the culture of the Marathi katta...?

I recently went for a sarod concert by Brij Narayan, a disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. I'd read about the concert in the Mumbai Mirror. It said that the concert was organized by Acharya Atre Katta. When I called the listed phone number, a woman told me the concert was in the open air at the Shyama Prasad Mukherjee garden in Borivli west. Besides the annual Dover Lane music concert in Calcutta and a one-time concert organized at the ATIRA grounds in Ahmedabad, I have never attended Indian classical music concerts in the open air in India. So I was somewhat thrilled. But apparently the open-air concert memories I was drawing upon weren't the right ones. The Shyama Prasad Mukherjee garden is a relatively run-down garden in Borivli west. Okay, so the garden isn't too bad and the concert could have been enjoyable if the noise of the traffic on the road outside had been non-existent. Actually the traffic also would not have bothered me had there been less talk and more of the sarod. But this post is not to explain my disappointment with the concert. Rather, it is to say a few words about a kind of public culture in Mumbai that this concert seems to be a part of.

Acharya Atre was (wikipedia tells me) a "prominent Marathi writer, a great poet, an educationist, a brilliant newspaper founder/editor, a political leader, a movie producer/director/script writer and above all, a superb orator." Judging from the Marathi speeches that the concert began with and ended with, Acharya Atre Katta is a Marathi organization of sorts, founded in his name in 1997.

In Marathi, "katta" - this blog tells me - is "a small wall, a kind of boundary but in Marathi slang it means a place to sit and waste away time." The blog also mentions that a katta exists in every corner of Mumbai. It is "a place where people meet, talk, share and grow up." "Each locality, each building has its own katta." In a katta, "rich, poor, high class, low class does not matter."

I don't know whether the Acharya Atre Katta always organizes events like this concert (this one was organized to celebrate its anniversary) or whether it usually involves a more informal gathering in this garden where people sit, talk, etc. If the former, then this "katta" certainly seems like more of a formal organization as compared to what the blog suggests about the Marathi katta. If the latter, then how is this any different from the people I see in the garden near my home in Ahmedabad where particular groups of people regularly meet - often at specific spots in the garden - to sit, talk, etc. Is there a word in Gujarati that has a meaning similar to the Marathi katta?



I am also curious as to who the members of the Acharya Atre Katta are. Something tells me that they are middle-class folks. On the other hand, the concert was free and open to all - a corner of the public garden was taken up by the small stage-structure and chairs; when the chairs filled up people sat on the grass, the benches and the dusty low walls here and there to listen to the performance. Some people seemed to have entered the garden on hearing the music and stood around listening to the performance for awhile. Although the majority of these folks looked like they were from middle-class backgrounds, there were others who weren't, especially amongst those who entered the garden on listening to the music.

I also found it interesting that the Acharya Atre Katta hadn't booked the garden exclusively for the concert to keep out people who might come to the garden that evening for other purposes. So there was a woman who had clearly not come for the concert (I overheard her asking her husband what it was all about) who was reclining on the grass; she drank some water from a bottle she was carrying, then gargled with some of the water and spat it out on the lawns. There was a heavily built man with long greasy hair and a black netted sleeveless shirt walking about the garden like he owned it. Young couples - lovebirds immersed in each other - sat facing a blank wall of the garden to seek privacy. Children played in a small sandy playground at the other end of the garden. Although I like my Indian classical music concerts without distractions, there was something nice about the way in which this concert occupied a relatively public, open space without trying to regulate this space. Does this have something to do with the culture of the Marathi katta?

Anyone have anything to say about the Marathi katta, do leave your comments.