By Isha Singh Sawhney
Courtesy of Kunal KakodkarCrowds at the NH7 festival 2011 in Pune, Maharashtra.
Music festivalgoers in India are a happy lot these days. After
spending the last decade looking enviously westward, and bemoaning the
lack of Coachellas and Glastonburys at home, festival options now crowd
India’s social calendars.
Revelers can pick from travel-worthy destinations including a desert,
an oceanfront, the ubiquitous Indian hill station and a handful of
cities. For example, would you rather be: drunk on rice beer in
Arunachal Pradesh’s beautiful paddy fields with the Radiohead-inspired
singing of Sky Rabbit’s lead, Raxit Tewari, or wine-soaked in the
vineyards of Nashik, fueled with copious amounts of live music from
another Tewari – Ankur Tewari and the Ghalat Family?
India’s music devotees are hopeful that the shoddy organization and
short performer lineups that once characterized music “festivals” here
are a thing of the past.
“The term ‘music festival’ was often misused by Indian promoters,”
said Arjun S. Ravi, a festival fixture and an acerbic music critic who
runs the webzine
Indiescision,
which is sponsored by the music site NH7. Any event with “two or more
artists on the bill, cheap drinks and a willing club” was billed a music
a festival, he said.
But in recent years, professional management groups have been putting
together smoothly run, skillfully executed festivals, like Only Much
Louder’s highly successful NH7 Weekender in Pune and Invasion in Delhi,
Bangalore and Pune and Percept’s Sunburn, a three-day electronica
festival, in Goa.
Competition among these groups has meant more “long-term planning and
better curators and audiences,” said Vijay Nair, Only Much Louder’s
chief executive. “People now expect all the things that come together to
make a music festival,” he said, including big lineups, multiple
stages, film tents and food courts.
The Indian music industry’s newest bedfellows, big corporate
sponsors, have helped make these expectations possible. For years, big
brands in India feted only Bollywood and cricket. Now they have “woken
up to a large demographic of the youth that’s finding Bollywood crass,”
said Ankur, the front-man and lyricist of the indie-rock band Ghalat
Family.
It helps of course that surrogate-advertising laws ensure that
festivals are the only (and probably coolest) way alcohol brands can
advertise. For liquor companies, sponsoring music festivals and concerts
is a way to tout their wares without violating the 1995 Cable
Television Network Act, which bans advertisements that “promote directly
or indirectly production, sale or consumption of cigarettes, tobacco
products, wine, alcohol, liquor or other intoxicants.”
“The greatest boon to the music industry has been the ban on alcohol
advertising,” said Anup Kutty, Menwhopause’s bass guitarist.
Mr. Nair estimates that endorsements from alcohol sponsors account
for about 60 to 70 percent of festival revenues. Finding a music
festival to append to their name gives big brands much more mileage than
any tie-ups with soda companies or releases of music compilations on
compact discs.
More bands and better financing sources leads to more festivals, said
Lalitha Suhasini, the editor of Rolling Stone India. She said
organizers are now also offering audiences an entire new festival
experience, which could involve “backpacking to a hill station for a
festival to getting a band tattoo at a tattoo stall in the festival
bazaar.”
Mahesh Madhavan, president and chief executive of Bacardi South Asia,
which is the chief sponsor of the Invasion and NH7 events, said the
liquor brand has longstanding ties to music in India, dating from the
1990s, and has brought international bands like Bob Sinclar, Flo Rida
and Basement Jaxx to the country.
Mr. Madhavan wouldn’t give exact budgets earmarked for festivals like
NH7, but said that a festival costs “anything between $800,000 to $1
million.”
Bacardi paired an individual brand with each festival it sponsored:
Dewar’s scotch with NH7 Weekender in Pune, which featured mattresses in
the sun and slow, acoustic music, and Eristoff vodka at Invasion in
Noida, Pune and Bangalore, which featured electronica, laser lights, the
dance music group Prodigy and the D.J. David Guetta.
Musicians like Mr. Kutty of Menwhopause say they have also found
friendly governments as sponsors. He has enlisted the Arunachal Pradesh
Department of Tourism for the Northeast’s first big mainstream music
festival, Ziro. The founders of the Ragastan festival in Jaisalmer are
partners with Incredible India, the central government’s tourism
campaign.
Still, a handful of festivals remain proudly independent, eschewing
sponsors altogether, like Happily Unmarried’s Music in the Hills, which
celebrate its eighth year this April. Happily Unmarried avoids sponsors
to keep the festival small and focused.
To help you decide where you want to wear your neons/Wellies/Ray-Bans
and wave your lighters and jump around in mosh pits, we have listed the
festivals of the season.
Courtesy Ziro Festival of MusicZiro town in Lower Subansiri district, Arunachal Pradesh.
What: Ziro
Where and when: Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh, Sept. 14 to 16
Tickets: A three-day pass is 2,500 rupees ($45)
Getting there: By bus or taxi from Itanagar, by rail from the North Lakhimpur Railway Station, or by air from Guwahati.
Ziro will see local bands and big names from across the country come
together for what’s being touted as the Northeast’s first music
festival, in this green hill station. Expect performances from Digital
Suicide, Dirty Punk, Vinly Records, Alisha Batth, Trisha Electric and
Peter Cat Recording, among others.
Partnered with
NgunuZiro,
which works for the sustainable development of Ziro valley and
empowerment of local communities, the festival promises to respect local
Apa-tani tribe ethics. Sponsors are the state tourism board and local
businesses. Food stalls by Apa-tani tribe villagers will offer dishes
like fermented bamboo, many kinds of meats and many more kegs of rice
beer. Of the 2,000 expected attendees, most are likely to come from the
northeast.
