Celebrating unity in diversity and highlighting the true spirit of secularism in Indian society and culture, a three-day Samarpan music festival commenced at the Rabindra Mandap here on Friday evening. The event, exclusive to spiritual and devotional music, is being staged by the famed city-based six-decade-old Bhubaneswar Music Circle.
The inaugural evening commenced with a concert of New Delhi based ghazal, Sufi and bhajan singer Jitender Singh who hails from a cultured and educated Dogra Rajput family. Son of a classical singer, his gifted voice prompted his father to send him to Delhi for professional training after the son graduated in science from Jammu University and has opted for study of law.
In Delhi, he was groomed in Khayal singing by Pandit Mani Prasad of Kirana gharana and later on he evolved his own style of singing inspired and influenced much by ghazal maestros Mehdi Hassan and Jagjit Singh. The influence of ghazal on his style was evident from his “Sufi Musings” concert here.
He picked up Sufi songs of two iconic Sufi poets of Indian sub-continent belonging two different periods but to the same Sufi sentiments - Hazrat Amir Khusrau from 13th century and Buleh Shah of 17th century. The songs extolled how spiritualism and the essence of any faith and religion and how the temple or the mosque bear the same significance for a devotee.
Jitender Singh was superbly supported by Rahul Vishwakarma on tabla and Ratan Prasanna on Rabab while Bhabatosh Mohanty was on guitar.
Aptly titled “Music of the Soul from Bengal”, the second session of the evening featured well-known Baul artiste Parvathy Baul from Birbhum district of West Bengal. Winner of the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, her special appeal has been her solo recitals with dance in trance that she does alongside singing and playing of three instruments herself - Duggie, Ektara and Nupur - all played simultaneously.
Educated enough to explain the songs and the tradition in English, she has this added advantage of reaching out to larger audience beyond Bengal.
The evening being celebrated as Shivratri, Parvathy has carefully chosen the first three songs for Lord Shiva from the rich repertoire of Baul songs while the rest two were on Krishna and Radha respectively. As an ode to Odisha, she commenced her concert with a Charya-Geet, a song that belonged to 8th-century Odisha, followed by a song of the legendary Lalan Fakir. Another of her rendition was a 400-year-old song from poet Padmalochan of Bengal, she mentioned.