Pete Seeger meets qawwali

A metro ride, a shared-auto ride and a walk through a lane with fluttering red flags away, this was a world where children of factory workers bounced along to the music of Pete Seeger, and anti-imperialist songs played through the night on a shaky harmonium.

Much before words like ‘art’, or ‘curate’ became elite preserves, punctuating conversations in wine-and-cheese soirees of post-liberalisation India, the revolutionary theatre activist Safdar Hashmi had dreamt of a janotsav; a cultural festival that would bring together the working class. The idea was to see the working class as the true progenitors of art and art as born from human labour. Hashmi, along with his troupe Jana Natya Manch (Janam), was performing a play Halla Bol in Jhandapur village in Sahibabad, on the outskirts of Delhi, on January 1, 1989 when he was attacked mid-performance; he died three days later. After the incident, the play, indeed the words halla bol, became the war cry for protest and resistance for workers’ groups across the country. In a fitting tribute to Hashmi and his legacy, 25 years after his death, his dream was realised, and his life relived in song, over the three-day Halla Bol festival in Delhi, conceptualised, curated, and performed by workers, and organised by Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). The overarching theme was “not folk art, or dying art or traditional art, it was any art performed by worker-performers,” says Sudhanva Deshpande, from Janam, which provided logistical support to CITU. The three days were filled with progressive and protest music, qawwali, local forms like Ragini (a folk form from Haryana, performed by Suresh Pal and Party), Alha (a martial ballad from Bundelkhand, performed by Gangaram and Party), songs of birha (performed by Shambhunath Yadav and Sangeeta Sargam); acrobatics (Shekhar and Mukesh from Kathputli Colony) and magic (by the popular Ishamuddin, Kathputli Colony).

Minutes into the first day of the Halla Bol festival, women and children, in their best clothes, tentatively crowded into Ambedkar Park. Announcing the opening act — Ashok Band from Ghaziabad — CITU’s KM Tiwari declared how art is a great vehicle for spreading the message of the revolution. A few minutes later, a cluster of children found themselves swaying to a mesmerising, albeit slightly tinny version of a song that’s rocked protests from the American Civil Right’s Movement, to the Iraq War to Delhi University post-Godhra: Bob Dylan’s

Blowin’ in the Wind . The band followed this up with songs of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and Paul Robeson’s song John Henry — an old American ballad about a railway worker John Henry who, in an attempt to save his job, defeats a machine, but dies thereafter. The next performer, all piercing voice and gut-wrenching lyrics, was Ratan Gambhir, whose songs lament against capitalism, American Imperialism, and rally for the working class. While one category of performers kept to progressive songs, attempting to inspire the working class, another set, sang original compositions on Hashmi’s life. For instance, the birha composition by Shambhunath Yadav fit Hashmi’s earthy, lived reality, into a poetic, epic-hero format. Stringing together the facts of Hashmi’s being — his life, jobs, theatre — Yadav embellished it with imagined tales of what might have been. Alha, the martial ballad form, had performers composing original songs in Hashmi’s memory, and reimagining his life as a martial hero.

Perhaps the most incongruous act of the entire event was the French band Imperiel Kirkistan, which had invited itself to the festival and didn’t have quite the working class roots as the others. IK which apologetically describes itself as a “lesser-known band in France” stormed the Pete Seeger Manch (as the stage had been named) with their horn-playing and gibberish lyrics. The park was soon jam-packed with people from the area, and the band delivered the final punch: a jam session with Ashok Band, where one of the French gibberish singers, suddenly broke into Hindi lyrics. This was followed up by the two bands jamming to

Blowin’ in the Wind , which drove the crowd berserk. Wrapping up three days of music and late-nights, Radhika, wife of a factory worker weighed in on her favourite performance. “I should say Ragini because it’s from my region, but this Ragini performance was done by Haryanvi farmers, so I couldn’t understand the lyrics. We’re from Ayodhya,” she says. “But I loved the bands. Especially the song at the end,” she says.

Take a bow Dylan, this answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind.

(Shreya Ray is a writer and musician based in Delhi)