Mumbai: Three days, one campus, and an explosion of colour, sound and conversation. Malhar 2026, St. Xavier’s College Mumbai’s annual cultural festival, has come to a close. Built around this year’s theme, “Iridescence: The Spectrum of Expressions,” the fest turned the campus into a space where sport, art, music and hard conversations all found room to exist side by side.
It began on August 13 with Elimination Day, where the energy was set early with an eight-team volleyball knockout at ETCW’s Ace the Court. LA’s Shark Tank turned writers into entrepreneurs for a day, pushing them to pitch their own stories the way founders pitch startups. IPA brought the music and dance with Band Baaja Baarat and Taal Se Taal Mila, poets took the mic at Slam It Down, and IPA × ETCW blended Bollywood with comedy in Picture Abhi Baaki Hai. The day closed loud with WPAS’s Jack in the Aux letting bands rework music through technique-driven, story-first performances.
Film Maker Imtiaz Ali at the Malhar Fest 2026 |
Day One is where Malhar really found its voice, literally, through the Conclave, themed around “Pratibimb.” SheSays founder and Xavier’s alumna Trisha Shetty opened up about courage, telling students that fear stops being a weapon the moment you stop taking it seriously. Writer Anish Gawande pushed back on secondhand opinions, urging students to go out, talk to people, and actually understand the world instead of just reading about it.
Beauty entrepreneurs Karishma Kevalramani of FAE Beauty and Namrata Soni of Simply Nam shared how they built their own brands from scratch, and what inclusivity actually looks like in an industry built on narrow standards. On stage, World Performing Arts’ Novacore brought hip-hop and break-dance flair, Taal Se Taal Mila returned with classical storytelling through dance, and a run of theatre and mime, Multiverse of Madness, Sound of Silence, No Captions Needed, Shakespeare in the Dark, carried the day into the night.
Actor Divyendu Sharma At Malhar 2026 |
Day Two didn’t slow down. The Conclave line-up crossed journalism, cinema, sport and public service in a single afternoon. Peek TV’s Priyanshi Sharma spoke on independent journalism and how much power audiences now hold over which stories get told. Actor Richa Chadha talked candidly about the unglamorous groundwork of an acting career, while Divyendu Sharma looked back at how the OTT wave, and Mirzapur in particular, changed everything for him.
Maharashtra Food Safety Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe At Malhar 2026 |
Civil servant Tukaram Mundhe asked students a question that stuck: do you want to lead, or be led? Badminton champion Saina Nehwal spoke about what discipline actually costs, and filmmaker Imtiaz Ali talked about why filmmakers need to trust their stories more than they trust the algorithm. The rest of Day Two kept pace with the Malhar Thunder Cup, The Final Frame, street theatre at The Great Indian Nukkad, hip-hop at Ghost Beat, poetry at Slam It Down, and a closing stretch of Out of Tools, Jack in the Aux and Now Playing 2016.
Malhar 2026 |
For three days, St. Xavier’s became a campus of many voices: writers pitching like founders, athletes chasing finals, poets on open mics, and speakers who had built careers out of asking hard questions. That was the real spirit of Iridescence, not one story told well, but many stories told at once, each catching the light differently. Malhar 2026 arrived at exactly what it promised, a spectrum, fully lit.
