Rajasthan Kabir Yatra is dedicated to reviving the traditional all-night singing congregation Bhakti-Sufi poetry in Rajasthan with a blend of concert aesthetics and design that has taken firm roots in the music circuit of the region, drawing audiences and performers from across the globe.
Who will be sheriff [judge]
In a town littered with meat
Where the watchman
Is a vulture? […]
Frog sleeping
Snake on guard;
Bull giving birth
Cow sterile
Calf milked
Lion forever leaping
To fight the jackal.
Morning, noon and night;
Kabir says, rare listeners
Hear the song right.
This upside-down poem of Kabir startles us with its absurdity, and precisely due to its absurdness, it is insightful about our time. Like the poem, many institutions seem to work against their designated constitutional roles. We often hear instances of police violence or police as mute spectators of violence on one side while being excessive and prejudicious on the other side.
As V.N. Rai, a former IPS officer and expert on communal violence and the role of the police force, says, “No riot can last for more than 24 hours unless the state wants it to continue”. Through his research, he found that during communal violence in India, the Hindus look at the police favourably. In contrast, minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs look at the force with apprehension. From the 1987 Hashimpura to the 1984 Sikh pogrom to countless everyday partisan and unconstitutional roles of police has been well documented. In this context, one finds it rather intriguing that policemen and BSF soldiers are dancing in uniforms in an all-night singing congregation organized for communal harmony, and then further knowing that they are the organizers of this traveling music festival in Rajasthan.
The question one must ask, how appropriate it is for a state institution to use religious-que music to counter religious hate, especially in the current political climate of India.
Rajasthan police, with the support of community-based organizations and civil society people, organized music festival under the banner of RKY and hosted musical events at the exact spots where religious hate crimes had taken place. The main aim of this project was to deploy music to counter religious hatred. These are some attempts to counter the hegemony of Hindu majoritarian nationalism and religious hatred, as well as use the traditions to connect to the masses. Rajasthan Police deploys music as a confidence-building measure through its community policing initiative.
The contestation over these traditional cultural practices has been going on for a long time. The inclusive, egalitarian essence of many Bhakti congregational practices across the subcontinent has brought people together to partake and to participate as equals in singing, eating, and living together. This radical utopic imagination of an equal society is recurrent in many Bhakti traditions, such as Kabir’s Premnagar (city of love); or Begumpura (city without sorrow) of Sant Ravidas. For many centuries, this utopia has been chased by the marginalized, yet to be attained. As Eduardo Galeano says, “Utopia is on the horizon.
I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”`Religious hatred has a long history in the subcontinent. In the 1990s post-Babri-demolition era, the urban intelligentsia realized the utter failure of the state-backed Western-style secularism to take root among the Indian masses (Bharucha 1993). They have consequently sought refuge in the mystical Bhakti (devotional) and Sufi poetry as a counterforce to religious hatred.
In 2015, religious hatred against Muslims ascended across India, and Rajasthan was no exception. In October, Bikaner, a district in western Rajasthan, witnessed religious clashes between Hindu and Muslim communities over the issue of religious processions. The situation escalated and the town was under curfew for days. At the same time, in Bhilwara, another district of Rajasthan, a 20-year-old Muslim boy was found dead, leading religious hatred to boil over in the city (The Hindu, 2015). As a counter move, after a few months, Rajasthan Police launched the project Taana-Baana (meaning warp and weft, symbolizing social fabric) in collaboration with Lokayan Sansthan, an organization working on the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of western Rajasthan.
Lokayan took a grassroots initiative to revive the local performing and singing congregational traditions of the region and started the Rajasthan Kabir Yatra (RKY) in 2012. This eventually became a success among locals and music lovers from across the country. RKY gives free access to both local and outside audiences, in contrast to other more popular but touristy music festivals which primarily cater to the paid non-local audience. As the RKY Website states, “Rajasthan Kabir Yatra is India’s longest traveling folk music festival, celebrating the oral traditions of the Bhakti, Nirgun, and Sufi poems such of Kabir, Mirabai, Baba Bulle shah, Gorakhnath, Shah Lateef, and other saints and sages who share a deep mystic ecstasy sublimated in their poetic voices.”
Rajasthan Kabir Yatra is dedicated to reviving the traditional all-night singing congregation Bhakti-Sufi poetry in Rajasthan with a blend of concert aesthetics and design that has taken firm roots in the music circuit of the region, drawing audiences and performers from across the globe. The area has an older popular religious tradition of singing congregations called Jaagan or Satsang, where the poetry of saints and Sufi poets is performed. In contrast, as the night progresses, the genre moves from Sagun (form) to nirgun (formless). In the post-midnight session, there are very few engaged audiences, and the singing goes in the form of interaction and dialogical by reciting philosophical and didactic aspects of the poetry. This phenomenon has transformed with the advent of various modes of entertainment and urbanization. Few scholars noted that these late-night sessions are now being utilized for the political propagation of Hindutva (Schultz and Purohit).
Generally, the police response to religious hatred has been abysmal and, in some cases, they have sided with perpetrators, further aggravating the already fragile inter-religious harmony. In this case, the idea behind using music festivals was intended as a confidence-building measure and to make people comfortable with the police. This was drawn from the global policing practices in countering fundamentalism and building trust within communities and with law enforcement.
It is rooted in the logic that communal violence is not just a law-and-order problem but a manifestation of a much deeper socio-political and cultural hatred. Without addressing these fault lines, law and order will always be a stone’s throw away from disturbance. Choosing the exact spots of communal violence as a space for music festivals aims to reconfigure the spatial memory of communities.
How much of that has been achieved? There are no tangible answers yet. In a quest for social harmony, a utopia, it is a step towards that. In these times, when religious and cultural spaces are under the threat of majoritarianism, whether these islets serve as a resistance of Bhakti’s egalitarianism, or as remnants of a past gone by, only time will reveal that. But only words, even iconoclasts such as Kabir will not suffice.
To conclude, in Kabir’s words, as watchmen, the police force must not resort to unconstitutional practices, while the people must not only sing and listen but, as Kabir says, hear the song right. It is not in the sound, lyrics, form, or body; the message is formless, and to get, and spread the message, one must give up their form, and identity (read biases here). Then only a true congregation, a Satsang, and harmony can happen. Like, Kabir attended to his weaving diligently while singing poetry, institutions may choose to tune in, but they must attend to their primary vocation, their constitutional duty of impartial and just force.