Outsiders on the Fringe

A brisk run through the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — it began in the late ’40s and is today considered the world’s largest showcase of performing arts — reveals that this year the event showcased a veritable list of ‘Who’s Who’ and ‘What’s What’ of arts encounters and acts from across the world. The surfeit of goodies was packed in with tremendous punch and pizzazz to present a wholly eclectic feel of what’s hot and what’s not. As Rona Johnson, editor of the festival guide puts it, ‘‘Holding the high ground at the sharp end of the arts, the Edinburgh International Festival is the biggest and most important event in Scotland’s cultural diary, which dares to challenge an audience it believes can take it. And when it comes to new, this year too there’s been plenty to shout about.’’

Festival director Brian McMaster’s much touted visit to India earlier in the year yielded a series of Indian classical dance presentations which were put up at the Royal Lyceum Theatre between August 24 and 26. Birju Maharaj and Radha and Raja Reddy elaborated on the nuances of Kathak and Kuchipudi, while Madhvi Mudgal and Malvika Sarrukai expounded on Odissi and Bharata Natyam. Audience presence, though, was nothing to write home about. But, as an Indian organiser put it, ‘‘It’s a great start, dammit.’’

Udaipur-based glassmaker Vakar Hussain, poster-painter Balakrishna Vaidya and 10 young Gotipua (Oriya) dancers were some of the participants in the Fringe festival. ‘‘People only want traditional themes. I haven’t slept for two months, making bullock-carts and village scenes,’’ Hussain declares proudly. Equally happy are the Gotipua dancers, who received a lot of applause for their supple acrobatics and Odissi-like movements. ‘‘We loved the plane ride,’’ admits one of dancers shyly.

Well-known Bollywood playback singer Sunidhi Chauhan performed with fellow musician Sukhwinder Singh and Pakistani singer Shafqat Ali Khan and ended the performance with a rendering of Mariah Carey’s Hero.

Earlier in the month, Night Raga and Pritham Chakravarty’s savage monologues on ‘‘marginal lives’’ were hailed as the highpoints of the fairly disparate Indian showcase, which was supported by Visiting Arts and the ICCR. Chakravarty, who performed a ‘‘not so pretty’’ monologue on the lives of four hijras at the Hub, a popular festival venue, said of the act, ‘‘It’s a bizarre world you have to enter to understand. Even then there is disbelief that this is happening in modern India.’’

As yet not too many people in Edinburgh are entirely clear about what is really happening within the realm of modern and contemporary art and culture in India, given that they have to rely on the relative ‘expertise’ of organisers who profess to be showcasing the best of Indian arts.

On the other hand, high praise was showered on Canadian Opera Company’s Oedipus Rex, (based on Stravinsky’s musical opus), which played its closing shows to packed houses in Edinburgh with an elaborate and opulent stage of cinematic scale. The overwhelming sense of the performance was a triumphant reiteration of the fact that ‘we are the world’.

A world that, for the moment, excludes the Indian performing arts. As outsiders on the fringe in Edinburgh, with preconceived notions of what should and should not be showcased, we can only watch the show from the aisles and, perhaps,meekly join in with applause. At least till such time as we can learn to go with the flow and get across a sharper feel of what the current Indian pulse is really about. Till then we really do not have that much to shout about. Maybe next year?