On a recent spring evening in Delhi, singer Rekha Bhardwaj sat just a few feet away from her audience, singing the ghazal Kahan ho tum chale aao, mohabbat ka takaza hai. There was no stage in the conventional sense, no distance to mediate the experience—just a room full of people seated on durries, leaning in, responding in real time. It is precisely this kind of setting that Tanvi Singh Bhatia and Anubhav Jain set out to create when they founded IBTIDA: Ek Mehfil in 2019.
Their idea was not simply to revive a cultural form, but to rethink how it could exist today. “We wanted to change that perception by creating formats that made these traditions easier to understand, engage with, and truly experience,” says Bhatia. For her, the starting point was personal. She grew up in a home where music and poetry were part of everyday life, shaped by a mother trained in classical music and a grandfather who wrote poetry. Those early experiences of artists performing within arm’s reach, of evenings unfolding without rigid structure, became the foundation of IBTIDA’s approach. Bhatia, along with Jain, translated that instinct into a passing show across cities and audiences.
Together, they built their platform that prioritises context as much as content. Mehfils, unfolding in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, are deliberately capped, usually at under 200 people. “Anything larger becomes a concert,” Bhatia says, “and loses its essence.” The decision is central to their philosophy—keeping the artist and audience within the same shared space, where nuance is not lost to scale.
Such sense of proximity shapes how the performances are received. “Proximity is what we thrive on. In large auditoriums, music often travels across distance, reaching the ear but not always the body,” Bhatia says. The environment itself is carefully constructed. Drawing from references like courtyards in Lucknow, angans in old Delhi, and baithaks in Hyderabad, the settings are designed to be immersive rather than performative. “We recreate the essence of a bygone era—through pardas, drapes, carpets, and settings that feel like a home, a drawing room, or a courtyard—just as mehfils in courtyards and baithaks once existed,” she explains.
Their attention extends to every layer of the evening, including the food, which shifts with the theme—sometimes leaning into Awadhi cuisine, at other times reflecting the regional flavours of Delhi. The result is an experience that moves across sound, setting, and taste without fragmenting into separate parts. At the same time, IBTIDA has become a meaningful platform for artists working across traditions and ouvres. Alongside larger evenings featuring names like Usha Uthup, Vishal Bhardwaj, and the Nizami Bandhu, the organisation also offers intimate private baithaks and gatherings.
The choice of venues reinforces this thinking. A mehfil held at Safdarjung Tomb, featuring the Amjad Ali Khan family, stands out as a defining moment. “Historical spaces have always felt natural to what we do. They carry an emotion within their walls, and that seeps into the experience,” Bhatia says. Their current curatorial theme, Qissa, lean further into storytelling. “We have lost the ability to simply sit with a story because of everyday noise. Qissa is a deliberate pause from that noise.”
What Bhatia and Jain have built is not a straightforward revival. It is a reworking of a format—one that retains its core while adapting to how audiences engage today. In their hands, the mehfil shifts from being an inherited idea to a contemporary experience—one where, as Bhardwaj’s performance made clear, the distance between artist and audience is no longer the point.