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Grand pageantry showcases India

Vaiju Naravane

It will break down social barriers, unite people, says Lille's mayor

— Photo: AFP

BREATHTAKING: Twelve elephants created by famous Bollywood set designer Nitin Desai grace the beginning of "Bombaysers de Lille" on Saturday in Lille.

Lille: France's northern city of Lille on Saturday throbbed to Indian rhythms with a gigantic song, dance and light parade that brought six and a half lakh people into its medieval paved streets.

Open air discotheques boomed out Indipop, some 1,500 residents of the city dressed in Indian costume swayed to thumping filmi numbers, the Bollywood Brass Band belted out intricate drum roll tattoos, enormous floats decorated to look like Indian killer trucks with familiar signs like "No horn please" or "Goods Carrier" ferried Rajasthani Manganiar singing parties through the streets lit up by fire throwers and a thousand lamps.

"Wedding saree"

The backdrop to the parade with the huge railway station was illuminated to look like the maharaja's palace in Mysore. The party went on all night will revellers trailing home early in the the morning. Martine Aubry, the powerful Socialist mayor of Lille, was dressed in a pistachio green ghagra choli which she described as "My wedding sari, for my marriage with Lille." Ms. Aubry, the author of France's 35-hour work week and a committed Socialist, believes such cultural events are a means to break down social barriers, a way of uniting people of different classes and races in joy and laughter.

"This extravaganza has cost the city 1.5 million euros or 3 per cent of our annual budget for culture. And looking at the crowds present here today, I feel it was money truly well spent. Why India, and why particularly Bollywood? Because India, despite its huge problems that we are not attempting to cover up here, is a country that looks resolutely towards the future... ," she told The Hindu .

The festival has cost a total of 7.5 million euros. The extravaganza will continue over three months with 500 film projections, 50 art exhibitions and over a hundred theatre, dance and musical performances. The literary aspect of India has not been ignored — prominent Indian writers and their French publishers including Suketu Mehta, Tarun Tejpal and Ruchir Joshi will discuss trends in modern Indian literature. The city has commissioned original works of art from young and rising Indian painters and sculptors such as Subodh Gupta or Ashok Sukumaran.

The festival has managed to combine tradition and modernity, the new and the old, to give the image of emerging India, a country on the move.

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