Sacred Amritsar Festival to be held from Feb 20-22

The Sacred Amritsar Festival – 2026, a Sleepwell presentation, will be organised in the holy city of Punjab from February 20-22.

At Qila Gobindgarh, the festival will bring together powerful voices in music and mystic poetry for an immersive cultural experience rooted in reflection and spirituality, Teamwork Arts, the producers of the festival, said.

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The evening will celebrate the timeless resonance of mythological verse and melody. The Sacred Amritsar promises a time that honours India’s rich spiritual and musical traditions. The festival is produced by Teamwork Arts, who are also the producer of the Jaipur Literature Festival, an organiser’s spokesperson said here on Friday evening while announcing the dates of the next edition.

A star-studded line-up of performers, including Padma Shri Kailash Kher and Kailasa, The Anirudh Varma Collective, The Kutle Khan Project, and Usha Uthup, will be featured at the festival.

Session on “The Lost Heer” draws huge audience

The folklore of Heer Ranjha was also relived at a session on the latest book by Harleen Singh, who was in conversation with British journalist Anita Anand. However, the discussion on the passionate love tale evolved into a broader theme on the prevailing status of women in society.

The session, titled The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab, drew a large audience, with Harleen Singh discussing his latest book. Singh said he wanted to write about the histories of women in Punjab, as they are not very well documented.

Any representation of women from the province was viewed through a colonial lens, as martial women, missing the femininity that their stories carry, Singh said. “The history of common women is found in folklore; it’s found in recipes; it’s found in random pictures, where something might have been accidentally captured.

“Overall, they are scattered all over the place,” Singh said. Speaking about the title of the book, he said he chose it very consciously and named it so because Heer represents the quintessential Punjabi woman to him.