The Story
OrganizerKunwar Ranjeet Chauhan founded Jashn-e-Adab in 2012 with a mission to create a national platform for Hindi and Urdu literature beyond the metropolitan literary festival circuit. The festival's design reflects an understanding that poetry, music and performance art in the Urdu-Hindi tradition are inseparable -- a mushaira is also a performance, a ghazal is also poetry, dastangoi is also literature. This integration distinguishes Jashn-e-Adab from festivals that silo literary and performing arts programming. The multi-city format (Delhi + Mumbai as anchors, with editions in Lucknow, Raebareli, Roorkee and other cities) reflects an explicit ambition to distribute Urdu-Hindi literary culture beyond its traditional strongholds. The festival confers annual awards to literary figures and provides book release platforms for emerging writers.
Jashn-e-Adab's cultural significance for the ghazal ecosystem specifically lies in its programming integration: unlike Jashn-e-Rekhta (which is Urdu-language-broad) or Khazaana (which is ghazal-exclusive), Jashn-e-Adab situates ghazal within a wider Hindi-Urdu literary context. A ghazal performed at Jashn-e-Adab exists in conversation with a mushaira, a dastangoi performance and a kathak recital on the same stage over three days. This contextualisation matters because the ghazal is ultimately a literary form that became musical -- and festivals that treat it as both simultaneously serve the form more honestly than those that treat it as only one or the other.
