Mansa Jimmy, Roysten Abel & Ranjit Barot to herald spring in Delhi with KNMA in the Park

(Clockwise from top, left) Mansa Jimmy; BeatRoute; Roysten Abel; Ranjit Barot; Aditi Jaitly, brings the second edition of KNMA in the Park on February 23, 2025, at Sundar Nursery, Delhi.

The full-throated Sufi-blessed independent musician Mansa Pandey, 29, who is better known by her stage name Mansa Jimmy, moved from Nainital to Delhi a decade ago in the pursuit of music. Her songs of love are tinged with the streak of a rebel/reformer. She can sing in any genre or theme but the song must resonate with her. She’s been writing lyrics and making music for a while now and performing four-five years prior to the lockdown but it took a pandemic/lockdown-triggered-social-media-boom for her to cash in on the situation and count her returns. A Coke Studio Bharat appearance, collaborating with composer duo Salim-Sulaiman (the song Mera Yaar Purana for SoundChk), writing lyrics for 777 Charlie (2021) among other pan-Indian film songs. With 3,16,000 followers on Instagram, she is quite the youth icon the country needs.

Much like a habit that was inculcated in Mansa from a young age — like a gazillion Indian children, to be brought out from hiding by their parents and egged to sing and entertain the visiting guests at home — the annual KNMA in the Park, at Sunder Nursery on Sunday February 23 at 6 pm, will make Mansa open its second edition to entertain Delhi in a relaxed setting.

Her set for the evening will have “a little bit of everything: mostly folk and originals and unreleased tracks, and then a little bit of covers. Songs we’ve never performed before. There’ll be a section of folk songs that have been reimagined, modernised, made contemporary. We will do our take on the songs of a couple of music directors we love. We are doing a rendition of a song by [Pakistan’s] Chakwal Group called Kadi Aao Ni. We are doing [Begum Akhtar’s] Hamari Atariya Pe as a reggae anthem. And we’ll have AR Rahman’s and Gulzar Saab’s songs. And, also, my original songs Seelan ki Khushboo and Kaise from my upcoming album (to be released in March),” she says.

Mansa Jimmy. (Photo: Pravin)

KNMA in the Park is one of the many events the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) has added to Delhi’s cultural calendar. There was Lodhi Art Festival (with St+art India Foundation), CentreStage Weekend (for young artists and collectives), Adharam (Carnatic-Odissi set-piece), the six-day KNMA Theatre Festival, KNMA Legacy Series (families in the performing arts), “this year we featured Sarangi artist Murad Ali Khan and his family,” says Aditi Jaitly, senior curator — performing arts, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi. KNMA in the Park is a more a relaxed atmosphere, a day out with your family and friends in the park, combined with culture, to welcome the spring. “The idea is basically to have a day or an evening of culture, to bring the arts to the people, into public spaces, making it accessible to audiences from all walks to life,” she adds.

Aditi Jaitly Jadeja, senior curator, performing arts, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Photo: Ayeshe Sadr)

Jaitly, daughter of handicrafts curator and politician Jaya Jaitly and wife of former cricketer Ajay Jadeja, is also a Bharatanatyam dancer, says, “So, the Sundar Nursery park with its flowers, greenery and monuments is a historical setting, and already has an amphitheatre, but we typically tend to use the park spaces for KNMA in the Park. The last time, we used the lakeside lawn. This time our stage and setup is a bit bigger, so we’re using the picnic lawn. You could just sit down or stand by the sides and sit on your chatai (mat), with your picnic basket by your side. The show is ticketed at Rs 299 (buy on Insider). The prices are kept low deliberately, even though we have big prominent acts,” adds Jaitly, who joined KNMA in 2022 to bring to life KNMA’s first performing arts event Charishnu, a multi-dance production directed by Jaitly’s guru Bharatanatyam danseuse Leela Samson. KNMA until recently has largely been a visual arts space, and is now expanding its cultural scope.

The showstopper spectacle of the evening will be a presentation by Beat Route, a marriage of sight and percussion sounds by composer Ranjit Barot and theatre director Roysten Abel. The newly formed BeatRoute, a curation by the arts-focussed Bengaluru-based Bhoomija Trust, has had two shows in Bengaluru and one in Ranthambore. The Delhi premiere is their fourth show. Abel had earlier brought his gorgeous spectacle The Manganiyar Seduction to KNMA’s Lodhi Festival.

