Where Tradition Finds Its Future: Twenty Years of Jodhpur RIFF: By Arnab Banerjee, this immersive feature explores how Jodhpur RIFF marks twenty years of musical innovation, community preservation, global collaborations, women’s voices, and the enduring future of Rajasthan’s extraordinary folk traditions.

One of India’s most anticipated and exuberantly celebrated music festivals, Jodhpur RIFF (Rajasthan International Folk Festival) is once again preparing to unfurl its singular magic within the majestic ramparts of Mehrangarh Fort.

With the sandstone citadel poised to resonate once more with music from across Rajasthan and the world, Festival Director Divya Bhatia approaches this year’s edition with palpable excitement, animated by an itinerary that promises both discovery and delight. Yet, for Bhatia, the festival is as much about looking ahead as it is about looking back.

More than two decades after its inception—this being its 20th edition—Jodhpur RIFF has evolved into a cultural institution of remarkable resonance, its journey shaped by music, imagination, and a commitment to artistic exchange. As he speaks of the road ahead, Bhatia also casts a fond, almost wistful gaze over the years gone by, reflecting on the improbable beginnings, the milestones, transformations, and the extraordinary journey that has brought the festival to where it stands today.

The Living Memory of Folk Music

Folk music begins where formal history often ends: in the intimate, unrecorded spaces of everyday life. Rooted in the lived experiences of communities and traditionally transmitted through oral, participatory, and intergenerational traditions, it is far more than an archive of inherited melodies and rhythms.

It carries the memory of ordinary people—their labour and celebrations, grief and devotion, courtship and conflict, rituals and beliefs, landscapes and languages. It remembers what communities have endured and, equally importantly, what they have chosen to preserve.

Yet something more elusive happens when such music is performed live. The song ceases merely to represent the past and begins, in the charged immediacy of performance, to recreate it. An inherited melody is not simply repeated; it is inhabited. A rhythm passed from one generation to another acquires new breath.

The performer, the audience, the place, the hour, the weather, and even the silence between notes become participants in a singular act of cultural memory. A recording can preserve sound, but it cannot completely preserve presence. The true enchantment of folk music lies in that fleeting alchemy between inheritance and immediacy.

Few festivals understand this distinction as instinctively as Jodhpur RIFF, which celebrates its twentieth edition from October 22–26, 2026, at Rajasthan’s magnificent Mehrangarh Fort.

A Festival That Reimagines Tradition

Over twenty years, Jodhpur RIFF has become one of India’s most distinctive roots-music festivals—not merely because of its spectacular setting or the international stature of its performers, but because of the quietly persistent vision of Festival Director Divya Bhatia.

His achievement is not simply that he has kept a festival alive for two decades. It is that he has built an ecosystem around an artistic philosophy: one in which Rajasthan’s traditional musicians are neither museum pieces nor exotic embellishments, but active participants in the future of music.

Meeting Bhatia is an experience in itself. He speaks with the restless energy of someone perpetually listening—to music, people, possibilities, and the spaces between them. His enthusiasms encompass percussion, theatre, acting, writing, conversation, socialising, and, above all, music.

For Bhatia, however, the festival’s lodestar has never shifted: Rajasthan’s artists. “Rajasthan’s artists have always been this festival’s lodestone—that hasn’t changed in twenty years.”

What has evolved is the scale of the ambition. Jodhpur RIFF has painstakingly developed a platform where Rajasthani musicians revisit and reframe their own traditions for contemporary audiences, sometimes creating entirely new musical and performative vocabularies. At the same time, musicians from India and across the world are invited into genuine artistic dialogue.

A Larger Cultural Ecosystem

Since the end of last year, Bhatia has assumed a broader full-time role connected with Mehrangarh’s Music Museum Project, an umbrella initiative encompassing Jodhpur RIFF and several dimensions of musical and cultural development.

