The World’s Largest Theatre Festival Just Turned 25 — And Went Even Bigger

The National School of Drama's Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM) opened its silver jubilee, 25th edition on January 27, 2026, and ran for 25 days until February 20 — its largest-ever format in a run that began in 1999. This year's edition spanned 40 locations across India plus one showcase country on every one of the seven continents, staging 277 Indian productions and 12 international ones across 228 Indian and foreign languages and dialects, according to the Ministry of Culture.

BRM has carried the label "world's largest international theatre festival" for years, but the scale of the 25th edition — commentators have taken to calling it a "Mahakumbh of theatre" — pushed that claim further than before. Productions ranged from Delhi mainstage premieres to community performances in Ladakh, part of a stated effort by NSD and the Ministry of Culture to move the festival's centre of gravity beyond the capital and into smaller cities and border regions that rarely host international theatre programming.

What a milestone edition like this actually tests is logistics as much as artistry: coordinating language interpretation, touring schedules and venue readiness across 40 simultaneous locations is its own kind of production, one that happens almost entirely off-stage. Whether that expanded footprint holds at this scale in future editions, or settles back toward a more centralised Delhi-anchored format, is the open question we'll be watching as BRM 2027 applications are already underway.

Twenty-five years in, the hardest thing Bharat Rang Mahotsav has to prove isn't that Indian theatre is alive. It's that it can keep growing without losing the room.

A festival spanning 228 languages and 40 cities, running for 25 days without a break, is really just a very large-scale version of something small theatre groups do every night in a single hall: build a temporary उत्सव — a celebration — out of people willing to show up and pay attention together. That's the same faith Antare Kala's Rangmanch pillar has in the nukkad natak troupe performing to twenty people as much as in the mainstage production performing to two thousand.