What Dhrupad Mela reflects of Banarasi arts community

The festival of Shivratri was celebrated in Banaras also through another year of Dhrupad Mela, a music festival dedicated solely to the genre of Dhrupad. Each year, dozens of Dhrupad artists travel to the city to perform in the country's only festival for Dhrupad, made more special by the fact that it happens in Banaras, a particularly blessed and esteemed place to perform as an artist. As a listener too, it is a wonderful time to be in Banaras. The mela takes place high above the Ganga, on the grounds of the Sankat Mochan Foundation, which is an organisation that does research on Ganga pollution and that is headed by the head priest of the city's most important Hanuman temple, called Sankat Mochan. Dhrupad Mela is free and open to all, with no tickets or passes or closed doors, advertised through newspaper announcements and posters that are plastered along the ghats and galis a couple of weeks in advance. Over the four evenings of the mela, hundreds of students, gurus and artists of music and dance, as well as foreign tourists and music lovers from in and around Banaras, wander in and out of the grounds and listen late into the night. On my first evening there, a friend of mine pointed out an elderly man dressed in dhoti-kurta who, he said, travels each year to Banaras from his town to attend one night of Dhrupad Mela. The sight is not unusual for Banaras, for the same thing happens at the city's two other main music festivals, the one at Sankat Mochan temple, in April, and the one at the Durga temple, in August. Like these other two festivals, Dhrupad Mela demonstrates a mixing of high and low, and a non-elite spirit of community that continues to characterise Banaras. The atmosphere at the mela is akin to that at the Sankat Mochan and the Durga Mandir festivals - of high excitement but also meditative introspection.

Even while Dhrupad Mela is unique and great in many ways, visiting it this year, I had to ask whether the wonderful carefreeness of Banaras must accompany a kind of unprofessionalism and passivity. For finally Dhrupad Mela remains most of all a kind of mela or fair, which most people - most of all the music community of Banaras - seem to visit for entertainment. There is, finally, much more tea-drinking, random socialisation, petty gossiping and loitering than there is any serious conversation, discussion or sharing. The mela, in other words, hardly serves as a dynamic meeting ground for the music community of Banaras and of India, or as an annual platform for excellence in tradition and innovation, for the presentation and exchange of work and ideas.

I also noticed this year a lot of "fusion" taking place on stage, in the way of artists mixing into their "Dhrupad" performances, elements of non-Dhrupad singing and playing. Again, fusion is great, but only if it is done deliberately, intelligently, aesthetically. I wondered whether this seemingly careless fusion reflected a decline in the standards of training in Dhrupad generally.

Being the only festival of its kind in India, Dhrupad Mela offers so many possibilities for promoting and enriching the shrinking art of Dhrupad, as well as strengthening the musical community of Banaras and serving as a model for other such festivals in India. Dhrupad Mela is a unique event that helps maintain Banaras as an important centre for the classical arts. We are very glad of the patronage that permits this to happen. But we must also note that in its present form, it reflects the "looseness" that characterises the Banaras arts community as a whole and lacks the standards to take Indian classical music and dance forward. One proof of this is that once over, the experience of Dhrupad Mela hardly lingers; hardly ever does one hear a reference or mention of it, because little intellectual and artistic benefit results.