Sangeet Samaroh: Why the tradition must thrive

The night that Ghulam Ali performed at the Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh, the festival’s first night, I was amazed by how packed the temple was. The Sankat Mochan festival is always crowded, but people turned up in unprecedented numbers just to hear Ghulam Ali – and many seemed to be people who were attending the festival for the first time. It was the first time that an artist from Pakistan and a Muslim artist of such popularity performed in the festival, and it was the first time that ghazal singing was performed amidst purely classical performances.

I finally found a standing space for myself on the roof of the temple. I watched and listened to the crowd’s cheers (cheering seems to be the new fashion), applause and sighs at every delicately wrought phrase with amusement and also slight skepticism. Ghulam Ali’s singing was exquisite, as expected. But as a student of music in Banaras who has enthusiastically attended almost every year of the festival since 2004, I felt a bit betrayed, as though the real spirit of the festival had gotten lost. The festival is usually so intimate and homely and delicately done, a rare chance to truly absorb the music. The crowds with their crowd-like noises, and the giant screens and lights that had been added to the stage and surroundings to aid audience viewing, seemed so out of place in Sankat Mochan.

I changed my mind quite quickly, however. In retrospect, I realise what a unique and wonderful event it was to have someone like Ghulam Ali perform at Sankat Mochan. I realise that his performing in the temple only demonstrates what is unique and wonderful about the Sankat Mochan festival to begin with.

In what way is the festival so unique and wonderful? It continues a long tradition of music and dance in the temples of Banaras, the philosophy behind which is that the gods may be pleased through shringar, through sheer beauty, rather than overtly religious activity. Paradoxically, this means that Banaras’ temples have always been secular, social places rather than just centres of religion. Ghulam Ali’s ghazal singing dramatically demonstrated this Banarasi, and Hindu, tradition.

The festival demonstrates the best of Banarasi culture in other ways too. Because it is in a temple, it is truly free and open to the public. People wander in and out and stay for as long as they please. There are no passes or closed doors. The flowing spaces and floor seating (as opposed to stiff chairs) allow the audience to swell and contract, and to completely relax through the night, to even stretch and nap. For Ghulam Ali’s performance, no black-box theatre would have been able to welcome its audience with the open arms that did Sankat Mochan!

These perhaps seem like small details, but they are anything but unimportant; they make for a wonderful alternative to the much more commercialised and elite nature of the arts in India’s larger cities, and a model for how our arts can be "Indian" and "local" as well as modern and global. The truth is that this alternate, living, open, generous, humane, non-elitist philosophy and practice of the arts in Banaras has a beautiful gossamer texture that threatens to be destroyed just by trying to define it.

On April 7, a day before Ghulam Ali’s performance on the first night of the festival, PM Narendra Modi tweeted, "The ‘Sangeet Samaroh’ at Sankat Mochan Temple in Varanasi, which will go on from April 8 to 12 will truly be a treat to music lovers."

But it was so much more than just a "treat"! How important it is that a tradition like Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh continue to thrive in Banaras and modern India – and how important it is that our PM realise that.