Shrinking Spaces
An ode to the Bengal Classical Music Festival
November has arrived. I have been looking forward to November since I came back mid this year. It is the month when rays of light fall differently on your face, sound travels differently, sunshine thins, and the mist thickens.
November in Dhaka is also the month of festivals. The Dhaka Lit Fest, the Folk Fest, and the Bengal Classical Music Festival. It is the month that Dhaka comes alive. But this year, in what is arguably the biggest blow to the country's cultural development, the Bengal Classical Music Festival has been cancelled. This was supposed to be the sixth edition of the internationally acclaimed Bengal Classical Music Festival. Bengal Foundation, the organising body of the mega classical event, has cancelled the festival this year after failing to get Bangladesh Army Stadium as its venue.
It's a valid reason. The character of the festival, which has been created over the past five years, is largely dependent on the venue. The Bengal Foundation finalised the artistes' line-up, including top classical musical maestros from India, young and veteran classical artistes from Bangladesh, and other participants, and the dates of their trip by August this year. But as the organisers have pointed out, the army stadium is a secure venue for foreign artistes, and it is the promise of security that makes the event so coveted. Without it, the festival will not be the same.
Dhaka has been a gradually shrinking space. For quite some time now, glimpses of spontaneous movement, free, unabashed contact between people, have been rare. The day that the cancellation of the event was announced, my colleagues and I went on a rant, unable to swallow the galling unfairness. In her rant, one of my colleagues exclaimed, "Over 50,000 people at an event and not one case of sexual harassment! Do you know how rare that is?" She wasn't wrong. It is painfully rare.
A recent poll conducted by Thomson Reuters Foundation stated that Dhaka ranked as the seventh most dangerous megacity for women. In the poll, which took into account sexual violence and cultural practices along with two other factors, Dhaka failed miserably. An ActionAid report found that the increased visibility of large numbers of women on the streets has led to increased levels of sexual violence and harassment in urban and public spaces. Sadly, deep-seated patriarchy has not let women's social status rise alongside their economic independence. Bangladeshi women living in cities feel continuously unsafe and anxious for their own safety. Ten percent of women in cities feel unsafe in public spaces and 15 percent think public transport poses a danger. Rising reports of rapes on buses don't help either.
So when my colleague claimed she felt thwarted as a woman, and as a human being, she was more than justified in her feeling. And this year, it wasn't just a cultural festival that was compromised. For many of us, it was breathing space.
But it is not only a breathing space for the second sex that this space provides. In addition to dismantling gender barriers in its own subtle fashion, the space dismantles barriers of social class and poverty by providing access free of cost, inviting people across all walks of life to immerse themselves in culture that is a luxury accessed and consumed by the rich.
The charm of ancient forms of music that were once passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, has been long lost on younger generations. But my father and I make a ritual of going together to this event every year, dismantling the barrier of a "generation gap".
This festival, the world's largest classical music festival in terms of the number of performers on a single stage, audience capacity and duration, sensitises the audience to a taste for quality music. A better appreciation and understanding of the fundamentals of music, which in the ancient Indian subcontinent originated from a diverse lineage, deeply rooted in spiritual and ethnic traditions. Music, which has been the bedrock of a shared culture in a subcontinent deeply divided for over 70 years. The festival serves as a testament to diversity.
And that is not all. Academic research has suggested time and again that there is a strong correlation between dying cultural spheres and increase of extremism. In a working paper published by More Europe, a cultural civil initiative composed of a public-private partnership of foundations, civil society networks and national cultural institutes, a strong relationship between flourishing cultural spheres and the reduction of violent extremism was suggested. The individual and collective social capital that is created through arts, culture and cultural exchanges, the strengthened social networks, the cultural identity that is cultivated, all serve as tools for sustained tenacity.
The most crucial variable for individual and collective resilience, in the approach of several social scientists and counter-terrorism experts, is social capital. They distinguish between three levels of prevention: (i) primary prevention, addressing societies at large; (ii) secondary prevention, targeting particularly vulnerable groups; and (iii) tertiary prevention, focusing on already partially radicalised groups and individuals.
Artistic expressions, cultural projects and enhanced inter-cultural dialogue, research indicates, may operate as valuable tools on all three levels.
So, in a city of shrinking spaces, where men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, struggle to breathe, the Bengal Classical Music Festival far exceeds its purpose of simply nurturing the traditions of music in Bangladesh. It transcends into an expanding, living, thriving space that dismantles many boundaries, giving room to breathe.
Shagufe Hossain is the founder of Leaping Boundaries and a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.