What: Sunburn
Where and when: Delhi, Unitech Golf Course and Country Club, Noida, Oct. 7; Goa, Dec. 27 to 29
Tickets: Regular ticket 2, 500 rupees and VIP ticket 6, 000 rupees for Noida
With the dance music evangelist Nikhil Chinapa at the forefront,
Sunburn kicked off in 2007 on Goa’s Candolim beach as a three-day
festival, and since then the festival attracts over 100,000 people each
year. This year, the festival has been on the move, first to Mumbai in
April, and then Delhi and Colombo, Sri Lanka, in October.
Previous Sunburn lineups have included big acts like Axwell, Above
& Beyond, Gareth Emery, Markus Schulz, Pete Tong and Infected
Mushroom. Expect magnificent pyrotechnics and trippy visuals of the
Delhi audio-visual deejays BLOT, both in Noida and Goa. This year’s big
names include Dutch deejay Afrojack and German EDM deejay Moguai, other
than Indian heavyweights Jalebee Cartel’s Arjun Vagale and Ash Roy and
DJ Pearl .
What: Bacardi NH7 Weekender
Where and when: Noida, Ground D, Budh International
Circuit, Oct. 13 to 14; Pune, Amanora Park Nov. 2 to 4; Bangalore, Dec.
15 to 16 (venue to be announced)
Tickets: For Delhi tickets will cost between 1, 500 and 3, 000 rupees for Pune and Bangalore tickets still to be announced.
Getting there: All three cities are well connected by air, road and rail.
Now in its third year, the NH7 Weekender is expanding to Delhi and
Bangalore despite skepticism by festivalgoers that the event can be
successfully repeated outside of Pune. Delhi, in particular, has gained a
reputation for mishandling big concerts by international artists like
Bryan Adams, Akon and Metallica.
But Mr. Nair of
Only Much Louder said he
believed that the best crowds will be in Delhi. The company has also
promised that no acts will be repeated in the other cities.
In Pune last year, more than 25,000 people visited five stages,
featuring everything from punk, metal and electronic dance music to folk
rock, dubstep and acoustic gigs. NH7 Weekender’s last act has usually
been headliners like Imogen Heap and Asian Dub Foundation.
This year one more stage, Fully Fantastic, has been added in homage
to the great ol’ Daddy of Indian rock who passed away earlier this year,
Amit Saigal. The lineup includes the Kaiserdisco, Solstice Coil,
Parikrama. Shafqat Amanat Ali and the Music Basti Project.
Keith Bedford for The New York TimesThe Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.
What: JodhpurRIFF
Where and when: Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, Oct. 26 to 30
Tickets: Full donor passes are available for 4,900 rupees
here
Getting there: Regular flights, trains and buses to Jodhpur.
High up in Mehrangarh Fort, this folk music festival brings bands
from Egypt, Paris and San Francisco together with the most formidable
names of Rajasthani folk music. The festival is made for those who love
the idea of an innovative mélange of
jugalbandi (literally
“entwined twins”, an Indian classical music term for a duet)
collaboration, under the backdrop of the year’s fullest, brightest moon.
What: Ragasthan
Where and when: Kanoi Village, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, Nov. 16 to 18.
Tickets: 4,000 to 5,000 rupees
Getting there:Regular flights, trains and buses are available to Jaisalmer.
Harley bikers and buses of artists will head to the rolling sand
dunes of Kanoi Village, where local Rajasthani folk musicians and
experimental artists from all over the world will enthrall attendees
against the awesome backdrop of Jaisalmer’s desert.
The festival, attracting an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people, features
three stages, the Morio Main Stage, Ammara Electronic Stage (complete
with visual performances with dancers and artists) and a World Stage
(collaborations with different embassies include music from Iceland,
Britain and Norway). Visitors will be able to stay in tents in the
desert, go stargazing and enjoy a nighttime movie at the Ujalo film
tent.
What: Lost
Where and when: Pune, Nov. 23 to 25; Delhi, dates to be announced
Tickets: To be announced
Getting there: Regular flights, trains and buses are available to Pune.
The Bollywood actor and nightclub owner Arjun Rampal and Shailendra
Singh, an executive with the marketing giant Percept, have joined forces
to create the Lost festival. The two are major players in the country’s
music scene, having brought Lady Gaga to India’s first Formula One race
in December and the Sunburn festival to Goa.
Though not much has been announced about the lineup at Lost, Mr.
Rampal promises this festival will be that “light at the end of the
tunnel” for “rock stars and musicians in this country that are lost and
don’t have anything to do.”
Despite all that rhetoric, if Mr. Rampal’s and Mr. Singh’s track
records are anything to go by, we’re sure Pune is in for another winning
festival. Promising 50 artists over two days including 20 international
artists, the Lost festival will move bag and baggage (installations,
artwork, everything) from Delhi to Pune. Word from the organizers is
that they’re hoping their very deep pockets might attract the likes of
the Smashing Pumpkins, Jesse J or Porcupine.
Nine
bands- 24 x 7, Pune; Ably, Mizoram; Gingerfeet ,Kolkata; Clueless
Attention, Nagaland; Dosser’s Urge, Shillong; Four Fields, Nagaland;
Adam’s Apple, Darjeeling, West Bengal; Titans ,Tura ,Meghalaya and Black
Rose, Nagaland will battle it out in the finals of Airtel Hornbill
National Rock Contest (HNRC), 2012 on Friday evening, which would start
at 5 p.m. at IG Stadium, Kohima. 
