Kashika Colours-and-Ragas Festival Opens at Town Hall With Nirala Staging and Mishra Recital

The Kashika colours-and-ragas festival opened on Sunday, 13 September 2026, at the Alco/Alfred auditorium in Town Hall, Varanasi, with a theatrical staging of Ram Ki Shakti Pooja and a classical vocal recital. The District Tourism and Culture Council, the Varanasi Municipal Corporation and Nagari Pracharini Sabha organised the inauguration. Mayor Ashok Kumar Tiwari and Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal attended as guests. Lamp lighting marked the open. The festival is to run on Sundays thereafter.

Vyomesh Shukla, president of Nagari Pracharini Sabha, conducted the evening and directed the theatrical piece drawn from Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s Ram Ki Shakti Pooja. Classical vocal followed with Padma Bhushan Pandit Sajan Mishra and Swaransh Mishra. Pandit Dharmnath Mishra accompanied on samvadini; Rajesh Mishra played tabla. That is the locked performance line-up for the opening night — not an invented guest list.

Mayor Tiwari, speaking on record, framed Kashi as not just a city but a living symbol of Indian culture, art, music and spiritual consciousness. Events like Kashika, he said, help carry that heritage to a wider public and connect a new generation to its roots. Commissioner Nagpal said the municipal corporation is working to preserve and promote Kashi’s cultural heritage and to strengthen the city’s cultural identity nationally and internationally through such events. The stated aim of the series is to bring Kashi’s music, art and spiritual traditions to Gen Z and to visitors.

Town Hall’s Alfred auditorium is a familiar municipal stage for civic culture nights. Putting a Nirala staging and a Banaras gharana vocal line on the same bill is a deliberate mix of literary theatre and classical music. Weekly Sundays give the festival a calendar habit rather than a one-off inaugural splash. How many Sundays hold, and what each programme lists, will be decided as the series runs; Sunday locked the open.

Shukla’s dual role — NPS president and director of the Nirala piece — keeps the literary half of the evening inside the Sabha’s own house. Sajan Mishra’s presence anchors the music half in a name the city’s classical audience already knows. Samvadini and tabla credits complete the accompaniment card without padding the copy with invented rasas or audience-reaction colour.

This desk does not invent footfall figures or standing ovations. The locked facts are the organisers, the guests, the lamp lighting, the Nirala staging under Shukla, the Mishra recital with named accompanists, and the weekly-Sunday plan. Paraphrased on-record lines from the mayor and the commissioner sit inside that frame. No competing outlet is named; no wire is cited.

For residents who follow municipal culture calendars, the practical stamp is simple: Town Hall, Sunday evenings, Kashika as a joint tourism-council, VMC and NPS platform. For visitors chasing a classical night in Kashi, the opening bill paired literary theatre with a Mishra vocal set. For Gen Z outreach — the aim named by the organisers — the test will be whether later Sundays keep that age band in the seats. That test is ahead of this file, not inside it.

Kashika’s first night therefore lands as a named inauguration with a named bill, two on-record civic lines, and a weekly Sunday promise. The next verified stamps will be the programmes that follow — not rhetoric about heritage in the abstract.