This Basant Kite Flying Festival is celebrated on the 26th and 27th of January every year, to mark the beginning of spring. Basant Mela is the kite flying festival of Pakistan, celebrated mainly in Lahore—the historic capital of Pakistan. The Basant Kite Festival in Lahore is celebrated in spring, and heralds the beginning of theBasant Festival Lahore season. Along with the kites there is also great food, folk art, dancing and music. When you first visit Pakistan’s capital city during the Basant Kite Festival, you will see that the streets are filled with enthusiastic people flying kites everywhere. They fly them on the terrace, on top of roofs, and even standing on vehicles. The sky is dotted with thousands of kites of different shapes and colours.
People fly kites during the night also, which illuminates the sky in a most unique. Once the Basant Kite Flying Festival starts, the Basant Mela market also begins. The Basant Mela market sells various things and holds many of the other festival’s activities. The Basant mela is a very crowded place filled with flowers and fruits, and also sumptuous Punjabi food. There will be the widest variety of kebabs to taste at the Basant Kite Festival, as well as puppet shows, horse dancing, folk dancing, handicrafts and arts.
Pakistan has a wide variety of cuisines, and when you visit Lahore for the Basant Kite Festival, you really have to indulge in the amazing food. This is really no place for a diet.
In the pre-partitioned Punjab, especially Lahore–celebrated the basant mela Panchami by flying kites. Muslims of Punjab also celebrated the Basant although it was considered as a local (Hindu or folk) festival. The younger Muslim folk did participate in kite flying as an event. At the time of partition in 1947, population of Lahore city was almost equally divided between Muslims (52%) and Hindus/Sikh (48%). By the end of September 1947, almost all the Hindus had left West Punjab/Lahore for India, but their tradition of Basant remained; and even today Lahore take pride in basant mela and fly kites from their rooftops with the same enthusiasm.
Being the historic capital of Punjab there is no other place where basant mela is celebrated with as much vigour and enthusiasm as the ancient city of Lahore. Although traditionally it was a festivel confined to the old-walled city it has spread all through out the city
With the advent of spring, skies of Lahore are resplendent with all types and sizes of kites. The Lahorites participate in kite flying competitions to herald the spring. basant mela is not only a kite flying event, but a cultural festival of traditional food, dresses, dances and music.
