I was neck deep in my last hours at the first ever Malwa Kabir Yatra in March 2010. I sat in a large room in Prahlad Tipanya’s Kabir Smarak Seva Shodh Sansthan, an ashram in Luniyakhedi, a tiny village in the Malwa region of interior Madhya Pradhesh. His wife Shanti Devi, a deep and practical thinker, served me hot parathas and dal baati as Prahladji watched me like a doting uncle, his ubiquitous half-smile shining through a meticulously trimmed white moustache.
Over the last week it seemed like he was everywhere at once. As a gracious host, a powerful performer, a philosopher and demi-saint spreading the practical teachings of Kabir. As a master of ceremonies having Indore’s few hundred or Rupakhedi’s 20,000 listeners camped for the night in the middle of nowhere, enraptured by his every word. In Luniyakhedi, his home, he is so much more. “The Luniyakhedi satsang organised by Prahladji has been on a large scale for 18 years. The idea was to take the philosophy of Kabir to the people in a larger scale,” says his son and percussionist Ajay Tipanya. For 18 years, he has thrown open the gates of his ashram to thousands of people, giving them blankets and mattresses with a giant shamiyana for shelter and food thrice a day for two days. All absolutely free. I was part of the first group of outsiders on the yatra. Two weeks ago when the fifth Malwa yatra finished, I had the opportunity to reconnect with Shabnam Virmani and Ajay Tipanya over the phone.
The idea of having a yatra was first hatched on an Amtrak train screaming through the wilds of Canada in 2009. “The yatra first took shape with the impulse to share the films of the Kabir Project with village audiences. Then cities, the US and Canada as well. Ajay and I were talking about how we could take these films back to the villages and people of Malwa, where they were shot,” says documentary filmmaker Shabnam Virmani, founder and director of the Kabir Project, speaking from her edit room, where she’s currently cutting her latest documentary. Over the last decade she and and the project have travelled across India and to parts of Pakistan with the sole objective of capturing the different manifestations of Kabir’s poetry in this vastly varied regions and cultures. Award winning films have resulted along with a growing community of Kabirophiles and Shabnam’s own immersion as a Kabir performer.
She says, “We then added the idea of it going from one village to another. The second addition was inviting artists from other places and states. We wanted to show the diversity of Kabir, by including musicians who sang in different languages and who were from different religions. It was also about having connections between rural areas of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and other rural areas rather than make rural films only for urban audiences. I wanted to let the Kabir in Gujarat speak to the Kabir in Rajasthan and so on.”
During that first yatra that I attended, there were teething problems, some of which endure. But Shabnam says without guile, “There is roughing out and we never promise any comforts but there’s a lot of soul and heart. Some things work and some things don’t but that’s the charm. After all, yatra comes from the root word yatna which means suffering and there’s something to be learned from that.” As Prahlad Tipanya always reiterates, “What is the point of this outer yatra if it doesn’t trigger an inner journey?”
The yatra has also grown exponentially over the last five years. And with more urban people learning about the yatra, the number of buses on the tour has gone from one to two to three.
“There are many new performers coming in, many new yatris as well. There has also been a greater impact of the Malwa Kabir Yatra all over India. This year we had a group from America who came all the way just for the yatra and spent five days with us. We had people flying in from Kolkata and Hyderabad just to attend one day of the yatra in Bhopal and Indore. So we have this situation where people come from so far away, spending so much money just to hear the music and words of the performers. This year, it went off really well because we had help from the Madhya Pradesh government and the police,” says an excited Ajay on the phone from his home Luniyakhedi, deep in the heart of Madhya Pradesh just days after the 2014 yatra.
This isn’t just a journey for the attendees. Every year, the Malwa Kabir Yatra enables musicians, urban and rural, masters and neophytes to come together with a greater purpose than just holding concerts. “The performers don’t just come to perform, they come here to grow. These musicians really listen to each other and travel with each other on the bus and sing and learn from each other during the journey,” offers Ajay, who has been intimately involved in every single yatra in the dual role of organiser and musician. I can attest to the uniqueness of the bus journeys that obliterated all darkness and discomfort in the healing light of Kabir’s words set to joyous music.