The Arts and Literature Foundation, in partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram and in collaboration with the Department of Art and Cultural Affairs, Haryana, will organise ‘Gurgaon Utsav’ for the seventh consecutive year. The event will be held from April 13-15 at Aravalli Biodiversity Park on Mehrauli-Gurugram Road.
The three-day event will open with dastango Mahmood Farooqui’s Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharat , which is based on Karna and his heroism. The dastan, both written and performed by Farooqui, is produced by Anusha Rizvi.
“The production is unique in many ways. For one, unlike the Ramayana , oral recitations and performance of the Mahabharata are rare, and rarer still in Urdu. Farooqui slips from Urdu to Sanskrit and Arabic without missing a consonant. It is unusual to have so many different languages employed by a single performer in one show,” said a press statement issued by the organisers of the utsav, a celebration of folk and storytelling traditions of the country.
Folk artists
The audience will experience the best of folk artists from across States, including Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, at the event. On April 14, Padma Shri awardee Prahlad Tipanya from Malwa will take the centrestage with his rendition of Kabir’s bhajans . Tipanya, one of the most compelling folk voices of Kabir in the country, combines singing and explanation of Kabir’s bhajans in the folk style of Madhya Pradesh’s Malwa region.
“His concerts are more than entertaining music. They are deep engagements with the spiritual and social thought of Kabir. In Malwa, he is not only admired as a singer but also revered as one who propagates, with great personal intensity and engagement, the messages of Kabir,” said the press statement.
On April 15, Nooran sisters will regale the audience with Bulle Shah’s poetry. Nooran sisters, Sultana and Jyoti, will bring to the utsav the very essence of folk music — strongly evocative of the Sufi traditions of Punjab.
“Theirs is a style that is reminiscent of qawwali — the only difference is that the electrifying excitement is created by two young women who have distilled the tradition they were born into and transformed it to a unique and powerful energy,” said the statement.
