With a lineup of indie artists, Majuli Music Festival wants to be Glastonbury of Northeast
To be held from November 24-26, Majuli Music Festival will feature a lineup of 30 indie musicians and headlining artists, including Kailash Kher and Sona Mohapatra. It also offers a platform for cultural exchange.
As the largest riverine island in the world, Majuli regularly features in textbooks and serves as a cultural centre in Assam. But the island is more than just a bird watcher’s paradise—it now also jams to indie music.
Mukul Doley and Momee Pegu have been organising Majuli Music Festival since 2019 to promote independent artists of northeast India and bring footfall and jobs to the people of the island.
“When I look back at my own siloed memories, I wanted to learn music, but at the time when I was growing up [in Majuli], I couldn’t make a career in music…I felt there are many dreamers who want to do something in this taking music as a tool,” Doley, Festival Director of Majuli Music Festival, tells YS Life.
He returned to the island from Mumbai in 2018 after a stint as a film marketer and distribution consultant.
The fourth edition of the indie music festival will take place from November 24-26, 2023 in the backdrop of river Kherkotia. The line-up includes Kailash Kher and his band Kailasa, Sona Mohapatra, and indie musicians from all over the northeast including Anoushka Maskey, Sannidhya Bhuyan, Kaloma, and Abdon Mech, among others. The event will feature 30 indie musicians across genres and 10 cultural artists. The music festival is bootstrapped and organised by Majuli Music Festival Foundation.
In last year’s edition, 20,000 attendees thronged the festival from across the country. The organisers hope this year will be bigger.
“Majuli is a big island yet it is a small place and we don't have enough place. In fact, even though people have put campsites, it is not enough and hotels and lodges are booked,” adds Co-director Pegu, who also runs Rainbow, an NGO focused on community development and offering a safe space for the youth.
Lucky Ali performing at the 2022 edition of Majuli Music Festival
Bringing music to Assam
Majuli Music Festival is representative of the growing interest in music emerging from the Northeast. Music festivals like Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh and Hornbill in Nagaland have achieved cult status, and the organisers want to bring music to Majuli too.
“In the last four years, we have seen local musicians, especially from Assam as well as from Majuli, who have grabbed a solid self-confidence to do something and create their own thing in this industry,” Doley notes.
Though many musicians from the Northeast take inspiration from all over the world, they are carving a niche for themselves and talking about their distinct cultural identity with a megaphone.
Whether it’s rapper Moko Kaza talking about what it means to live as a Naga citizen in Kohima in Naga Manu, or Shillong-based folk metal band Dymbur bringing social message to Khasi in Rape Culture, the aim is to shed Indian tropes many have about the region and bring its culture to the fore. This also shows the growing interest in the Majuli Music Festival.
“We are not genre-specific. This year, we have crossed 150 artists who have requested a slot in our festival,” he adds.
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Sustainability and employment
One of the festival’s core anchors is sustainability and climate action. The issue is more pertinent to the island of Majuli, which is slowly but surely losing ground to erosion and has been on the tentative list for UNESCO’s World Heritage Site status.
The festival aims to be a zero-waste event by minimising its carbon footprint and employing locals to build stalls, campsites, and cultural centres using sustainable materials. “The local people use bamboo architecture and all the bamboo is procured locally,” Pegu notes.
The team, which has grown to have 100+ volunteers this year, procures 10,000 bamboo trees from the local villages on the island, helping generate employment. During the festival, the locals also sell and trade rice beer (Poro Apong), green herbs, and livestock.
“Last year, a person from the village, who happened to have just Rs 200 in hand during the festival, turned his fortune and made Rs 16,000 in a span of three days by brewing rice beer and selling it at a premium price,” Doley narrates.
Majuli island
Beyond music
The festival has three stages, including a cultural stage to promote cultural exchange on the lines of the Hornbill Music Festival, where local tribes from across northeast India present their cultures and cuisines.
Majuli is home to the Mising, Nepali, and Deori tribes.
“This time, we will showcase Murong Okum by the Mising community…which is a community gathering space,” says Pegu.
“Different tribes will showcase their dance like Sattriya and Bhortal Nritya.” She also hopes the event will invite interest to establish a cultural school in the region.
“We want to be known as India’s biggest indie music festival where independent artists get together here in Majuli and explore Majuli by promoting ecotourism. We also want the tourism sector to grow simultaneously,” he adds.
Majuli is also home to its unique pottery art, which many believe is among the oldest in the Indian subcontinent and may be linked directly to the Harappan civilisation. The island is also home to Samaguri Satra, a chief centre of Vaishnavism in Assam known for its heritage art of traditional mask-making.
Majuli Music Festival has big plans; it wants to be known as Glastonbury of the Northeast. However, the road to success has been rocky, with the team running over budget when it organised the festival for the first time in 2019.
“We felt like it grew out of control,” Pegu notes, adding, “After the festival, we realised that 26,000-30,000 people had gathered as our ticket price was very nominal. For the locals, we just charged just Rs 50.”
While mobilising resources has been a challenge, some artists are also expensive for the organisers to afford, and it’s a completely different ballgame to reason with the locals, some of whom believe the festival is a gateway for the influx of Western culture into the state.
Both Pegu and Doley also have to convince their parents that they are on the right path and don’t want to be saddled with a government job.'=
All said and done, the dream of becoming a cultural hub for indie music in Assam is alive.
“Two years down the line, we are planning to bring international artists from Europe and other places,” Doley says.
Edited by Megha Reddy