BeatRoute is roughly a 75-minute spectacle, with music that Barot has created, keeping the drummers in mind, and there’s a visual aspect that Abel has directed, “which tells the story of each one of the performers there. That person’s journey, origin, a little window into their life and personality. That plays out while we are all on stage. Each member of that ensemble gets featured centre stage. There is a visual narrative that feeds that performance simultaneously,” says Barot. On the stage, there will be a round 18x18 ft LED drum-skin screen at the back, you will see visuals on the drum skin keep changing as the different beats are played.

Beat Route by Roysten Abel & Ranjit Barot. (Photo courtesy Mallikarjun Katakol)

BeatRoute features a diverse array of instruments, from the resonant mizhavu and the vibrant chenda to various eclectic desert instruments like the dholl, nagara, kharthal, bapang and morchang. And there’ll be a timekeeper. So, around eight artists. “These are percussionists from Kerala and Rajasthan,” says Abel, 57, “Ranjit heard all of them and instantly knew the intricacies, the tisram and chatusram (beats cycles), and recorded them and composed for these beats.”

“I don’t think Roy just does musical presentations,” quips Barot as Abel laughs and adds, “people have no clue as to what to call the stuff that I do. They try to box me in something or the other, but they just can’t find the box for me.”

“Even though percussion is so tinged with male energy, when you go into their villages or in their personal spaces, you get to see the feminine within these people as well. There are so many of these polarities that you come across while you’re telling the story of these musical instruments,” adds Barot, 65, as Abel explains how their jugalbandi happened. “The idea for BeatRoute started with me seeing a Warli painting I had seen. There were drummers and dancers in it. One thing led to the other and I felt it’d be a good idea to combine folk percussion with contemporary electronic music and see where it can go. But then you needed somebody who actually knows percussion and for a work like this you need a master and so I told Gayathri (Krishna of Bhoomija Trust) and we went to Ranjit Barot,” says Abel.

For this show, “we are pulling these people out of a very specific sonic and cultural place and we needed to play to their strengths. We don’t want to make the chenda player play hip hop to create something new. I know that Roy was very clear that we wanted to be very modern in our music. We wanted to have electronica elements. And I was hearing mild dramatic and cinematic elements. This is a multimedia show, not solely a musical performance,” says Barot, the son of late Kathak danseuse Sitara Devi, who has been an erstwhile composer of film music (Raakh, Oh Darling Yeh Hai India, Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya, Main Hoon Na, Teen Thay Bhai, Shaitan), but Bollywood is a word he has no association with today.

He adds, “We live in a very musical country. And like Roy said, people have attempted a lot of percussion ensembles. To be honest with you, I didn’t find any of them really successful. It’s just hastily put together, people with no real conceptual form and dialogue. It’s just a jam session. But because Roy said the whole backdrop was this electronic music meets indigenous drums, I knew that there’s a narrative we could use. It’s not just us coming together on stage and doing jugalbandi, which is another word that’s totally abused. And I’ve been such an admirer of Roy’s work way before this.”

Ranjit Barot. (Photo: Mallikarjun Katakol)

While composing the music for the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, Barot requested Abel if he could use the recording of Abel’s production A Hundred Charmers (100 snake charmers). “It really captured my imagination. Roy and I have the same amount of respect for our folk musicians and the artists of this country. There’s a certain amount of give back to the culture that we are perpetuating using as a springboard for our voice. There has to be some recognition and give back to the country’s musicians. And this project [BetaRoute] is partly that and partly us having fun with music and visuals,” says Barot.

While Mansa will release her album next month, Mumbai-based Barot, too, is working to release his album this year, drawing on the influences since his childhood, to gospel, Hindustani, folk, qawwali and Kannada/South Indian elements, and Abel is writing a play on Karna, from the Mahabharata, which will premiere in 2026-27. “But Ranjit and I are collaborating on another thing, he’s composing music for a film I’m making on The Manganiyar Classroom (Abel’s musical production showcasing the music of the Manganiyar community, a group of Muslim musicians from Rajasthan, India, and Sindh, Pakistan),” says Abel, on Zoom, from his coastal village home in Kizhunna, in Kerala’s Kannur district.

Roysten Abel. (Photo: Akila Venkat)

Jaitly wants KNMA in the Park to become a regular event that continues even when KNMA opens its own museum/space in the city in 2027, “because KNMA in the Park is in a public space, and is accessible by all,” she says. “The thing that I love about Delhi,” Mansa adds, “is that it’s both very challenging as well as quite welcoming, there’s a little bit of everything. So, it’s an experience.” And Abel is all for performances in the public, amid the public, “You need to liven up the public spaces,” he says.