About
To democratize performing and visual arts and make them accessible to people from all walks of life, not just a select few. To explore innovative and avant-garde ways of presentation while taking performances into creative spaces such as protected heritage monuments and public parks.
Seher is a New Delhi-based arts production and cultural programming organisation, founded and directed by Sanjeev Bhargava. Active for over three decades, Seher has become one of India's most recognised organisations for the conceptualisation, curation, and production of large-scale arts and cultural events, including music festivals, dance festivals, visual arts events, theatrical productions, and government cultural programming. Among its flagship productions are the Udaipur World Music Festival, the Jaipur Jazz and Blues Festival, the ASEAN India Music Festival, the Bhakti Utsav, and the Ananya Dance Festival. Seher has produced landmark events at major heritage venues including the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, and Humayun's Tomb, and has organised official cultural programming for events at Rashtrapati Bhawan, including the state banquet for US President Barack Obama in 2010 and 2015. The organisation has stated its core mission as democratising access to performing and visual arts for people from all walks of life.
Seher emerged from Sanjeev Bhargava's conviction that India's performing and visual arts were unnecessarily confined to closed auditoria and institutional spaces inaccessible to the general public. Working from New Delhi from the early 1990s, Bhargava built Seher into an organisation that prioritised context, scale, and accessibility in equal measure.
The organisation's most distinctive contribution has been the use of heritage monuments as live performance venues, a model that was novel in India when Seher pioneered it and has since become a major strand of cultural tourism and public arts programming. Performances staged against the backdrop of the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Humayun's Tomb, and other Mughal and medieval sites gave large audiences access to classical and world music in settings of extraordinary visual power, while simultaneously drawing attention to the heritage sites themselves.
Seher's relationship with the Government of India has made it the producer of some of the country's most prominent official cultural moments. The cultural banquets organised at Rashtrapati Bhawan for Barack Obama during his 2010 and 2015 India visits placed Seher at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and state protocol. Its work with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the Ministry of Textiles has extended its scope well beyond the independent arts sector.
The Udaipur World Music Festival, now in its several editions, is among Seher's most celebrated independent productions. Held at Udaipur's lakeside heritage venues, it brings together folk, classical, and world music from India and internationally, embodying the organisation's commitment to access and discovery. The Ananya Dance Festival, dedicated to Indian classical dance, has provided a major platform for Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Kathak, and other forms in a format accessible beyond the classical dance community.
Founding & Leadership
Sanjeev Bhargava is the Founder-Director of Seher. With close to three decades of experience in the arts sector, he has worked with artists ranging from M.F. Husain to Farhan Akhtar and has produced events from state banquets at Rashtrapati Bhawan to the Udaipur World Music Festival. Bhargava has engaged closely with multiple central government ministries and has been central to India's cultural diplomacy production capacity.
Initiatives & Portfolio
Multi-edition annual world music festival at Udaipur's heritage lakeside venues.
Major Indian classical dance festival.
Annual jazz and blues festival in Jaipur.
Multi-nation cultural exchange music festival within the ASEAN-India framework.
Festival of devotional music and arts.
Large-scale live arts events at protected heritage monuments including the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, and Humayun's Tomb.
Official state cultural events including banquets for US President Barack Obama in 2010 and 2015.
Seher occupies a distinctive position in India's cultural landscape because it has consistently operated at the interface between government programming, heritage tourism, and independent arts production. Its productions at heritage monuments have helped establish a model for using India's physical cultural heritage as a live backdrop for contemporary arts events, demonstrating that access to classical and world music can be created for large, diverse audiences. Seher's role in state cultural diplomacy, particularly its Rashtrapati Bhawan productions, also places it at the most visible level of India's cultural representation.
Seher is an unusual organisation in that its three decades of work span both the commercial production of large-scale festivals and the highest levels of official state cultural programming. Sanjeev Bhargava's ability to operate simultaneously in independent arts, heritage tourism, and government cultural diplomacy makes Seher's institutional profile genuinely singular. For the Atlas, Seher is significant as a production organisation rather than a venue or collection-holder: its value lies in the events it creates rather than what it owns, which makes it a different kind of cultural institution from the academies and museums on this list. Worth watching as heritage-venue festival programming becomes increasingly central to India's cultural tourism strategy.