The Big Bang Music Festival: An event rooted in Assam's creative community
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For Daniel Langthasa, 40, and Avantika Roohi Haflongbar, 39, starting a music festival on wheels was a dream. A little over a decade ago, they entered their idea for a music festival that travelled across the Northeast in a entrepreneurship contest and won the first prize.
Langthasa, a musician and activist, had toured India extensively with his band, Digital Suicide, and the couple wanted to offer similar exposure to musicians from the region. They envisioned a platform for cultural expression and exchange for the artists, but it didn’t take off as they could not raise the seed money. The couple did not give up and instead got the Dimasa community together to raise the funds to curate the Big Bang Music Festival in Assam.
“We got married in 2015, and a year later in 2016, we kicked off this dream project of ours. So it is essentially a festival of love and hope as we all come together for the love of music," says Haflongbar. In a region best known for the Ziro Music Festival, Big Bang has steadily won itself fans, who appreciate the space it gives to local musicians and the fact that it is entirely supported by the local community.
For one of Assam’s oldest indigenous communities, the Dimasa, hosting such a festival is more a means of cultural exchange. It is also a way to honour their musical traditions while bringing in global influences. Also read: Lounge Loves: Madeleines, zero-alcohol drinks and more Concentrated primarily in the Dima Hasao district and parts of Karbi Anglong, the Dimasas are an ethnolinguistic community with roots in neighbouring Nagaland and Manipur as well.
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