Udaipur World Music Festival: The Event Worth Revisiting

The first ever world music festival in the city of lakes saw sonorous life stories take centrestage even as a series of contradictions played out in the backdrop, finds Martand Badoni.

- Martand Badoni

​

When a crowd of largely Rajasthani men between ages of 18-45 responded in ecstatic fren-zy to African singer Dobet Ghanore’s call from the stage, I realised music really does bring the most diverse people on the same page. ‘Africa’ cried Dobet from stage to about 5,000 people. ‘Africa’, ‘India’, ‘Yeah’, they shouted back. In a drastic change, as soon as the song came to an end, the crowds began sloganeering ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, joking, getting restless even aggressive. This, till another song made them sway to its tunes again.

This was but a glimpse of the many contradictions noticed under the canopy of the Udaipur World Music Festival. Where on one hand the event brought a diverse group of musicians singing about freedom, desire and unity from across the world, one couldn’t overlook the fact that it was funded by a corporate- Vedanta- that has been mired in controversy for crushing people’s rights. Where in essence, it was organised to bring music from world over to the people of Udaipur, it had an exclusive private slot of performances for vips in the opulent property of Jag Mandir beside the Udaipur lake palace. However, what the festival did, most importantly, was give moments of rapture through music, to a diverse audience.