The Story
OrganizerThe Old World Theatre Festival was founded in 2002 by Old World Culture, part of the Old World Hospitality group, and was supported in its early years by Mahindra; Mahindra later went on to create its own separate theatre initiative, the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META). Held annually at Delhi's India Habitat Centre (and in some years also at Epicentre in Gurgaon), the festival grew into one of Delhi's longest-running and most prominent theatre festivals, reaching its 18th edition in 2019 with programming spanning classics, translations, adaptations and newly devised work from theatre communities across India. From at least its 17th edition (2018) onward, press coverage began describing the event as being organised directly by India Habitat Centre rather than by Old World Culture, and by 2023 the annual festival at the same venue was being consistently referred to in press coverage as the 'IHC Theatre Festival' rather than the Old World Theatre Festival, with programming continuing on a similar annual autumn schedule (most recently September 2025). No source was found confirming a currently active festival still branded specifically as the 'Old World Theatre Festival'. [Unverified — confirm current branding and organiser directly with India Habitat Centre before publishing]
In its Old World Culture-organised years, the festival's significance lay in being one of the earliest sustained corporate-and-hospitality-sector-backed theatre platforms in Delhi, predating the now much larger Mahindra-backed META awards that its own early sponsor went on to found. Under its current IHC-organised form, the festival's significance rests on India Habitat Centre's institutional role as one of Delhi's principal cultural venues, with the festival serving as a genuinely pan-Indian theatre showcase (drawing productions from Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai and Kerala in recent editions) rather than a Delhi-only programme. Whichever branding is treated as current, the festival's underlying continuity, an unbroken run of annual editions at the same venue since 2002, gives it real claim to being one of Delhi's oldest theatre festivals.
A theatre festival at this address and on this annual autumn schedule remains clearly active, most recently confirmed running in September 2025 at India Habitat Centre. What is unresolved is simply which name currently applies: recent press and the venue's own event listings refer to it as the IHC Theatre Festival, not the Old World Theatre Festival, and it is not clear from public sources whether this reflects a formal rebranding, a change in organising sponsor, or an informal shift in how the venue's own press office refers to its annual programme. [Unverified - confirm current name and organiser directly before publishing] For institutional and CSR audiences, the underlying event, an annual, pan-Indian, venue-anchored theatre showcase now in its third decade, remains a significant fixture of Delhi's performing arts calendar regardless of which name is currently correct.
Platformed a wide constellation of Indian theatre groups and new scripts.
