Great Indian Rock (GIR) was a multi-city

rock music festival A rock festival is an open-air rock concert featuring many different performers, typically spread over two or three days and having a campsite and other amenities and forms of entertainment provided at the venue. Some festivals are singular even ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. The first of its kind, it was usually held annually in cities like

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders w ...

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

Pune Pune (; ; also known as Poona, (List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million ...

Hyderabad Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River (India), Musi River, in the northern part ...

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

and

Shillong Shillong () is a hill station and the capital of Meghalaya, a Indian state, state in northeastern India, which means "The Abode of Clouds". It is the headquarters of the East Khasi Hills district. Shillong is the list of most populous cities in ...

, with a cumulative audience of approximately 50,000 people. The first GIR was held in 1997 as a two-day festival in Kolkata. The festival is organized by the media and publishing company Entertainment Media Services Private Limited, which also publishes the magazine ''

Rock Street Journal ''Rock Street Journal'' or ''RSJ'' is a monthly magazine covering the rock scene in India and South Asia. It was started in January 1993 in Allahabad by Amit Saigal and Shena Gamat Saigal after they noted the lack of a support system for India ...

''. The festival was founded by rock journalist and promoter Amit Saigal, who died in 2012. Subsequently, according to ''Mint, the "''Great Indian Rock Festival in Delhi called it a day after 15 years…in 2012." GIR started in the form of a competition amongst bands, where entries were called from all over the country in the form of physical cassettes and CDs. 12 bands were chosen out of more than a thousand entries at the end of an extensive week-long exercise of listening to each and every band's music which was personally conducted by the organizers at RSJ. The 12 shortlisted bands finally performed in a grand finale along with an international headliner which was the GIR Festival. Each edition of Great Indian Rock was also accompanied by an album compiling the songs of the shortlisted bands known as the "GIR Compilation," consisting of 12 original compositions by 12 bands from various regions of India. The album would be circulated across India through ''Rock Street Journal'' magazine. Great Indian Rock stopped being a competition in 2007. In addition to featuring Indian musicians like

Parikrama Parikrama or Pradakshina is clockwise circumambulation of sacred entities, and the path along which this is performed, as practiced in the Indic religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. In Buddhism, it refers only to the path along ...

, Orange Street, and

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by th ...

, the festival has also hosted international artists like

Shawn Lane Shawn Lane (March 21, 1963 – September 26, 2003) was an American musician who released two studio albums and collaborated with a variety of musicians including Ringo Starr, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Reg ...

Jonas Hellborg Jonas Hellborg (born 7 June 1958) is a Sweden, Swedish bass guitarist. He has collaborated with John McLaughlin (musician), John McLaughlin, Sultan Khan (musician), Ustad Sultan Khan, Fazal Qureshi, Bill Laswell, Shawn Lane, Jens Johansson, Ande ...

John Myung John Ro Myung (; born January 24, 1967) is an American bassist and a founding member of the progressive metal group Dream Theater. Background and personal life Born in Chicago to South Korean parents, Myung grew up with John Petrucci on King ...

, Meshuggah,

Tesseract In geometry, a tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eig ...

, and

Intronaut Intronaut is an American progressive metal band from Los Angeles, California, that incorporates complex polyrhythms, progressive rock, and jazz. History Intronaut formed in 2004, and their initial line-up included guitarist/vocalist Sacha Dunabl ...

, and

Satyricon The ''Satyricon'', ''Satyricon'' ''liber'' (''The Book of Satyrlike Adventures''), or ''Satyrica'', is a Latin work of fiction believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius, though the manuscript tradition identifies the author as Titus Petro ...

References

{{Reflist Rock festivals in India Annual events in India Music festivals established in 1997