The Jodhpur Rajasthan International Folk Festival or Jodhpur RIFF as it is better known, is the fruition of an idea conceptualized by the Jaipur Viraasat Foundation (JVF) and Mehrangarh Museum Trust (MMT), to provide an international platform for the rich musical heritage of Rajasthan. Started in 2007, Jodhpur RIFF has in a short span of time garnered widespread acclaim and been voted by global music magazine Songline, as among the top 25 music festivals in the world. RIFF 2011 will also be a feature on the BBC ‘Imagine’ documentary series, the first Indian music festival to merit inclusion in the prestigious series. The 5-day festival, now in its fifth year, gets underway at the exotic Mehrangarh Fort on October 12th and will showcase the artistry of Rajasthan’s legendary folk artists. It will also feature a lineup of top Indian and international acts in collaborations that will cut across musical genres. Slated to headline the Main Stage this year are Kavita Seth, Yuri Honing and Wired Paradise (Netherland) featuring Rajasthani virtuoso Sumitra with Daya Ram and Goram Khan, Band of Brothers (Australia), Rupa and April Fishes (USA), besides traditional Rajasthani folk artists like Shakar Khan, Kadar Khan Langa, Bhanwari Devi, JummaMewati, Hakam Khan Manganiyar and many more.
At the centre of this colourful celebration of music is a man as colourful as the festival, Mr Divya Kumar Bhatia, Director, Jodhpur RIFF. Mr Bhatia is a multifaceted creative professional whose career has straddled the world of performing arts, music, film and the web. He has been the Festival Director of Prithvi Theatre, the creative consultant for the Hidden Garden project in South Glasgow, Scotland’s landmark sanctuary garden, runs a web and communications design company, produced, directed, and acted in theatre, documentaries and films, including ‘Paa’ with Amitabh Bachchan. If that were not enough, Divya is also an environmentalist and an outdoor guy who has been a certified mountain rescue coast guard in the UK, played tabla in a band, a canoeing instructor in Ontario, Canada, picked coffee in Africa, is a certified Reiki master and still that doesn’t say it all. Suave and down to earth at the same time, Mr Bhatia who was briefly in Mumbai, spoke to C P Joseph and Stanley Paul, about his passion for Rajasthani folk music and his vision for RIFF in the coming years.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is the mission statement of RIFF?
I believe with RIFF what we did was to reintroduce the folk artist not as a folk artist but as an artist… so when you listen to them perform you are not looking at them as a folk artist but you are looking at them as an artist of some calibre and merit…earlier the folk artist was more of a prop in the larger tourism mindset.
Do you think more than the folk artists it is the event that has become an attraction?
Today when people come to Jodhpur RIFF, they are not asking who the stars are. They have no clue about the Rajasthani artists or even the artists from overseas. They come for the fact that they will get something of substance and of quality which is going to be fulfilling. Our target is to attract music lovers of all experiences who really want to enjoy the experience. We are not dependent on celebrities to pull an audience. Mick Jagger is our patron but we downplay it, because the last thing we want is for people to come to watch Mick Jagger.
Does Mick Jagger come every year? Will he be coming this year?
He’s come for two festivals. Let’s hope he comes this year as well.
On what basis do you select international artists for collaborations?
The decision making for the selection of the international artists and even the national artists remains with me. I get advice from one of our trustees of JVF (Jaipur Virasat Foundation), John Singh, and his wife Faith, who actually started the Virasat Foundation. He’s widely travelled andthough he’s not a musician but he has a very wide interest in music and particularly world music and its connections and how the root connects; so he’s one of my key guides. The other is Maharaja Gaj Singh, who has heard lots and lots of music, coming from a royal family that traditionally patronized the artists.
What are the key elements you look for in artists?
