“It’s not a festival. It’s a platform,” stresses Alliance Francaise of Madras’ executive director Pierre-Emmanuel Jacob, and Catherine Suard, Consul General of France to India in Pondicherry, agrees. The two have been working for months to realise the vision of Bonjour India, a cultural exchange between France and India, held across 33 cities over three months, ending in February 2018. “What we really, really want this time is to establish something that can be built on in the future,” says Suard.
Culturally, the idea is to create common projects with Indian artistes and French ones. Which is why there will be much stage-sharing and collaboration between Indian classical singers and French baroque musicians: Padma Shri recipient and Carnatic musician Aruna Sairam performing with Gregorian chanting expert Dominique Vellard, for instance, and French rock bands Colt Silvers and Last Train touring with Chennai-based band The Broadway Addicts in multiple cities, for instance.
But there’s more to Bonjour India than just music. The thrust of the event is on “starting collaborations which can be deepened in the future: for that, people have to meet and work together,” says Suard. So the three months will see activities ranging from electric cycling to higher education exchange.
French artistes, scientists and academics will also be coming in to meet their Indian counterparts. “We want it to be more interactive and integrated, for the long term,” explains Suard.
One main area of focus is environment and climate change. “France and India both have an understanding that they need to do something. The leaders of both countries are very engaged,” says Suard, pointing out that this is despite them being on different sides of the table. “They were fighting together for COP 21 and they fought together at the International Solar Alliance. Bonjour India is a lot about this as well.”
Some of the events planned are week-long seminars of academics and researchers, for students on developing programmes to find solutions, not only in urban but also in rural settings. Theatre Nisha’s The Water Princess — funded and produced by Alliance Française — is another step towards taking the conversation about the environment forward. The idea is to cross different points of view, she says, and recognise and develop new solutions. “We’ll address the very serious issue in the fairytale, but also in a seminar, in a movie and so on.”
Besides theatre, animation film screenings will be held at multiple locations, to show what filmmakers in both countries are doing. He stresses on the term “partnership”, stating that here, again, the idea is to get artistes from both countries to create common projects. In Chennai, the screenings will be held in February, over three days, in association with EarthSync, which has been tying up with Alliance Française for the last three years to organise the IndiEarth Animation Film Festival in Chennai. There seems to be an audience for it in the city and that gives them the confidence to screen lesser-seen noteworthy films.
