The Story
OrganizerKCC Ramjhol takes its name from the Ramjhol, the evening arti devotional programme of Rajasthani temples, referencing the religious and cultural heartbeat that connects Marwari communities across India with their Rajasthani origins. The Kolkata Centre for Creativity, established in 2018 as a unit of the Anamika Kala Sangam Trust, conceived Ramjhol as a festival that makes visible a cultural relationship that Kolkata's urban fabric has long contained but rarely celebrated: the Marwari community's centuries-long presence in Kolkata as merchants, industrialists, philanthropists, and cultural patrons has shaped the city's economy and institutions while the Marwari community itself has maintained strong cultural and religious ties to Rajasthan. The festival's 'Desert Meets Delta' theme for the fourth edition evokes the contrasting ecologies, the Thar Desert and the Gangetic Delta, as a metaphor for the cultural synthesis that has developed over generations of migration and settlement. KCC's multidisciplinary approach, seven programmatic verticals including arts fellowship, arts lab, and community outreach, gives Ramjhol a depth of community engagement that single-event festivals lack.
KCC Ramjhol addresses one of Kolkata's most significant and underexplored cultural relationships. The Marwari community's contribution to Kolkata's cultural institutions, CIMA Gallery, Birla Academy, and the philanthropic foundations that have supported Bengali arts for over a century, is enormous but largely invisible in mainstream cultural narration of the city. Ramjhol makes this visible while also examining the Marwari community's own preservation of Rajasthani folk music, crafts, and food traditions within a Bengali urban context.
Ramjhol addresses Kolkata's most significant and underexplored cultural relationship, examining what the centuries-long Marwari community presence has meant for both Bengal and Rajasthan, and what it continues to mean in a period of rapid urban transformation.
