The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA celebrated its illustrious 200-year legacy of cultural exchange with India with an elaborate "Sensational India!" festival over the weekend of April 4-5. The first of seven such annual events being planned, the two-day festival explored the cultural interplay between the rich and intricate Indian fine art forms of painting and sculpture, and the glorious performing arts of India rooted in hoary antiquity and towering tradition. The festival also pitched in various ethnic cultural participatory activities and traditional art, music, film, Indian story telling, fortune telling and live cooking demonstrations for good measure.

Saturday's program started in the classy atrium area of the PEM with an interactive demonstration by artists Sunanda Sahay and Reshma Singh of Khel Mel who shared the intricate techniques used to produce the complex designs of the Warli mural painting tradition, while the great Indian jungle classic, "The Jungle Book" was playing inside the Morse Auditorium. Right after, Chef Shruti Mehta made some traditional Indian dishes over anecdotal experiences of how the art of cooking has been perfected to a science in India and how this art form is very central to the vitality of the culture and everyday life in India.

Come noon time, the atrium area reverberated to the melodious and rhythmic Indian Carnatic classical music items put up by a full ensemble of accomplished young students trained for this event by  Durga Krishnan, a renowned veena player and director of the New England School of Carnatic Music. Krishnan put this astonishing and unique ensemble together  with students of Tara Bangalore on the Violin, Mridangam  from Pravin Sitaram etc.

This was  immediately followed by the tunes of Indian-American fusion based on Hindustani music by Shuchita Rao and Philip Kaplan of the Bangalore Ensemble.

During the brief lunch break scores of people lined up for getting their fotune foretold by the parrot-toting Praveen Sahay, while some others marveled at the Madhubani painting of artist Sunanda Sahay; some kids played around with their newly acquired Warli painting skills in the ethnically decorated Khel Mel festival tent while some others enjoyed the story telling session. Soon, it was time for a treat of an exquisite Odissi performance by the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble of India. Surupa Sen and Bijayini Satpathy led a group of charming and skilful artisans from Nrityagram, a 'gurukul' dedicated to imparting the core essence of Indian dance traditions to resident students in a setting of holistic, self-sufficient living, and a rigorous schedule involving a complete immersion, from dawn to dusk, in learning the Indian epics, Sanskrit and Indian martial arts; practicing Yoga, meditation, dance and other sublime principles of Indian performing arts as a way of life.

Together the graceful team of Odissi dancers created beguiling magic in the atrium with epic enactments of the divine interplay between Siva and Sakthi, by skilfully juxtaposing the ethereal dance movements and sensuous poses of Odissi, and impeccably marrying the compelling 'angasuddhi' with stupendous synchronization and poetic 'bhavam'. The overindulged, standing-room-only crowd of audience were then awakened from the blink-lessly captivated state of a mesmerizing spell and led into the Morse Auditorium for an educating discussion between Susan Bean, the curator at the PEM and Surupa Sen, the artistic director of the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble exploring the intertwining mutual influences between the highly refined Indian art forms of dance, music, poetry, sculpture and painting.

A satiated audience called it a blissfully relaxing day with a duo of music performances by Shuchita Rao and students from the New England School of Carnatic Music who presented various devotional Hindustani music compositions, followed by an Indian-American fusion performance, this time based on Carnatic music, involving an interesting ensemble of jazz, keyboard, veena, mridangam and tabla artists of the KrishnaRasi group led by Durga Krishnan and Marc Rossi.

Kudos are due to the PEM team of curator Susan Bean, Sudarshan Belsare and Jennifer Evans for fostering a continued appreciation of various Indian art forms in the New England area and to the Samir and Nilima Desai Foundation for supporting PEM in keeping the Salem tradition of cultural exchange with India alive.

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