You’d be forgiven for assuming that the largest festival of Indian classical music is held in India. But since 2012, the Bengal Foundation in Dhaka has been hosting a massive five-day affair that is now emerging as perhaps the most-attended Indian classical music festival in the world.
Simply called the Bengal Classical Music Festival, the event is held in Dhaka’s Army Stadium and features some of the biggest names in Hindustani and Carnatic music. It drew a crowd of more than 15,000 people in its first year, and last year, the organisers had to close registrations at 35,000 people.
“This year, we will be able to stretch the audience capacity to 50,000, and we have received registration queries from across Bangladesh as well as India,” said Luva Nahid Choudhury, the director general of Bengal Foundation, a non-profit cultural trust that has been promoting traditional music, dance, art and literature in Bangladesh for the past 25 years.
In comparison, Pune’s Sawai Gandharva festival – founded by the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and widely considered one of India’s largest classical music festivals – draws an average of 15,000 attendees every year.
This year, the third edition of the Bengal Classical Music Festival will be held from November 27 to December 1. Although the event is free, online registration is mandatory and begins on November 3. For five evenings in a row, the concerts at the festival will begin at 6 pm and continue all night up to 5 am, just before the morning namaz.
In the 55 hours of programming, the festival will feature nearly 50 prominent Bangladeshi and Indian artistes, including vocalists Kishori Amonkar, Ulhas Kashalkar and Girija Devi, flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan and santoor player Shivkumar Sharma.
“The main aim of the festival is to reinvigorate the tradition of classical music in Bangladesh,” said Choudhury. The tradition, she says, had died down in the country over the past few decades, partly because of political reasons and largely because of lack of patronage.
“Our organisation had been working with Bangla music for several years, but we felt it was important to go back to the roots of this music, which is in classical forms,” said Choudhury. “We also saw a demand for classical music among people.”
Enormous scale
From its first edition, the Bengal Foundation consciously decided to make the festival a large-scale project. “We chose to hire a stadium for the venue to bring public attention to the event and mobilise a large number of people in this effort to promote classical music,” said Choudhury. The effort seems to have worked, with youth forming 60% of the audience, she said.
The Indian musicians who have performed or been invited to the Bengal Foundation’s festival say that the event has its own distinctive scale and atmosphere.
“Last year, even though there was some political unrest in Dhaka around the time of the festival, audiences turned up in large numbers for the concerts,” said Sameehan Kashalkar, a young vocalist who will be performing at the festival this year along with his father, Ulhas Kashalkar.
Sameehan Kashalkar believes the event’s success lies in the fact that while Bangladesh has periodic standalone recitals for classical music, it does not have many other large festivals for it.
“India has a large number of cultural organisations across the country that put up multiple festivals, so the crowds attending them get divided,” said Sudha Dutta, the daughter of veteran vocalist Girija Devi, who is set to perform in Dhaka for the third year in a row. “My mother loves performing at this festival because it draws the kinds of crowds that you usually only see for cricket matches or rock concerts.”
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Simply called the Bengal Classical Music Festival, the event is held in Dhaka’s Army Stadium and features some of the biggest names in Hindustani and Carnatic music. It drew a crowd of more than 15,000 people in its first year, and last year, the organisers had to close registrations at 35,000 people.
“This year, we will be able to stretch the audience capacity to 50,000, and we have received registration queries from across Bangladesh as well as India,” said Luva Nahid Choudhury, the director general of Bengal Foundation, a non-profit cultural trust that has been promoting traditional music, dance, art and literature in Bangladesh for the past 25 years.
Photo: Bengal Foundation Bangladesh 2013
In comparison, Pune’s Sawai Gandharva festival – founded by the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and widely considered one of India’s largest classical music festivals – draws an average of 15,000 attendees every year.
This year, the third edition of the Bengal Classical Music Festival will be held from November 27 to December 1. Although the event is free, online registration is mandatory and begins on November 3. For five evenings in a row, the concerts at the festival will begin at 6 pm and continue all night up to 5 am, just before the morning namaz.
In the 55 hours of programming, the festival will feature nearly 50 prominent Bangladeshi and Indian artistes, including vocalists Kishori Amonkar, Ulhas Kashalkar and Girija Devi, flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan and santoor player Shivkumar Sharma.
“The main aim of the festival is to reinvigorate the tradition of classical music in Bangladesh,” said Choudhury. The tradition, she says, had died down in the country over the past few decades, partly because of political reasons and largely because of lack of patronage.
“Our organisation had been working with Bangla music for several years, but we felt it was important to go back to the roots of this music, which is in classical forms,” said Choudhury. “We also saw a demand for classical music among people.”
Enormous scale
From its first edition, the Bengal Foundation consciously decided to make the festival a large-scale project. “We chose to hire a stadium for the venue to bring public attention to the event and mobilise a large number of people in this effort to promote classical music,” said Choudhury. The effort seems to have worked, with youth forming 60% of the audience, she said.
The Indian musicians who have performed or been invited to the Bengal Foundation’s festival say that the event has its own distinctive scale and atmosphere.
“Last year, even though there was some political unrest in Dhaka around the time of the festival, audiences turned up in large numbers for the concerts,” said Sameehan Kashalkar, a young vocalist who will be performing at the festival this year along with his father, Ulhas Kashalkar.
Sameehan Kashalkar believes the event’s success lies in the fact that while Bangladesh has periodic standalone recitals for classical music, it does not have many other large festivals for it.
“India has a large number of cultural organisations across the country that put up multiple festivals, so the crowds attending them get divided,” said Sudha Dutta, the daughter of veteran vocalist Girija Devi, who is set to perform in Dhaka for the third year in a row. “My mother loves performing at this festival because it draws the kinds of crowds that you usually only see for cricket matches or rock concerts.”
