Vasant Utsav: A Festival of Folk Arts
The India International Centre (IIC) is organising ‘Vasant Utsav 2025’, a two-day festival of folk music and art celebrating contemporary narratives in traditional folk art.
To take place from March 21 to March 22, the festival includes performances, exhibitions and screening of short and long documentary films. The performances include the best of folk music by renowned folk artistes Megha Sriram Dalton from Jharkhand, an ‘MTV Coke Studio’ artist and Mooralala Marwada, a Sufi folk singer from Janana village of Kutch district, Gujarat.
On March 21 and 22 at 6 pm in the Lounge Verandah, the ‘Pattachitra’ tradition with a storytelling session will take place. It’s an exhibition by Sahajan Chitrakar, a Pattachitra artist from West Bengal who will exhibit traditional folk paintings and sing stories from the ‘Ramayana’ and other deities depicted in the paintings. The artist will continue to demonstrate and sing on the second day of the festival.
On March 21 at 6:30 pm in the Fountain Lawns, ‘A Desert Trail: Musical Journey’ will be performed by Mooralala Marwada, a celebrated folk singer from Gujarat, who belongs to a lineage of Meghwal singers who migrated from Rajasthan to Khadir Island in Kutch four centuries ago. With a rich repertoire of ‘Nirguni’ bhajans, Sufi ‘kalaam’ and other traditional folk songs, Mooralala also plays the ‘santaar’, a traditional stringed instrument.
Bhairav Dutt Bhatt, an 86-year-old voice mimickry artist from Uttarakhand who brings to life different sounds of birds, animals and humans, creating a rare experience that will present this folk tradition.
On March 22, at 6:30 pm in the Fountain Lawns, Megha Sriram Dalton, from Daltonganj, Jharkhand will present the ‘Love Ballad of Jharkhand’. She is one of the most promising folk singers of the state. Apart from folk, she has also made her debut in Bollywood giving them the best songs.
From March 21 to March 27, IIC will also present ‘Visualizing Oral Traditions’. The exhibition invites viewers to witness this act of transformation - where myth isn’t lost but reborn as pigments explode onto paper. At the heart of this exhibition, one can witness the active passing of ‘smriti’ (memory) within the Pardhaan Gonds of Madhya Pradesh. The Pardhaans, who are the bards of the Gond tribe, have traditionally carried forward their ancestral knowledge and collective memory through song and music out of the ‘Bana’, their sacred string instrument.
