Lounge
The Big Bang Music Festival: An event rooted in Assam's creative community
Summary
Assam’s Big Bang Music Festival puts musicians from the region in the spotlight
For Daniel Langthasa, 40, and Avantika Roohi Haflongbar, 39, starting a music festival on wheels was a dream. A little over a decade ago, they entered their idea for a music festival that travelled across the Northeast in a entrepreneurship contest and won the first prize. Langthasa, a musician and activist, had toured India extensively with his band, Digital Suicide, and the couple wanted to offer similar exposure to musicians from the region. They envisioned a platform for cultural expression and exchange for the artists, but it didn’t take off as they could not raise the seed money.
The couple did not give up and instead got the Dimasa community together to raise the funds to curate the Big Bang Music Festival in Assam. “We got married in 2015, and a year later in 2016, we kicked off this dream project of ours. So it is essentially a festival of love and hope as we all come together for the love of music," says Haflongbar.
In a region best known for the Ziro Music Festival, Big Bang has steadily won itself fans, who appreciate the space it gives to local musicians and the fact that it is entirely supported by the local community. For one of Assam’s oldest indigenous communities, the Dimasa, hosting such a festival is more a means of cultural exchange. It is also a way to honour their musical traditions while bringing in global influences.
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Concentrated primarily in the Dima Hasao district and parts of Karbi Anglong, the Dimasas are an ethnolinguistic community with roots in neighbouring Nagaland and Manipur as well. “We cohabit with different tribes and communities, including the Zeme, Kuki and Hmar, but sadly most of the tribes have lost their traditional musical instruments although they have carried their songs and dances. Thankfully, our elders have kept intact some of our Dimasa traditional instruments like the muri, muri-wathisa (bamboo flutes), and the khram (drum), and have passed them on through generations. We wanted to bring that to the fore," said Langthasa. Both he and Haflongbar belong to the Dimasa community and hail from Haflong, the lone hill station in Assam.
Since its inception in 2016, the festival was hosted every year for five years until Covid hit. After a hiatus of three years and lots of planning, the festival returned for its sixth edition, earlier this year, on 26-27 October, in Nanadisa village of Dima Hasao district in Assam. This year’s line-up included Japanese trombone and trumpet artist Chie Nishikori, BFR Sound System by reggae artist Delhi Sultanate, Khasi blues singer Tipriti TIPS Kharbangar, desi hip-hop artist MC Mawali, Shillong’s Rastaman Ras ManMan, and Haflong’s grunge band Ahimxa, among others.
It began with folk performances from the Nanadisa Folk Collective and the Zeme Folk Collective, who represent the Dimasa and Zeme communities. Nanadisa lies 35km from district headquarters of Haflong, and BFR Sound System, the headliner this year, travelled for five days via road from Delhi to Nanadisa. As the hand-built Jamaican reggae sound system echoed through the hills, the village headman Rohen Langthasa joined Delhi Sultanate on stage with his treasured muri-wathisa (a type of Dimasa bamboo flute), which the 65-year-old usually plays in his leisure time.
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“It is usually during our primary harvest festival, Busu Dima, that the villagers gather for folk music and dances. It starts at the end of January and the celebration continues for about a month. We wanted to bring that energy through the assimilation of different genres of music with the folk music here, and the Nanadisa villagers led by the headman lived up to it," said Langthasa.
A teenage boy band from Haflong, H-Town Pioneers, created the festival’s anthem. “It all started when Donato, our producer, made a beat with a Dimasa instrument, muri, and blended it with drums. We sent a sample of that beat along with a freestyle to Daniel and Roohi, they really liked the beat with the overall hook and picked it as the festival’s anthem," said band member Sachin Langthasa, aka Lil Cloud.
Grik Nunisa, 27, is another emerging talent who led a medley of Dimasa songs that speak of harvest and traditions. A self-taught musician, Grik experiments with different genres of music. “I developed an interest in metal first, slowly transitioned to punk rock, and now I do indie pop, with songs in Dimasa and Hindi," said Grik.
“In most cultural festivals, the folk or local artists do not get recognition; they are often used as fillers on a program. We wanted to change that," Haflongbar, who is a food influencer, said. She hosted a culinary workshop and a guided jhum tour showing participants how to prepare berengjiba, a vegetable dish cooked in bamboo pods, and maiju, sticky rice cooked in bamboo. In the jhum fields, known as phdain in Dimasa, the attendees were taken on a medicinal plant trail, led by the village headman. “They (the participants) were curious about the bamboo pod cooking practice and marvelled at the zero-waste cuisines we prepare," says Haflongbar.
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The couple have plans to scale this model. “We are the facilitators but the villagers are the real stakeholders in hosting the Big Bang Music Festival. We want to expand on it and build a cohesive ecosystem connecting the youth, villagers and the global community," says Haflongbar.
Simanta Barman is a freelance journalist based in Guwahati, Assam, who writes primarily on lived experiences, food, and places.
