“I have not heard from you:
No letters from you, no information about you.
Come back, see your village just once, and go back.”
-Bhikari Thakur
We are now in the age of cities: Fast cities. Smart cities. Model cities. They will be planned and will be built, even if the blue prints are undesirable. Workers who build cities experience the idea of a city very differently. They spend their lives along the lines of scaffolding. Constantly moving between different tracks and compartments, on the same train, they are on separate journeys. No maps can trace their movement. The worker is a ghost, we never see, but can sometimes sense. He passes by.
We hope to create passages to meet workers in a third space, outside of surveilled spaces, to meet each other outside the context of work. A space where we can recollect, collectively. A space free of authority and suspicion: through music.
This monsoon, for the first time in Bangalore, we at maraa are proud to present Kalpana Patowary and her mandali for a performance of Bhojpuri songs and poems.