Touching a chord

On a winter morning, while the moon still lingers in the Jodhpur sky, Sawan Khan Manganiyar pulls his black shawl around his shoulders, leans into the mike and unleashes his rustic voice to command a sunrise. His alaap sets a flock of pigeons hurtling into the sky. The small audience gathers close as the Manganiyar folk musicians from the Thar desert perform on a makeshift stage at the Jaswant Thada, the lakeside marble cenotaph of Maharaja Jaswant Singh II, outside the walls of the Mehrangarh Fort.

Morning glory: Sawan Khan Manganiyar (middle) astounds audiences with his renditions of Bulleh Shah’s poetry

Accompanied by Ghewar Khan on the kamaicha , a 17-string cousin of the sarangi, and the beats of the dholak and kartaal , Sawan Khan invokes compositions of Bulleh Shah, the Mughal-era Punjabi sufi poet, and the Sindhi Sufi saint Shah Latif.

As the sky transforms from grey to blue to mad streaks of golden and pink, his powerful voice seems to be a worthy match to the unfolding celestial performance.

It is just another day at the World Sacred Spirit Festival at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. The festival, in its 12th edition this year, was organised by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, established in 1972 by former Maharaja Gaj Singh II. It is a space where devotional music converges from all corners of the world, where the hum of the tanpura or the harmonium harmonises with the klezmer (French clarinet) of the Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe, the long-necked saz (lute) of Ottoman classical music, the 1,000-year-old two-string erhu (Chinese fiddle), and the double-fluted Rajasthani folk instrument algoza .

Over three days (February 22-24), 3,000 festival-goers were treated to 19 performances, featuring 150 artistes, at the twin venues of Mehrangarh Fort and Jaswant Thada. More than anything, the festival was a time capsule, immersing the audience in an experience that harked back to how music was consumed here 500 years ago -— under open skies, on the banks of rocky lakes, amidst the sounds of nature, in lush royal gardens or lavish red stone fort terraces under a star-spangled sky.

“When everybody is busy on their screens with short attention spans, what’s important is to keep the depth — to make music that makes you hear your heart, that takes you back to where you come from,” French multi-instrumentalist and music composer Mathaias Duplessy tells BL ink after his spellbinding evening concert at the Zenana Deodi Courtyard of Mehrangarh. As part of the decade-old band Mathaias Duplessy and the violins of the world , he collaborates with erhu player Guo Gan, Aliocha Regnard on nyckelharpa (Swedish chordophone), and Nara Kargyraa on the morin khuur (Mongolian horsehead fiddle).

In a song called Crazy horse , Duplessy recreates the sounds of a team of horses grunting, snorting, neighing, clicking their hooves and galloping away amidst the rapid melody of the erhu. With some skilled vocal techniques, and using every part of his guitar that can possibly generate a sound (drumming his fingers on the acoustic wooden body and pulling at the strings until they squeal), Duplessy extracts melody, percussion and wild sound-effects, transporting you to a dramatic horse chase on the Mongolian grasslands.

“Animals are not at a different level of consciousness than us. We are like animals. There is humanity in animals too. We all came from the same stardust millions of years ago,” he says, philosophically.

Duplessy, who began learning the guitar at six, says even as a child he always composed music, imagining his melodies in the sounds of many different instruments. In 2014, his music for the Hindi movie Finding Fanny earned two nominations for best background score (Filmfare and Radio Mirchi awards).

Gan, too, has dabbled with film music, playing in the Hans Zimmer background score for the Hollywood film Kung Fu Panda . In Jodhpur, he and his band played a tribute to the martial arts legend Bruce Lee, ending with Gan, dressed in a traditional Changshan robe, leaping out of his chair and brandishing his erhu bow like a sword in a kung fu film. The audience roared with laughter and applause.

“Sacred music needs humour too. Why should it only be happy, sad or melancholic,” asks Duplessey. “All music is sacred. I play because I need to from within. This is my life — that’s how my music is sacred.”

Gan lives in Paris and has 30 simultaneous collaborations with various artistes around the world. In 18 years he has performed over 2,000 concerts in 80 countries, primarily playing world music and jazz on the erhu and piano. “I love different colours together, in music. It’s very important for the dialogue between different cultures to take place in the musical world,” Gan tells BL ink .

When Ambi Subramaniam, 28-year-old Carnatic violinist and the son of renowned violinist L Subramaniam, sits against the backdrop of the Jaswant Thada’s rock lake and begins playing Toli Janma, a Tyagaraja kriti in raga Bilahari, the sun begins its descent, bathing everything around in gold. The rippling waters reflect a flight of swallows, as they wend their way to their nests under the sprawling ceilings of the Mehrangarh Fort.

A still lake: Violinist Ambi Subramaniam played seamlessly with the Manganiyars

The Manganiyars from the Hamira Kamanchiya ensemble join in. The kamaicha is integral to the music of the Manganiyars. Along with their dholak and kartaal , they jam with Subramaniam and his accompanists on the ghatam and mridangam. Together they play ragas Maya Malawa Gowla and Desh.

The final act, a rhythmic conversation between the ghatam, kartaal , mridangam and dholak, ends with an energetic crescendo.

“I am grateful that I was born into a community that understands the world in sur (tune). Because of this I can relate to any genre of music,” says Khete Khan Manganiyar who was on the kartaal with Subramaniam and has performed all around the world.

Subramaniam is currently pursuing a PhD in music to create a “global” violin technique.

“The violin is the same instrument used across streams — classical, gypsy, flamenco, bluegrass or Carnatic. The techniques are different in different parts of the world. To learn another style, one often wastes time unlearning what you already know. The idea behind my PhD is to create a global violin technique by creating universal building blocks to help you play any style of music on the instrument,” he tells BL ink .

In another part of the fort, there’s another kind of fusion at work — the Raitila, a jugalbandi of the Manganiyars and the Langas, two Rajasthani folk genres that are otherwise not known to see eye-to-eye, playing together for the first time with Spanish flamenco guitarist Jackson Scott. This is followed by Anatolian music by the all-women quartet Telli Turnalar, born out of their shared love for the saz, used in Turkish and Kurdish songs. They sang Islamic Alevi traditional music, in Aşık style, where the saz is worshipped as a sacred instrument.

Voices from Anatolia: The all-women quartet Telli Turnalar performed ancient Islamic songs

It was a treat for the senses — from the Darbari Qawwali by the Andaz brothers, Scottish bagpipes played by the young band Rura, the mystical dance of the snakebite healers called Nayiks, sitarist Shujaat Khan, and a musical drama based on Jodhpur’s own poet-saint Meera Bai, which brought together the Manganiyars and Persian instrumentalists.

At ₹8,000 for a festival pass, you can embark on three days of a musical treasure hunt, not just immersing in eclectic music but also acquainting yourself intimately with the architecture of one of India’s most magnificent forts, perched on a cliff 400 ft above Jodhpur’s skyline.

At the World Sacred Spirit Music Festival, perhaps the most sacred lesson to take back is the realisation that borders are irrelevant.

As Sawan Khan Manganiyar sang, in the words of Bulleh Shah, who longs for love and grace:

Intezari mein guzaari/ Zindagi saari khatam

In sagi sansaar mein/ yaar se yaari hatam

(I spent my life waiting for you/ Even among my own, it is you I long for)

Until the next winter in Mehrangarh.

shriya mohan

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