This article looks at TCS Ruhaniyat’s 25th edition, highlighting the festival’s long-standing role in presenting living folk and mystic traditions across India. It outlines the 2025 Mumbai lineup featuring forms such as Paakh, Bhawaiya Gaan, Kabir compositions by Prahlad Singh Tipanya, and performances by Hemant Chauhan, along with international acts from South Africa and Italy. The article also notes the return of key artists like Parvathy Baul and Kachra Khan, the collaborative segment Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, and the festival’s continued commitment to authentic Qawwali.
For a quarter of a century, TCS Ruhaniyat has functioned as one of India’s most consistent platforms for living folk and mystic traditions inviting international artists whose work is rooted in their own regions’ spiritual and cultural histories. Supported by Tata Consultancy Services, the festival has travelled through eight Indian cities, carrying with it a commitment to presenting oral traditions, spiritual lineages, and community-led art forms that rarely find a stage at this scale.
As it enters its 25th year, the 2025 edition in Mumbai brings together an expansive lineup from across India and beyond. The curatorial focus of the festival aims to showcase forms that have survived through transmission, and devotion rather than just documentation. These include 'Paakh', an ancient polyphonic singing practice from Jammu, 'Bhawaiya Gaan' from West Bengal, and compositions of Sant Kabir performed by Prahlad Singh Tipanya, one of the most respected voices in the Malwi singing tradition. It will also feature Hemant Chauhan presenting a selection of Gujarat’s mystic songs, drawing from the region’s long-standing devotional repertoire.
Ruhaniyat 2025 additionally features two international acts from South Africa and Italy, expanding the festival’s scope while maintaining its central theme: how music becomes a vessel for memory, resistance, and collective experience.
The festival honours artists who have shaped its identity from the beginning. Parvathy Baul — one of the most important contemporary exponents of the Baul tradition — returns with a performance that reflects her decades-long involvement with Ruhaniyat. Manganiyar singer Kachra Khan, known for his renditions of Sindhi kalams of Baba Bulleh Shah, also makes a reappearance, reinforcing the festival’s long-standing relationships with hereditary artists whose work sits at the intersection of music, spirituality and oral storytelling.
A recurring highlight of Ruhaniyat, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, continues this year as well. The segment brings Indian and international artists together in a collaborative performance, asking them to engage in a shared musical language. The segment pushes artists into a shared rhythm where their traditions meet through instinct, timing, and the raw mechanics of live collaboration.
Each evening will close with an unembellished Qawwali performance, staying faithful to the form’s traditional structure. The festival’s insistence on maintaining the authenticity of Qawwali, especially in a landscape where the genre is often adapted for contemporary consumption, has been one of its defining principles since its inception.
Across two decades and more, Ruhaniyat has positioned itself as a space that celebrates music which still circulates through local, inherited systems of teaching and performance. Its 25th edition underscores that mission by spotlighting traditions that have endured because of communities that have kept them alive, through an experience where the line between stage and listener dissolves.
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