Manipuri musician Akhu Chingangbam, who sings songs of identity and peace, will perform as part of the four-day ‘Voices of Diversity’ festival beginning in the capital on Thursday. A progressive all-woman band, a percussion group comprising Dalit communities from South India, and an inter-faith performance of Kabir’s bhajans and Sufi music will also be part of the music festival presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). The October 9-12 festival at Sunder Nursery has been curated by Carnatic vocalist T M Krishna, and will focus on inclusivity and putting diverse voices from across the country in the same space. “Things are better now [in Manipur] as there are no shootouts, mainly because of President’s rule. Personally, I have gone through a lot in the past couple of years, faced threats and all. There has been a lot of pressure on people like me who criticise authority,” Chingangbam told The Indian Express. Manipur has been racked by ethnic violence since May 2023, in which more than 250 people have been killed and thousands displaced from their homes. President’s rule was imposed in the state in February this year, but the ethnic faultlines between the Meitei and Kuki-Zomi peoples run deep, and several questions about the future remain unanswered. Chingangbam, though, is confident that the situation will change. “Manipur has faced worse than this in the past. We’ve overcome this kind of situation in the past,” he said. Chingangbam, frontman of folk-rock band Imphal Talkies and The Howlers, has sung of the lives and experiences of the people in his state in numbers such as Fake encounter, Where have all the flowers gone, Lullaby, and When the home is burning. Besides some of his best known songs, he will sing of the schisms of the last two years at the festival, and present numbers from his new album Nothing More Joyful in This. For Chingangbam, Delhi has been a second home. He graduated in Physics from Delhi University, and has a PhD from Jamia. But he chose to go back to Imphal and make his voice heard through protest music. “.If you belong to an environment that has been disturbed and there have been concerns about one’s rights, people will come up and say something; oppose. That’s human nature… There aren’t many bands looking at protest as a genre. Maybe that level of suffering hasn’t been there for them. There are people in the underground, perhaps,” Chingangbam said. The festival will open with writer and theatre director Bhushan Korgaonkar’s Lavani ke Rang, and will feature Sangeet Natak Award-winning lavani performer Shakuntalabai Nagarkar. This will be followed by Wild Wild Women, an all-woman hip-hop band who address issues of gender bias, mental health, and women’s empowerment through their music. On October 11, musicians Pallavi MD and Bindhumalini will present ‘The Threshold’, featuring woman poets and stories of women from varied worlds who have challenged conventional ideas associated with freedom. Prahlad Tipaniya and Mukhtiar Ali will bring Kabir’s bhajans and Sufi singing together in an interfaith collaboration. Bengaluru-based Ambedkarite group Jangama Collective will present ‘Nannajja (My Grandfather): A Rhythmic Ancestry’, featuring percussionists from various marginalised communities of South India, whose music came from working with leather. “This is a country of so many different kinds of voices, both literally and metaphorically. But do these voices talk to each other? The festival is generational, it is from regions, it’s from various social sections, it’s various languages,” Krishna said.
