Seated regally on the summit of the vast and semi-arid Jodhpur landscape, the mammoth and otherwise distant and quaint Mehrangarh Fort dons a festive look for what is counted among the 25 best international festivals according to the UK-based Songlines magazine, with none other than Rolling Stones front-man Mick Jagger as its international patron. The Jodhpur Rajasthan International Folk Festival (RIFF), in its fifth year, had the otherwise quiet, secluded and almost intimidating fortress standing with arms wide open to usher in folk music artistes from across Rajasthan and gifted musicians across the globe. The 2011 edition of this UNESCO-endorsed festival was organised between October 12 and 16, by the Jaipur Virasat Foundation (JVF) and the Mehrangarh Museum Trust. The festival had performances and concerts going on round the clock, most notable daily slots being the ?Dawn and Dusk Devotions? timed with sunrise and sunset, and the evening performances at the grand Zenana courtyard, which took the avatar of the main stage for the duration of this festival, which showcased 180-plus folk performers.
Global Confluence
Notwithstanding its backbone, the folk music of Rajasthan, RIFF also relies heavily on live collaborations between folk artistes and international music talent from various nooks and corners of the world. So while you had the Meghwals of Mewar creating magic at dusk at the 19th royal cenotaph Jaswant Thada on their variant of the Tanpura, called the ?Tandura?, the night that followed reached a crescendo with a jugalbandi between the hugely renowned Dutch jazz band Yuri Honing and Wired Paradise and folk musician Bhawaroo Khan Langa and his group. Honing?s saxophone blended magically with the percussion of Langa?s wooden khartal, which are simply just four pieces of wood. ?Coming to India made me learn about the stunning instruments present here. I recently performed with Bhawaroo Khan Langa and his group in Amsterdam and everybody marvelled at their brilliance,? said Honing. Perhaps these collaborations go a long way in promoting folk talent, artistes who many a times are reduced to menial jobs to support their livelihood, not only on the national stage, but even internationally. Vocalist Jumma ?Jogi? Mevati who plays the folk instrument called bhapang collaborated with international artistes at the iTunes Festival in London last year. Another collaboration that promises to give Rajasthani folk musicians an international stage to showcase their talent was the performance by Band of Brothers from Australia, blending their global and fusion sounds with dholaks, khartals and sarangis. These Rajasthani musicians are now set to play at the Adeleide Guitar Festival in 2012 with the Band of Brothers. This year the festival had international artistes from as far as San Francisco, Manchester, Amsterdam, Reunion Island, Sao Paulo and Melbourne.
Apart from Langa and his group and Mewati, a RIFF find of 2007, Bhanwari Devi has already performed at the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival 2011, and so has Kader Khan Langa, the Sindhi sarangi exponent. ?I used to perform in tiny verandahs in my village, or at best at raised platforms near the village chaupal. Singing in a proper auditorium in front of thousands was a very different experience,? says Bhanwari Devi, who thanks RIFF for lifting her out of extreme poverty. This year, Devi who always performs with a long ghunghat was featured as a ?Living Legend?, and enthralled the audience inside the ornate Moti Mahal at the Fort.
The festival?s international appeal is also evident from the international press presence at the event with journalists from the biggest international media brands hobnobbing with the artistes and organisers. In fact, RIFF 2011 has now become the first Indian festival which will be featured by the BBC on its coveted Imagine documentary series.
Musiconomics
Under the glossy sheen of a globally renowned folk music festival, financial sustainability is a key challenge for RIFF, like most Indian festivals based on folk art forms. Under the fa?ade of grandeur, festival finances are albeit dwarf. But then, RIFF?s director Divya Bhatia believes that for festivals like RIFF, initially continuity is far more important than financial sustainability. ?It is certainly not a commercial model and it can?t be as of now. Sustainability has a different logic for this event. For us sustainability is about the willingness of our partners and the support they provide in various capacities. For instance, the museum trust provides us with the fort as a venue without any charge and the Taj hotels across Jodhpur provide rooms for our artistes. Frankly, the returns we get through pass sales is just a little over 10% of the cost of organising the festival,? he says.
Organising RIFF requires a little over R1 crore while the box office collection for the festival is in the range of R11.5 lakh. However, considering that the collections from the first edition of RIFF in 2007 was a paltry R80,000, the organisers consider it no mean feat that they have been able to create a festival where audiences actually pay for folk performances and not popular music, perhaps an unparalleled example in India. The festival audience has also swollen by almost 70% over last year with almost 4,500 unique attendees in the 2011 edition. Organisers say that 40% of the audience comes from Jodhpur and other parts of Rajasthan, while 30% are foreign visitors and 30% are from other parts of India.
Bhatia, who has earlier donned the hat of festival director for the prestigious Prithvi Theatre Festival for eight years, employs the example of his former festival to drive home the sustainability point. ?More than three decades after its inception, the Prithvi Theatre Festival depends on sponsors and partners even today. So then, can we call a hugely successful festival unsustainable?? he asks.
As for the artistes? remuneration, for folk artistes, it varies anywhere between R1,000 to R50-60,000, depending upon the nature, duration and number of performances. The international performers, according to Bhatia, are actually paid the least and it?s mostly their travel and stay expenses that are taken care of by the festival. ?At times air tickets are really expensive, so in such cases, we contact the respective embassies and many a times they sponsor the tickets of the artistes. Actually international artistes don?t come for any fees. They come for the platform that RIFF provides them in front of a huge audience that India offers,? says Bhatia.
While the road ahead for RIFF seems littered with quite a few challenges at least in terms of finances, the festival has succeeded in creating its own niche and a brand that is now attracting talent as well as audience attention. Organisers now have varied ideas in their heads to actually take the festival mass, not in terms of popular content but in terms of encouraging more people to embrace folk music as form of entertainment that needs immense attention. This year RIFF was inaugurated with a free city concert in one of the busiest areas of Jodhpur city and attracted an almost 5,000-strong audience. In the coming years, RIFF plans to increase the number of these city concerts, which after a few years could be monetised as well by charging minimal ticket prices from the city folk, unlike the princely sum of R4,500 which one needs to shell out for a full festival pass, or pay upwards of R600 per individual performance. Five years after its inception, RIFF?s tryst with destiny continues, and so does that of the large number of Rajasthani folk artistes associated with the festival.
