Delhi is a city of cultural festivals. Numerous events featuring different kinds of performing and visual arts, exhibitions, film festivals, poetry festivals take place throughout the year. Except for peak summer in May-June, there is mostly a crisis of choice for the Delhi audience. Delhi, being the capital city showcases not only the “national” culture from different regions of India, but it also offers a choice of numerous international events through various embassies and cultural institutions like IIC, IHC and others. Delhi attracts people from all over the country who made it their home. Here we can easily attend a Bharatanatyam performance by the Tamil community, a Rabindra Sangeet concert organised by some Bengali club, enjoy a mouth-watering Pongal feast by a gracious Malayali host and of course one cannot miss the omnipresent vivacious Punjabis.
Ironically, in this myriad of cultural activities from all over India, and the world, Delhi’s own cultural traditions are not highlighted adequately. To amend this, Kri Foundation in collaboration with INTACH organized a five-day festival aptly named Dilli ka Apna Utsav—Delhi’s own Festival. Conceptualised and curated by Arshiya Sethi, this festival showcases various aspects of Delhi’s traditional culture through a variety of events at multiple venues. Other than presenting classical music of Delhi Gharana, Kathak based on poets of Delhi, Sufi and Qawali performances, the festival offered other interesting events like two walks in the Old Delhi area, one highlighting the poetic life of Delhi in 18th and 19th centuries, and the other one bringing back to life the courtesan culture of a bygone era. There were also two events highlighting the story-telling traditions of old Delhi, “Kissagoi” and “Dastangoi”. An interesting aspect of “Kissagoi” was that it involved children from the forgotten bylanes of Old Delhi telling their own stories, underscoring nuances of a lifestyle that still survives in bits and pieces as part of our intangible living heritage and presenting it in the timeless fashion of oral tradition.
Since time immemorial, Delhi has been the centre of political power. Starting from the “Indraprastha” of the Mahabharata times, the capital city of the mighty Mughals, to Lutyens’ Delhi during the colonial period and the present day capital of modern India, Delhi has always been a centre of synthesis of varied and diverse cultural influences. Delhi has been captured, ransacked and ravaged, yet every time it resurrected from the ashes like the mythical phoenix. Several books have been written on Delhi by celebrated authors including Khuswant Singh and William Dalrymple, who in the process of uncovering the mysteries of Delhi, fell in love with the city. In today’s modern metropolitan Delhi, one can still get the nuances of the past in the early morning rituals of a sadhu at Nigambodh Ghat practicing puja in the age-old traditions prescribed in the Vedas, in the Qawali singing at Nizamuddin Darga, in an inconspicuously hidden façade of Mughal architecture in cacophonic Chawri Bazar, in the early evening sky full of colourful kites on Independence Day in Old Delhi, in the mouth-watering aroma of kababs while walking past the famous Karim restaurant. In such moments, the veil of time disappears, suddenly giving you a rare glimpse of the past and the timelessness of Delhi. I would conclude with a famous line from a celebrated poet of Delhi Zauq: Kaun jaye zauq par Dilli ki galiyan chhod kar—who would ever like to leave the city of Delhi?
The writer is a Kathak dancer based in Delhi.
mukherjee.sharmistha@gmail.com