About · परिचय
हम क्यों मिलते हैं
A festival rooted in painted walls.
The Shekhawati Sahitya Sangam began in 2021 as a single mehfil in a half-restored haveli in Nawalgarh. Forty people came. They stayed until first light.
The Shekhawati region of Rajasthan is sometimes called the world’s largest open-air art gallery. Across roughly fifty kilometres, more than two thousand merchant havelis carry painted frescoes — some four metres tall, some no bigger than a palm.
Most are now empty. The merchant families left for the cities a century ago, and the paintings have been quietly negotiating with weather, lime, and pigeons ever since.
The Sangam exists to bring people, voices, and footfall back into these courtyards — not as a museum, but as a working room. Literature is the most portable cultural form we have. It can enter through any door.
2021
First edition
84
Voices this year
12
Havelis in use
What guides us
हमारा संकल्प
Bilingual by default
Every keynote, every printed programme, every signpost in Hindi and English. Rajasthani wherever a poem asks for it.
Conservation-conscious
No staging on painted walls. Removable installations only. A share of every ticket funds local fresco restoration.
Open-door pricing
Subsidised passes for students and Shekhawati residents. Free walking tours for school groups year-round.
Translation as practice
A residency for translators each year, working between Rajasthani, Hindi, English, and a rotating fourth language.
The trust
Run by a small, stubborn team in Jhunjhunu.
The Sangam is produced by the Shekhawati Sahitya Trust, a not-for-profit registered in Rajasthan. We’re a team of seven, supported by sixty volunteers from the surrounding towns during festival week.