The distinction matters. RIFF has twenty years of identity and institutional history behind it, and Bhatia is emphatic that its independence and pedigree must be protected. Yet the wider project gives him an opportunity to address something the festival alone cannot. “Jodhpur RIFF cannot go into the villages of Rajasthan and start training youngsters on a regular basis. But ecosystem development is something the festival has always aspired to do.”

Folk Futures: Investing in the Next Generation

That philosophy has found concrete expression in Folk Futures, one of the most significant initiatives associated with the new phase of the project.

Traditional masters now work regularly with children in five villages around Jodhpur, teaching traditional songs and instruments while embedding learning within the communities where these traditions originated.

The programme began with approximately 120 children and is expected to grow to 200–250 students in the coming years. Rather than manufacturing performers for a festival, Folk Futures seeks to restore the conditions in which music once naturally travelled from one generation to the next.

Learning, however, is only the beginning. Mehrangarh’s restaurants and public spaces will become performance venues where promising young musicians can gain live experience and receive professional payment for their work.

Cultural preservation, Bhatia insists, becomes meaningful only when culture can also provide dignity and livelihood.

Women Find the Stage, Finally

Perhaps the most quietly transformative development is the increasing presence of women. Nearly three-quarters of this year’s programme is either women-led or prominently features women—not because of quotas, but because remarkable artists have emerged naturally within Rajasthan’s evolving musical landscape.

For generations, women sustained folk traditions within homes and ritual spaces while rarely appearing on formal stages. Their movement into public performance represents far more than a change of venue; it signifies a profound renegotiation of artistic agency.

“They do want to learn. But now they also want to perform on stage. That is the big difference.” Through Folk Futures, women teachers are already mentoring the next generation, creating pathways from learning to earning.

A Festival Built on Relationships

If the most visible aspect of Jodhpur RIFF is its spectacular programme, the less visible foundation is relationship-building.

Bhatia travels extensively, listens obsessively, and insists on hearing artists perform live before inviting them. A recording, he believes, can never fully reveal whether an artist belongs within RIFF’s distinctive aesthetic. “I have to hear the artist live.”

This philosophy has created a festival that prizes discovery over predictability. Collaborations emerge not from novelty alone, but from trust, familiarity, and genuine artistic curiosity.

Hindustani Excellence Meets Global Collaboration

Among this year’s highlights is the long-awaited appearance of Padma Shri Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande, one of the finest exponents of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana.

International collaborations bring together artists from Scotland, Finland, Poland, France, Iran, Canada, the United States, Colombia, Chile, Cabo Verde, Estonia, and the Philippines, reflecting RIFF’s evolution into a truly global meeting ground for roots music.

Rather than commissioning every encounter, the festival increasingly co-produces collaborations initiated by artists themselves—a sign of the trust it has cultivated over two decades.

Rajasthan in Its Own Voice

At the heart of Jodhpur RIFF remains Rajasthan itself. Masters including Mir Bassu Khan, Padma Shri Taga Ram, Ghewar Khan, Darre Khan Manganiyar, Feroze Khan, and Asin Khan Langa embody traditions of extraordinary depth, while more than 250 Rajasthani folk musicians participate in this year’s edition.

Alongside them, over a hundred young Langa and Manganiyar musicians from Folk Futures signal the continuation of a living heritage. Women artists such as Anita Dangi, Dariya and Kewal Meghwal, Ganga, and Sundar further affirm that Rajasthan’s oral traditions continue to evolve through new voices.

The Future Sounds Ancient

Jodhpur RIFF’s twentieth edition is ultimately not a celebration of nostalgia, but of continuity. Its greatest achievement lies in demonstrating that folk music survives not by remaining untouched, but by remaining meaningful—through education, collaboration, performance, and the courage to let tradition speak in the present tense.

As Mehrangarh once again echoes beneath the Sharad Purnima moon, Jodhpur RIFF reminds us that the future of heritage is created not in museums, but in living voices.