An Indian Summer
Radha Spratt checks in at An Indian Summer – a weekend-long arts festival held in Leicester to celebrate Indian art and culture
Held in the heart of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, An Indian Summer, a weekend long festival over 18-19 June, was truly ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. The driving force behind it was a desire to bring Leicester together to celebrate aspects of Indian culture dear to the substantial and vibrant Asian community that calls the city ‘home’.
Bipin Anand, along with some friends and family, was the brains behind the undertaking. Very keen on “grassroots”, he expressed his determination not to “lose that community element”, despite plans to expand the festival year-on-year and collaborate with “high quality artists”. Dressed in a sherwani and trainers, the enthusiastic young entrepreneur who runs his own media company personified the professed aim of the festival to combine the traditional with the modern.
The stylish and otherwise minimalist venue – housing cinemas, exhibition rooms and media production suites – was decked out in garlands of marigold and rose, and festooned with lengths of colourful silk bandhani-print. Tasteful handicrafts, a divan complete with brocaded cushions, a gorgeous silver Rajasthani jhula and tiny Indian curios, added bursts of colour to the scene; the smell of incense, the babble of myriad accents and excitable laughter abounded.
After the festival’s inauguration by Leicester’s Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby, the weekend kicked off with kathak and bharata natyam performances by women and young girls who attend the city’s Centre for Indian Classical Dance: they took the tiny stage periodically throughout the weekend, and in ghungroo-ed feet and traditional finery they enacted scenes from the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. There was also modern dance of the thrusty jangly shaky-shaky variety that Bollywood has exported worldwide.
Classical music with-a-difference, came in the form of a live jam between a tabla artist in India, and Mayur Narvekar in Leicester. Narvekar is a classically trained tabla-player, jazz-funk percussionist and producer with his own record label in Bombay. He spoke of how experimentation with drum & bass and glitch-hop in India has resulted in “India now inspiring the West”: arguably a phenomenon not confined to music.
Another major crowd-puller over the weekend was the line-up of Indian films, all of which were popular favourites among Leicester locals: Sholay, the big daddy of ‘curry Westerns; Jodha Akbar, an epic Mughal saga, and Lagaan, a Victorian-India crowd-pleaser about cricket and imperialist British baddies, are all mainstream Bollywood at its dazzling best.
Other films, like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and Deepa Mehta’s Fire-Earth-Water trilogy, explore ‘the real India’ with the latter based on the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa and the celebrated Urdu writer and feminist Ismat Chughtai. Devdas, based on Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1917 novella—which has inspired eight Indian films in different languages—was also showing.
Literature in more direct form was celebrated with a segment of the weekend dedicated to people reading from novels and reciting poetry, either selected or of their own composition. A lengthy section of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children got an airing, as did a poem by Bulleh Shah, the 18th century Punjabi Sufi poet, which was performed in Punjabi and English. And just to mix it up a little, a rhyme about Leicester’s unity-in-diversity tripped off the tongue of slam poet, Zero Pence.
There were talks on everything from ayurvedic medicine to the ethnic-mix of Leicester, as well as an interesting discussion entitled ‘Super Power vs Slum Poverty’. The main speaker was Bhaskar Solanki, who has covered hard news worldwide as a cameraman for the BBC, in places as far-flung as Rwanda, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
His experiences led him to realise that “you can give money to people, but only education can change their lives”. The 2001 Gujarat earthquake led him to co-found The Rushey Mead Foundation, now engaged in building schools for underprivileged children. An Indian Summer’s organisers are all former students of the city’s Rushey Mead School, and a raffle at the venue raised hundreds of pounds for a project in Gujarat’s Bhuj region.
The weekend festival was a feast for the senses – including the spread of Indian food on offer, and a cooking demo by a Bengali chef – and looks all set to really come into its own in future. A short film exhibit entitled ‘Horn Ok Please’, an exuberance of sights, sounds and everything Indian – and parodying the slogan that is as much a staple of India’s highways as tarmac – mirrored the feel of the festival: a great many enthusiastic people coming together, and just going for it.
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