with every retiring or dying member, we are losing the melodies as well,” says Chaurasia.

Thankfully, all stories aren’t as bleak. In Indore, Anupriya Deotale has been playing Indian ragas and her own compositions on the violin, an instrument first created in Italy. “I grew up loving the violin and the compositions of Ustad Amir Khan of the Indore Gharana,” she says adding that much of her practice was focussed on copying the sounds of Indian instruments like the sarod and the sarangi to create newer, more soulful sounds. After years of riyaaz, Deotale, who now plays Hindustani classical music on her violin, even replicating the sound of vocals on it. “The closest instrument to the human voice is the violin, and I have trained mine to sing,” she says. The audience at Maheshwar was mesmerised. At the end of the performance, someone rightly said, “The soul is fed.”

It’s a sentiment that definitely applies to the Sacred River Festival as a whole.

Riddhi Doshi is an independent journalist.