As a classical artiste who never stopped being a student and enjoys a range of musical forms, Shubha Mudgal has taken to new techniques of communication with the same gusto as she brought to her rendition of popular songs like “Ab ke Sawan”, “Naachoon Sari” and others in the swinging ’90s. But not everyone is as quick at adapting new tools to their personal lifestyle.
Take facebook. While most people today use the networking site, she wryly notes, “It can be about life beyond oneself also.” Shubha talks of how she shared the advantages of new communication technologies with her colleagues in the music industry, utilising a grant from the Ford Foundation to introduce some hundred classical musicians to a world of paperless documents.
“We were advised not to spread ourselves too thin so we concentrated on Maharashtra,” she recounts. “So we got together about 100 musicians (we called a lot more though), where we told them you don’t need a paper bio-data! Parimala Inamdar (known for her association with NIIT’s Hole in the Wall initiative, e-learning consultancy and projects taking technology to rural areas) addressed them.” Later 20 of the participants joined a workshop conducted by Parimala.
Shubha observes that musicians possess cell phones and know about the Internet but don’t know how to make optimal use of them. “How you present yourself on a digital identity is up to you. If you don’t use slang regularly you needn’t present yourself that way,” she adds by way of example.
Indeed, why should distinct voices sound identical in their digital avatars?
By the same logic, if India can be defined in countless ways, why should its music be any less diverse? No wonder Shubha is associated with a festival that has a comforting umbrella term for a name: Baajaa Gaajaa. The popular annual event, whose fourth edition recently came to an end in Pune, is conceptualised and founded by Shubha along with her husband, well known tabla exponent Aneesh Pradhan. Appropriately, the festival's tagline is “Music from 21st Century India”.
Among the concepts the festival seeks to highlight is the huge spectrum of forms that come under the title Indian music. For many, says Shubha, Indian music has come to mean only Bollywood music, whereas for those who don't listen to Bollywood, Indian music means only its classical music. But, she points out, “whether it's a wedding band or a classical concert, or forgotten forms or songs of women – all of these are valid forms.”
As students of classical music, she and Aneesh found the path to discovering forms of Indian music unknown to them went on and on. “It's such a huge captivating area,” she says. “So we thought of a festival that looks at diversity.”
There are already several single-genre festivals across the country, she notes, such as the Sawai Gandharva in Karnataka, the Jazz Festival and others. And while “it's impossible to present complete Indian music which is panoramic in its diversity,” she says, it certainly “brings a smile to our face when we see a Rock band videographing a Yakshagana troupe.”
Performers are not the only participants though. There are software distributors, instrument makers, retailers. And writers on music too. “We tend to somehow say, oh yes, yes, they are there, but we forget about them,” she remarks.
Shubha mentions her “grand design” in trying to bring together like-minded independent record labels. Underscore Records, started by Shubha and Aneesh, “is one of many record labels that have sprung up, and it's doing the work that parallel cinema was doing,” she explains. “I felt sad that we (various independent labels) don't know each other.” For example, in South India, De Kultur Music has field recordings of folk music, she says, but “unfortunately music lovers don't know about this.” Her idea is that while no individual label would have the resources to set up a retail store, a few together might be able to. “This would be one way other than the Internet,” she says.
While Underscore can be seen as an artiste-friendly initiative through which lesser known names can get an audience and a buying public for their recordings without falling into the machinations of the profit hungry big companies, Baajaa Gaajaa, which evolved from the fifth anniversary of Underscore, is “finally, about celebrating excellence” rather than championing individuals or causes. “For me it's very important that the systems of music are more celebrated and not the individuals,” says Shubha.
Baajaa Gaajaa, she emphasises, is not a festival for upcoming artistes. “We are not claiming to be crusaders” presenting lesser known musicians. “We are saying we have deep respect for all of them: each person's contribution, however humble or massive, celebrated or uncelebrated.”
Though hoping to involve other cultural organisations, Shubha says her experience with them, “especially those of the government, has been dismal.” Pointing out that bodies funded by taxpayers' money have no business to be so lax, she says an organisation that “doesn't have the courtesy to respond, either now or in a year's time, deserves to be brought down.”
Lots of the effort in mounting the festival – seeing that it does not become a “hotchpotch”, designing and structuring it – comes from a team of people not always named and sometimes hardly paid as well. Citing an example Shubha says, “Red Earth has each year been designing a new art work for us.”
There are “people whom we couldn't possibly pay the corporate fees,” she notes, yet they stay with project “because they see a challenge and the fun and the merit in it as well.” Otherwise, why would a celebrity designer like Sabyasachi agree to design the ambience for one of the concerts, as he did this year, she asks.
“A large part of the funding has come from personal resources and I have no regrets,” says Shubha. Besides, she gives the credit to family, friends and music lovers, all of whom are not featured at the festival, for giving her and her team the courage, which she corrects to “foolhardiness”, to undertake the event.
Well, Indian music is an ocean. Who can ride its mighty waves without a cocktail of foolhardiness and courage?
