Treble in the village: See what sets the Big Bang! Festival of Love apart
It celebrates music, but also Assam’s culture and indigenous ways of life.Expect foraging walks, wine-making sessions, takes on politics and peace.
Nanadisa has sat where it is, a village in the mountains of Assam, for over 500 years.
The rest of the world has slowly inched closer, but the nearest town, Haflong, is still a two-hour trek away.
There are only 28 houses in Nanadisa. Like so many indigenous communities in north-east India, the people here are largely self-sufficient, growing and making things locally and living quiet, restful lives.
October, though, was anything but quiet. More than 1,200 music fans from across the country descended on the village for the Big Bang! Festival of Love. This music festival has been held annually, usually in Haflong, since 2016. Then came an enforced break, amid the pandemic. This was the first edition since 2019.
In addition to offering a platform for independent music from across India, Big Bang aims to celebrate Assam’s culture and indigenous ways of life. The performances this year included sets by Shillong blues-rockstar Tipriti Kharbangar, Haflong grunge band Ahimxa and Mumbai rapper MC Mawali.
Activities offered alongside included foraging trips for medicinal plants, bamboo-basket-weaving, and cultural performances by indigenous artists.
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The founders of the festival — Daniel Langthasa, a musician and political activist, and his wife Avantika Haflongbar, whose label Roohi works to preserve traditional Dimasa textiles — say Big Bang began as a way to spark connections between Dima Hasao district’s many different communities, both ethnic and linguistic, in a time of rising polarisation. Hence, Festival of Love.
“It was also born of a deep love for our land and people, and to shine a spotlight on our traditional ways of living,” Langthasa says.
He started out, in the late-Aughts, as the guitarist of the Guwahati protest-pop band Digital Suicide. In 2015, he and Haflongbar married and he moved to Haflong. There, he began to write satirical political ditties in Hindi, under the moniker Mr India.
His YouTube channel began to draw listeners, with its songs of opportunistic politicians and greedy builders.
In 2018, Langthasa — whose father, the Congress leader Nindu Langthasa, was assassinated by militants in 2007 — joined the Congress and ran for a seat on the NC Hills Autonomous Council, which he won. He left the party and contested as an independent this January, but lost. He remains involved in local activist efforts.
The festival is his way of reaching out with a message that goes beyond one state.
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An early ally, in the causes of the festival, has been Taru Dalmia, the New Delhi reggae-roots musician and frontman of the band Ska Vengers.
In an effort to take his music everywhere he went (villages, protests sites, community halls), Dalmia put together Bass Foundation Roots, a Jamaican-style sound system — stacks of custom-made speakers and audio equipment that need only some space and a power source — in early 2016.
He took his sound system to the first edition of the Big Bang festival that year, and went back every year until the pandemic. He has been instrumental in helping it get back on its feet.
Early this year, Dalmia won a $10,000 (about ₹8.5 lakh) grant from Studio Monkey Shoulder, an initiative founded by French DJ and broadcaster Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM, to support grassroots music communities.
As soon as he heard the news, Dalmia called Langthasa and offered him the money to help revive the festival.
What he admires most about Big Bang, Dalmia says, is that it invites people from across the country to see how viable a simple, agrarian life could really be. “Indigenous ways of living don’t generate a lot of revenue, and so they are being devalued and made to seem unviable in India,” he says. He likes the ways in which the couple are challenging this dominant worldview.
Even with this backing, it wasn’t easy to stage Big Bang in such a small, remote location. Langthasa, 41, and Haflongbar, 39, were committed to using only local resources and so the main stage, for instance, was built from bamboo. “Apart from some nails,” he says, laughing, “everything at the festival was made locally… the stalls, the art installations. Even the rope was made from bamboo fibre.”
When they explained that they wanted visitors to engage with what was unique to this region, the village headman Rohen Langthasa, a herbalist, offered to conduct foraging walks. There were also sessions on how to make the local rice wine, and a talk by farmer Sujit Langthasa on jhum farming, a traditional practice of shifting cultivation that involves using patches of land by turn, and leaves patches of land fallow for set periods.
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Langthasa says he knows a two-day festival won’t make people suddenly rethink their choices. But he hopes they will at least leave with a few new ideas, and some curiosity about what else they might learn from village life.
Meanwhile, there are plans to hold some of the workshops through the year. He wants urban Assamese people in particular to get a fresh look at their cultural inheritance.
“They don’t engage with any of this culture,” he says, “and yet they think it will always just be there…”
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