There's a moment, early into the show, where you stop watching a performance and start listening to a memory. The been hums to life. Then another joins. Then ten more. By the time all hundred are playing, you're not in a theatre anymore. You're standing in the middle of something that's been disappearing from Indian streets for thirty years, brought back at full volume.
That's A 100 Charmers, the production by theatre director Roysten Abel, and if you've never heard of it, here's the short version: it's what happens when one man decides a dying folk tradition deserves better than a footnote.
Roysten Abel doesn't do small ideas
If you know Abel's work, you know he doesn't really "stage" things. He excavates them. His earlier production, The Manganiyar Seduction, took Rajasthani folk musicians who'd spent their careers playing weddings and festivals and put them on a velvet-curtained, red-lit set that looked more like a cabaret than a concert hall. It worked. Audiences in Europe and across India sat up and paid attention to music they'd otherwise have walked past.
A 100 Charmers is built on the same instinct, except this time the subject is even more overlooked: the been players of India. Even if you're not someone who has consciously thought about the person or thing making that sound, you've heard it. Every Bollywood movie has used that sound to represent snakes and snake charmers; it's just a way of quickly telling the audience that there's a snake charmer on screen. Most people do not stop to think about what kind of skill is involved in playing this instrument and what has happened to all of the men who have dedicated their lives to playing this instrument.
What actually happened to India's been players
Here's the part most people don't know. In the 1970s, India banned the practice of public snake charming, mainly to protect wildlife—a reasonable decision that most people would agree with. But it had a side effect nobody anticipated: it wiped out an entire profession overnight. Stories like these continue to inspire cultural performances and plays in Bangalore, where theatre often brings forgotten histories and traditions back to life.
Been players weren't just performers with a snake and a basket. They came from families that had played this instrument for generations, passed down by ear, with no sheet music, no school, nothing written down at all. Once the snakes were off the streets, so was the demand for the music. Some players switched trades. Some taught their children to do anything but pick up a been. A few held on anyway, mostly out of habit, mostly unheard.
Roysten Abel found these musicians scattered across the country. Many of them were rusty, some hadn't played in years, and Abel asked them to do the one thing nobody had asked them to do in a long time: play, just for the music's sake.
Building a show out of a hundred soloists
This wasn't a quick casting call. Abel and his team travelled through regions known for been-playing communities, tracking down musicians who still remembered the instrument in their hands even if their fingers had gone stiff. Some hadn't performed publicly in years. A few needed convincing that anyone still cared.
What came out of that search is genuinely unlike anything else on an Indian stage. A hundred-piece orchestra creates a sound that resembles more of a drone than a melody as they all play together. They are loud enough to hold your attention as a number of people in the audience sit and watch in amazement of how loud they are being played, so much so that the performance has a great deal of influence from Indian folk music, but due to having a large amount of theatrical components, from the location, lights, and size of the performance, you would not see this same performance if performed out in public as street musicians.
The cleverest part isn't the spectacle, though. It's what the spectacle does to your perception. You walk in thinking of the been as background noise from childhood trips to a temple fair. You walk out having actually listened to it, maybe for the first time.
Why Bangalore is the right place for this
Bangalore doesn't lack for live music. Between the Carnatic circuit, the indie gig scene, and everything experimental in between, audiences here are used to a range. But A 100 Charmers asks something different of a crowd. It asks people to sit with a sound most of them have only ever half-heard, and give it the same attention they'd give a touring orchestra.
That's exactly the kind of risk Bangalore audiences tend to reward. There's an appetite here for work that doesn't explain itself too much, that trusts the room to lean in. A 100 Charmers shows fits that appetite precisely.
More than a show
What stays with you after A 100 Charmers isn't just the sound. It's the fact that you watched something close to extinction get a second life, performed by the very people who almost lost their craft to circumstance. Roysten Abel didn't rescue a tradition by explaining it to an audience. He just put it on stage, at full strength, and let it speak for itself.
Catch it at Prestige Centre for Performing Arts
A 100 Charmers is coming to Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, and it's worth clearing your evening for. This isn't background music or museum-piece nostalgia. It's a hundred musicians playing like their tradition depends on it, because for a long time, it genuinely did. If you care about where Indian folk music has been and where it's headed next, this is one to see in person.
