The five-day Shreshtha Bharat Sanskriti Samagam, a national festival of performing arts being hosted by New Delhi-based Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) under the Union Ministry of Culture, kicked off here at Bhanja Kala Mandap auditorium on Tuesday with a seminar on Indian music.
The seminar brought much cheer to the people of the State who are demanding the coveted ‘classical’ tag for Odishi music. “We are happy and honoured that this historic seminar by India’s national academy for performing arts included Odishi music along with Hindustani and Carnatic music traditions,” opined Guru Ramahari Das, well-known Odishi musician who headed the State-owned Odissi Research Centre and the Odishi Music Department of Utkal University of Culture earlier.
He was one of the nine exponents of the country who was invited to speak on Odishi music.
Speaking lucidly but with authority, Guru Das pointed out that while Odia language and Odishi dance – that follow Odishi music - have already been categorised as classical, the tag eludes Odishi music that has a tradition of above one thousand years. He further argued in favour of inclusion of other major regional music traditions of India like the Borgeet of Assam as classical music.
“Since Indian culture is composite and celebrates unity in diversity, its major music traditions should get due justice as Indian classical dances have received,” he emphasised.
In his welcome address, SNA chairperson Sekhar Sen stated that the festival has been the first of its kind for India where all art traditions are coming together.
“We have chosen six cities across India to host this series of unique festivals. While we started with Bhubaneswar, the next five festivals will be hosted in Baroda, Bhopal, Tanjavur or Chennai in Tamil Nadu, Amritsar and Guwahati. The thrust of the festival is to develop an inter-disciplinary approach towards art in which a dancer will interact with a puppeteer and a dancer will know the work of a folk singer. We aim at making our next generation aware of our great cultural tradition through these festival series which will have performances and seminars to deliberate upon the past, present and future of the art traditions,” he elaborated.
The nine stalwarts of Indian classical music who addressed the seminar included seminar chairperson Ajoy Chakraborty from West Bengal, Prabha Atre, Sharad Sathe, Yogesh Samsi and Vidyadhar Vyas from Maharashtra, Mysore Manjunath from Karnataka, Shruti Sadolikar Katkar from Uttar Pradesh, OS Thiagrajan from Tamil Nadu and Ramahari Das from Odisha.
Odisha’s popular musicIan Prafulla Kar was invited to inaugurate the festival along with the SNA chairperson and other visiting musicians.
