Across Rajasthan, music, craft, storytelling and performance take shape across multiple communities, regions, occasions and social settings. Rajasthani folk culture is fairly visible, but that visibility often centres on the forms and elements most easily adapted for public performance, tourism and popular culture. When a tradition is repeatedly encountered through what is most familiar or immediately palatable, much of its repertoire and context can recede from view. These traditions also carry indigenous knowledge, social histories, cultural codes and livelihoods sustained through generations of practice. Their flattening therefore places more at risk than artistic range alone; it can weaken the wider cultural systems through which the work continues. Singing Sands has grown from the question of how that continuity can be supported in practice while bringing more of Rajasthan’s cultural landscape within reach.
A festival makes it possible to gather, in one place, traditions and practitioners who would otherwise remain separated by geography, context and circumstance. For a visitor, this creates an unusual degree of access: the chance to hear different musical traditions, encounter particular instruments, spend time with artisans and storytellers, and begin to see the distinctions that exist within Rajasthan’s cultural life. The intention is to offer a broad canvas while still allowing each form enough space to retain its own character.
Singing Sands draws on nearly three decades of Vinod Joshi’s work with Rajasthan’s artists, communities and traditions. Over those years, travelling across the state, listening, documenting, working with performers and developing festivals has created a kind of working knowledge that cannot be reduced to a list of artists or art forms. It informs decisions about who is invited, which repertoire is presented, how the context of a tradition should inform its presentation, how different traditions are placed alongside one another, and when something less familiar needs to be brought forward.
Singing Sands would have been easier to establish in Jaipur or another major tourist city, where audiences, infrastructure and tourism networks already exist. Holding it in Shekhawati makes the location part of the festival itself. The region’s havelis, streets, landscape and living cultural practices become part of the experience in a way that could not simply be recreated within an urban venue. Over time, bringing the festival to Mandawa also creates room for stronger local participation, for skills and responsibilities around the festival to develop within the region, and for visitors to engage more deeply with Shekhawati’s tangible and intangible heritage rather than only encounter the festival as a self-contained event. That can contribute to rural tourism while allowing the festival’s relationship with the region to become more substantial with each edition.
The Desert Resort carries the same thinking into how Singing Sands is produced: its natural setting allows staging, lighting and other interventions to be used selectively and with purpose, creating an environment in which the music and the setting can hold their place without spectacle taking over.
The work begins much before an artist arrives at the venue or a programme is announced. Traditional performers may come from settings very different from the contemporary concert world. A musician accustomed to singing for several hours, for example, enters a new order when the same music has to hold a festival stage within a fixed time, before an unfamiliar audience, with different production and professional expectations. Preparing for that environment involves working on the structure of a performance, repertoire, pacing, presentation and the way an artist connects with a new audience.
This preparation is an important part of the festival’s purpose. It helps artists become increasingly comfortable within the wider performing world: festivals, institutions, touring circuits, collaborations and new audiences. Over time, the aim is for them to be better equipped to navigate those spaces independently.
New audiences can bring another kind of pressure. Artists can begin anticipating what they think a new audience wants from them. Familiar popular material can feel safer than presenting a repertoire the audience may never have heard before. Much of the work therefore lies in building confidence in the strength of the original music itself.
This does not mean keeping traditions fixed. Artists have always responded to changing audiences, performance settings and collaboration can create exciting new possibilities. Singing Sands itself makes room for conversations between folk, classical and international musical forms. What matters is that artists enter those exchanges with confidence in what they already carry. An artist should be able to adapt presentation, experiment and work in new settings without gradually reducing a distinctive musical tradition to the few things an outside audience already recognises. That balance between access and integrity runs through much of the festival.
A stage can create possibilities for an artist beyond the performance itself. A serious performance before an attentive audience can bring recognition, new relationships and further opportunities. Artists meet people outside their usual circles: listeners, fellow musicians, programmers, patrons and collaborators. Their work enters networks through which it can travel further. This matters for livelihoods, but also for confidence in the future of the practice itself.
Continuity is closely tied to that sense of possibility. When a tradition continues to command attention, respect and work, there is greater reason for younger practitioners to invest their time in learning it. The question of the next generation therefore sits behind many of the choices made at Singing Sands.
Parents also often tell us that they want their children to experience traditions they themselves value or are only beginning to discover. Singing Sands has therefore been consciously developed as a safe and children-centric festival. This goes beyond having a children’s activity on the schedule. It shapes the scale of the festival, the spaces, the degree of freedom children have within them, and the kinds of encounters the programme allows.
A child does not need every encounter to become a lesson. Hearing an unfamiliar instrument up close, trying a craft, watching an artist prepare, joining a workshop, or simply growing comfortable around these forms can be meaningful in itself. Familiarity begins through experience.
Singing Sands is conciously limited in scale because proximity changes the nature of the encounter. Artists and guests do not have to remain on opposite sides of a stage. A performance can lead into a conversation. A workshop can become an opportunity to ask where an instrument comes from or how a particular technique is learnt. Someone encountering a musical tradition for the first time can receive enough context to understand what they have heard. Artists can meet other artists and listeners directly. We often describe this as making the festival boundaryless. The distance between performer and audience should remain as small as possible.
That intimacy also helps us present unfamiliar traditions with care. For someone coming from another part of India, or from another country altogether, enjoyment often grows when there is some understanding of what is being encountered. Context can be offered through introductions, conversations, workshops and the presence of the practitioners themselves, without turning the festival into a classroom.
All of these choices come back to the same underlying purpose.
Singing Sands is part of a much longer engagement with the conservation and continuity of Rajasthan’s living traditions. The festival gives that work a particular form: it brings artists and audiences together, creates space for traditions that may otherwise receive little public attention, helps performers enter wider professional worlds with greater confidence, and allows new audiences to discover the depth of the work on its own terms.
There are many ways to organise a cultural festival. Over the years, we have found ourselves returning to this one. Begin with the people and the traditions, understand what each needs in order to be represented well, and design the festival around that understanding.