Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil,
la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta,
de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa
la tragedia sin par de la existencia.

More likely than not, it’s the loving caress of futility,
the endless misery of the poet’s existence,
to sing and to sing without ever being able to
tear tragedy away from life.

(From 'Canción Amarga/Bitter Song')

Julia de Burgos, a Puerto Rican poet and proponent of Puerto Rican independence, encapsulates in these lines what it means to be a poet, a musician, and an artist in a world governed by tragedies. While art for art’s sake is heady in its lure, there is no getting away from the economics and politics of it.

Music festivals are powerful. When they go well, they are glorious; when they don’t, it’s a nightmare. Ask anyone in the Middle East right now. Because music festivals rely on the superiority of live performance as an aural good – as opposed to recorded music that can be consumed repeatedly, uniformly and in a location-agnostic manner – they are meant for a different, smaller, kind of audience. And when it comes to a festival like Jodhpur RIFF, the audience base becomes even smaller. Unlike any other music festival in India, this folk and roots music festival – now in its 16th year – does not believe in expanding that base. It also does not believe in spelling out its politics.

“We have to define the specific nature of politics. For some politics of identity is all important, for some others it means nothing. Even if I stand and announce during the festival that we are Left-leaning or Right-leaning, what does it matter? Kalakaar ki life par kya farq padta hai?” says Divya Bhatia, the director of the festival.

Bhatia likes to see Jodhpur RIFF playing a key role in bringing artists/suppliers to the audiences/consumers of aural goods – to use socio-economist P.M. Hirsch’s vocabulary to define the cultural industry.

“You have to be regular and consistent in order for your politics to shine through. Merely speaking about something means nothing. My politics is about facilitating artists to make a name for themselves. To command respect. To ask for their due in monetary terms. The mandate of the festival has been to give a platform to artists that can bring a change to their personal and professional lives,” he adds.

Over sixteen years, Jodhpur RIFF has been able to establish itself as a niche festival that draws repeat audiences. The recently concluded 2023 edition saw some people who have never missed a single year. For four days and nights music lovers from across the world congregate in the medieval fort of Mehrangarh absorbing the sights and sounds of the collaborative congress of performance artists. “We are a not-for-profit festival so the scale has to be kept optimal. We do not spend anything on marketing and publicity so that we can pay the artists. People come to the festival year after year because they get something here which is matchless,” Bhatia shares.

Global music festivals are not a new phenomenon. Remember, French composer Claude Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. Expressing traditional diversity of different cultures, Jodhpur RIFF is an ideal space for multicultural encounters where the festival goer comes face to face with the 'Other' as well as the 'Own'. This year’s festival hosted musicians from across the world who brought their unique musical traditions and also collaborated on the spot with each other in a celebration of plurality. The festival customarily features a grand jam called ‘RIFF-Rustle’ for the grand finale when artists respond to each other in a carnivalesque manner. The Bakhtinian idea of different voices interacting in order to create meaning in a particular context can be experienced live during this improvisation. But that’s being pedagogical where there isn’t a need to do so. Sometimes, joy ought to take over intellect.

Joy can come in the form of a little schoolgirl who wants to become “a great artist like my mother”. And why wouldn’t you if your mother is Asha Sapera, a renowned dancer from the snake-charmer tribe of Rajasthan? Traditional arts can only flourish through intergenerational carrying forward. But it has to be a matter of choice and not compulsion or helplessness. The words of Asha’s daughter Nandini, fluently enunciated in English, perhaps herald a welcome era of choice. And maybe this is what Bhatia means when he says that artistes ought to learn how the market forces operate and make them work for themselves and their artistic goods.

“Artistes also operate within hierarchies and they have internal pulls and pushes. Like, each year I get requests from musicians wanting to play on the ‘main stage’ venue of the festival. One of the reasons is that they have figured out that ‘main stage’ performers get paid more. This is a good thing. Folk artistes are also getting more aware of parity with commercial musicians playing in Mumbai,” says Bhatia.

Art survives amidst death and destruction. Bertolt Brecht’s famous line on singing about dark days underscores its resilience. It cannot, however, exist in a vacuum of political economy. In simple words, it is possible for art to exist without a market but then the artiste cannot survive. An empowered artiste is the one who makes the market work for their artistic production and not the other way around. Art transforms into a pastiche in the absence of tools to negotiate the cultural materialism of its age. And this is where festivals like Jodhpur RIFF have a key role to play.

Aspirations and altruism need to be aligned in a way that art remains the refuge of the gifted, not the scoundrel. The pursuit of art ought not to be a torment.

As for the existential torment of the artiste, it engenders joy. For the artistes as well as their audiences.

And that’s what Leonard Cohen says:

“O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.”

Nishtha Gautam is an author, academic, and columnist. She’s the co-editor of a critically acclaimed volume on strategic affairs titled In Hard Times: Security in Times of Insecurity (Bloomsbury, 2022).

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