The Story
OrganizerJashn-e-Rekhta began, fittingly, not with a stage but with a website. In 2013, the industrialist Sanjiv Saraf — chairman of Polyplex Corporation and a late, passionate convert to Urdu poetry — launched Rekhta.org, an online portal to digitise and democratise Urdu literature. Much of the canon was locked away in a script that millions could no longer read; Rekhta put it online in Urdu, Devanagari and Roman scripts so that anyone could reach it.
But the team soon recognised the limits of the page. Urdu, as Saraf put it, is a language that lives across art forms — qawwali, dastangoi, mushaira, ghazal, theatre — and reading alone could never convey its full experience. In 2015, the Foundation staged the first Jashn-e-Rekhta at the India International Centre in Delhi: a modest gathering blending poetry, music, theatre and literary conversation.
It grew quickly, and dramatically. From the intimate confines of the IIC, the festival moved to ever-larger venues to accommodate swelling crowds — the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium — before its landmark tenth edition in December 2025 at Baansera Park on the Yamuna riverfront. Across three days, more than 300 artists performed over 35 sessions on five stages, drawing roughly 150,000 visitors.
The programming philosophy has remained constant from the first edition: high-quality Urdu content presented in an entertaining, popular register. The festival has featured a remarkable roll-call of talent — Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Wasim Barelvi, the late Rahat Indori, Kailash Kher, Papon, the Sabri Brothers, Ustad Shujaat Khan — alongside scholars, dastango performers and emerging poets. Beyond the stages, the festival has become a full cultural ecosystem: the Rekhta Books Bazar, the Aiwan-e-Zaiqa food courts celebrating subcontinental cuisine, calligraphy and craft pavilions, and an evening Light & Sound show.
The Foundation has also taken the festival abroad, staging Jashn-e-Rekhta Dubai to reach the global Urdu diaspora. A decade on, what began as one man's passion for the verse of Ghalib has become one of India's largest cultural gatherings — and the doorway through which an entire generation has discovered a language once thought distant or not for them.
Jashn-e-Rekhta's cultural significance lies in a single, hard-to-overstate achievement: it has made Urdu popular again, at scale, among audiences with no inherited connection to the language. Urdu's institutional decline in post-Partition India left it increasingly disconnected from everyday literacy, even as its idiom survived in film songs and ghazals. The festival reversed the drift of public perception, recasting Urdu from a language of nostalgia into a language of the present.
It does so by anchoring itself in the idea of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb — the syncretic Indo-Islamic cultural synthesis of northern India. By foregrounding Urdu as a shared inheritance of Hindu and Muslim poets alike, the language of both Ghalib and Hindi cinema, the festival actively resists the framing of Urdu as foreign or exclusively Muslim. In a period of sharpening communal and linguistic politics, this positioning gives the festival a civic weight that exceeds its literary remit.
The festival's most striking demographic feature — its overwhelmingly young audience — is also its most significant. Jashn-e-Rekhta has demonstrably introduced Urdu poetry to a generation that encountered it first not in classrooms but at a mushaira on a winter evening in Delhi.
In an era of cultural polarisation and language politics, Jashn-e-Rekhta matters because it offers a model of cultural revival that is inclusive rather than defensive. It treats Urdu not as a besieged minority possession to be protected, but as a living, shared, joyful inheritance to be celebrated openly. Its scale - hundreds of thousands of attendees, millions online - proves that there is vast, latent public appetite for the syncretic cultural traditions the festival represents. [Atlas Assessment]
Jashn-e-Rekhta has contributed a replicable template for language revival through experience rather than instruction, and has built - through the parallel Rekhta digital library of roughly 200,000 digitised books - one of the world's most significant repositories of Urdu literary heritage. Together, the festival and the platform constitute the most ambitious Urdu preservation and promotion project of the digital era. [Atlas Assessment]