First actual criteria is that the musician should come here; artists who are interested in India and particularly in Rajasthan and probably artists who haven’t really engaged with Rajasthan. For example, last year we invited a UK percussionist named Pete Locket, who has been coming India for 20 years and played with Bikram Ghosh to Zakir Hussain to A R Rahman, apart from Bjork and Peter Gabriel. He plays the tabla like a god, and also plays the mridang, the kanjira, the dholak, drums. He has been nominated twice as the world’s best percussionist, but has never played with folk artists. He was keen to come and worked with 18 folk artists of which only four were professional, the other 14 were villagers who at certain times of the year, during Holi would make or pull out some instrument, perform and then put it back. Pete has exceptional talent and that’s the key for our selecting international artists. Second they have to be open to engaging with the traditional musicians from villages. In a nutshell, we want these international artists to be exceptional in their field and open to perform with local folk talent. Sharing the stage with international artists gives the traditional artists the confidence; an acknowledgement of their talent.
Have you recorded the performances at the festival?
Yes.
Have you brought out albums of the performances or planning to do it?
Yes definitely for promotional purposes, though we don’t know about sales. We are a little wary about launching of recordings of folk artists. One, folk artists don’t own rights,so they can’t claim ownership to a song because they sing community songs. The logic of licensing of music is based on the idea of ownership of an individual, while with the folk artist the ownership doesn’t lie with the individual, unless the individual writes a new song, comes up with a new tune and claims it as his own.
But you can have the ownership of the recordings of the live collaboration performances?
Yes, we could, but if you talk commerce, you need a distribution network to maximize it…then you need sales points and it’s a whole world out there and we don’t understand that world well enough.
So why not CDs of the live performance?
Who will buy?Our focus is very much around the live performance.
Has the festival uplifted the lot of the folk artists in general in Rajasthan?
I think if you are looking at its contribution, then your talking to me right now about folk artists has happened because of the festival…A few days back I saw an ad in the paper for Kingfisher hosting this event called Folk-Funk. I was happy for folk has become mainstream. It means that for a nation that had marginalized the folk artists is suddenly open to looking at folk and Jodhpur…regarding the contribution, first and foremost we have taken the marginal element and are making it mainstream. I don’t think the question is, has it changed their economic status, Rather, I think the question is, has anything changed for them at all? The first thing that changed for them is the public perception because in the case of the folk artist most of them are either from the lower strata of society. That’s why they never get talked about in media. The only time folk artists are written about is during the festivals of India abroad.
If I ask anyone in Mumbai about Rajasthani folk artists, they draw blank and know them as folks with the turbans, etc.. It’s only the cliches. Today because of what Jodhpur RIFF, people are willing to talk about the folk artist in respectful terms and not being dismissive as they earlier were. RIFF had managed to give this marginalised section some respectability. When you talk of economic benefit, we definitely feel there is a trend that artists who are presented at RIFF get more work. Our big challenge is that we can only present 100 or 120 artists. The big ask is do justice to thousands of them.
Does RIFF look to media to get support?
For us the media is most critical in terms of the communication of what we are doing. We have avoided TV completely, because despite their covering the event they end up showing a 2 or 3 minute capsule. This won’t help the folk artists you tell me. I would rather have the BBC come in and do a one hour documentary on RIFF and this year they are actually doing it. So at RIFF television is not allowed. There was a guy from Manipur who wanted to make a documentary film on a folk artist and I said come. The film won a National Award, there was another film maker, Paromita Vohra, who made a film called ‘Partners in Crime’ on copyright issues…a lot of it was shot at Jodhpur RIFF.
What are the numbers that come for the festival at present?
I think if you look at independent entries you are looking at about 2500 for 3 nights and 4 days and its India’s only real international ticketed music festival around folk, most other folk events are free. The entire festival pass is for Rs 4500/-, which for most people is great value for money. For us the success of the festival depends on the fact that people have to travel to Jodhpur. RIFF is really about hardcore music lovers. I’m not aspiring for thousands of people, what we are doing is that we are moving more and more into the city. We want more events in the rest of Jodhpur and not just in Mehrangarh. This year we are doing two things: one is, there’s a very busy area in Jodhpur city called the Clock Tower area where we are going to do a free concert. The other thing we are doing is move into the area catering to children’s performances like traditional dance, traditional puppeteer, jugglers, traditional magicians, traditional nautaki acrobats, which we want to do for children in the streets. So we’ve tied up with a local partner and our thrust is to build an audience within the city. Next year we’d like to have screens in the city so that people from the city can see what is going on in the fort, especially for those who don’t have the means to actually be in the fort. So slowly we want to create an entire city that will be involved in the festival and feel an ownership.
