Over the last six years, the Darbar Arts Culture Heritage Trust has brought Hindustani classical and Carnatic music to the UK through its annual four-day festivals. In the age of hyper-marketing and rampant consumerism, Darbar's artistic director Sandeep Singh Virdee appears to have found the golden mean for promoting Indian classical music. Walking the razor's edge between the market's insistence on smart presentation and the thoughtful packaging of a complex and rich art form, it is his deep and unaffected respect for what he refers to as the “best music in the world with a definite spiritual and sacred core”, that has made his six-year-old venture such a success.
During this period the Darbar Brand has succeeded in taking more than 160 musicians including senior artistes and unknown names across the UK. The festival has been supported by the Arts Council England from its inception in 2006 which has supported about one third of its expenses, giving it the stability to innovate and grow. The Council's ten-year vision document for the arts titled “Achieving Great Art for Everyone” (2010), mentions Darbar as an example of an organisation which fulfils its mission of “responding to audience's appetite for a wider variety of music”.
This year in September, for the first time, the festival will be included in the Southbank Centre's classical music 2012 schedule in London with a series of partnership concerts in Leicester, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle and Southampton. These partnerships ensure that by the end of each tour roughly 11,000 people have watched the ticketed shows with British listeners making up more than half the audience.
To ensure greater visibility, the festival is also telecast as one-hour episodes on Sky TV's high definition format with more than 30 one-hour programmes produced for Sky Arts and over a dozen one-hour programmes broadcast on BBC Radio 3 till date. On the cards is a move to bring down a few British arts journalists to India so that they are able to better understand the heritage and context of the music. The Darbar team hopes that this will make for better coverage of the form in the British media.
New ideas
Virdee and his team have the instincts of a modern marketing outfit tempered with an understanding of the character and context of Indian classical music. This keeps them from mindlessly following the strategies adopted by the entertainment industry in India which emphasises gloss but undermines content. Significantly, the Darbar brand has been able to flourish in six short years not by retreating from the market, as classical music purists often advocate, but by using the modern culture industry and its resources to advantage.
The Darbar Festival invests in excellent sound and stage facilities and wonderful photographers who are able to capture the thrill and theatricality of this deeply emotional music. Special microphones for different instruments are used on stage and time and money are spent on creating sets, mood lighting and aesthetic appeal. Between one performance and the next, the sound set up is completely turned around within minutes. Photographs are used liberally in well produced brochures and one set of YouTube promos from the SkyArts TV are edited to the fast tempo of a football commercial clearly aimed at attracting youngsters.
Yet musicians are happy because the spirit and integrity of music are not tampered with. Referring to current debates about the ideal length of a music piece with time slots from 20 to 45 minutes being proposed, Virdee shows that for all his emphasis on smart marketing, in this vital respect he is on the side of the music. “You cannot play with such core aspects which define the character of the music,” he says. At his concerts artistes have options of performing for an hour, an hour-and-a-half and two hours and care is taken to perform ragas at their appropriate time in the day. The Darbar team has always resisted attempts to categorise Indian Classical music as World Music, a term Virdee believes is a typical example of Western pigeonholing of all non Western art forms.
Leading Hindustani classical vocalist Ashwini Bhide Deshpande was part of the festival in 2009 and took part in a five-day Shivir or intense workshop organised for Indian classical music students during vacation time at a Western classical music school housed in musician Yehudi Menuhin's residence in Cobham, Surrey. “I was very touched by the sensitive manner in which these events were organised. Sandeep passionately loves this music and it shows in everything,” she says.
At the Darbar Festival in King's Place London in 2010 for instance, there were 40 events in all including films, talks, free workshops for children, and learning sessions. One such talk was titled “Exploring Kanjira”, a session with Carnatic musican Neyveli Venkatesh which explored the range and rhythmic patterns of the simple instrument. Elsewhere in London, photo exhibitions and storytelling events were held. The first session of the festival, “Encounter”, was a concert which tried to draw in listeners from diverse background into the event by bringing together Indian and western classical vocal traditions with soprano Patricia Rozario and leading Indian vocalist Veena Sahasrabuddhe along with sarangi, cello, viola and tabla. The festival also presented among others the brilliant Hindustani classical vocalist M. Venkatesh Kumar from Dharwad who is only now emerging in the urban concert scene across India.
The Darbar Festival began as a tribute to his peripatetic and “natural born tabla teacher” father Gurmit Singhji who taught thousands of Asian children, mainly in the midlands of the UK and at such centres as the Leicester School of Music. He is said to have evolved systems for notation aiding in the teaching of the tabla. Growing up, Virdee heard anecdotes of great concerts from his father. He says his friends thought he was weird because he listened to his father's records singling out Amir Khan's Darbari, Bade Gulam Ali Khan's Malkauns and Vilayat Khan's Darbari Kannada.
Clearly, the distance from India had not in any way reduced his feel for the music. Another important lesson learnt from his father was that he ought to make a special effort to listen to talented youngsters and not just the big names. His father also appreciated Carnatic music alongside Hindustani classical music. When his father passed away suddenly in 2005, his musician friends and students all felt that a concert would be the best tribute to his life. Tabla greats Swapan Choudhuri, Anindo Chatterji and Kumar Bose were among the first to agree for the concert but in a matter of days the list had gone up to 50 musicians.
Getting it right
Once musicians are in the UK, the Darbar team invests in creating a build-up to the final concert which was in the initial years held in Leicester before shifting to London. Leading Carnatic vocalist Aruna Sairam was one of the artistes who was part of the festival in 2009 at the Southbanks Centre in London. But prior to the main concert, she along with other musicians had taken part in a series of lecture demonstrations and talks with students in and around London. “This build-up creates an expectation among people who start trickling in for various events and the final concert,” says Sairam.
Virdee makes frequent visits to India to keep up with the music scene. He was here last month during the music season trying to figure out if it was possible to call the Darbar festival the biggest festival of Indian classical music outside India. He returns to the UK reasonably satisfied that that just might be the case.
