The Story
OrganizerNCPA Bandish was launched in 2010 as a curatorial response to a gap in India's music festival landscape: most festivals celebrate performers, but few celebrate composers, the architects of the musical structures that performers inhabit. Bandish takes the bandish, the Hindustani classical term for the melodic and rhythmic composition that forms the structural base of a performance, as its conceptual anchor. The festival presents compositions by legendary figures such as Alladiya Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Sadarang and Adarang, Vilayat Hussain Khan, and Jaidev across multiple festivals and on the Hindi film song tradition, the festival bridges the gap between classical and popular musical heritage, treating both as serious compositional traditions worthy of careful attention. The NCPA's position as India's most significant performing arts institution, and its institutional longevity since 1969, gives Bandish a gravitas and stability that independently produced festivals rarely achieve.
Bandish occupies a unique position in India's music festival landscape as a festival explicitly organised around compositional heritage rather than performer celebrity. This focus on the composer, the person who created the structures that performers inhabit, is both intellectually sophisticated and pedagogically important: it invites audiences to hear performances as interpretations of a compositional tradition rather than as vehicles for individual virtuosity. The NCPA's institutional commitment to this programme across more than a decade reflects a seriousness about musical heritage that is rare in India's commercially driven festival culture.
In a festival landscape dominated by performer celebrity, NCPA Bandish's focus on compositional heritage offers a sophisticated alternative framing of Indian classical music, with a 16-year track record of high-calibre programming.