Your organization is a trust?
Both are trusts, the Mehrangarh Museum Trust and the Jaipur Virasat Foundation.
So how are your operating costs covered?
We have to raise funds…but our four trustees, they have a corpus and out of the corpus they give out a certain amount of money for office expenses, electricity, printers, rent, stationery, etc. Otherwise the expenses for the Jodhpur Festival, I raise the money to spend. I get a budget from MMT saying that we can contribute so much, JVF will tell me I have to take the decision because I am the Director, but there is only a certain amount JVF can put in and the balance I have to raise. So every year I negotiate with the Taj, which is our main partner. In our worst year we got Rs. 15 lacs and in our best year, we got Rs 35 lacs. So, every year it’s about going to the sponsors and finding out how much money there is and shaping my budget accordingly.
Do you make any profit?
How would we make profit?
You shouldn’t have any problems getting sponsors considering the festival’s popularity?
No, but the problem is that most sponsorships are handled by marketing departments and marketing is looking at whether there’s a or not, not for festivals, but for their products. I go to a cement company and they’ll say, this doesn’t concern real estate business. I tell that it’s not about real estate, but about getting the buzz. Their entire approach reveals that sponsorships are controlled by marketing executives or advertising agencies.
Don’t folk artists venture out of Rajasthan, for say better opportunities?
They do, if someone finds that he is losing out in Jodhpur, he’ll come to Mumbai. We had a couple of artists, like this guy named Swarup Khan, who was in Indian Idol and in the beginning when they first interviewed him and he was selected, he always talked about “our Rajasthani folk music”, , but by the sixth or seventh round, he was saying that everyone should learn Hindi film music because that is where the future is. That is scary as it means that whatever you know, forget it, who sab chod do aap, Bambaiaajao there’s where money is. There is some truth to that logic, but is he mentioning numbers; there are thousands of people who come to Mumbai to make it into the film industry, but how many make it.
How about your tie up with Songlines, are you also working with music tours organizers?
Yes, those are independents. We have about 12-13 tours happening. From the Guardian newspaper, there’s a website called Original Music Travel, there’s another one called Sound Travel. There are about 12-13 of them.
You put their logo on your website?
Because they have put us amongst the 25 best international festivals and they decide, we don’t apply. They choose and they tell you that we have done this, if you like you can put our icon on your website…there is nothing that we pay them or they give us.
Same thing with Australian VivaMusica?
Viva Australia is putting in money. They are the people who are paying for the Australian artists to come here, so we are not. What we offer is the festival. So, because Viva gived us money, we put up their logo and we give them credit. Songline doesn’t get credit, Songline’s only there because it says we are one of the top 25 festivals. The fact that you have been selected by a world music magazine, it’s a big thing.
Even the artists you invite, you don’t sponsor or pay them?
For international artists, we may go to the extent of buying them flight tickets or reimbursing flight tickets. For example the American group that’s coming, we are covering their flight tickets and where we don’t pay a fee and they need the money we give them what’s called an allowance, which is a little more than what they would spend in a day, we give them that. As a charitable foundation, there are rules regarding fee payment to artists. Our most expensive artists are our national artists: Sultan Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Rekha Bharadwaj, Sona Mohapatra, Kavitha Seth, these are artists who are expensive, they are more expensive than the international artists, but we don’t mind paying them because they give strength to the festival. They also bring a popular motif. Kavitha Seth is not a celebrity, she’s a good artist, so also Rekha Bharadwaj, she’s a good artist, they have strengthened our platform.