If you’re among the kind who whines that your favourite artist never tours India, there are a few reasons to reconsider your chagrin. Between manganiyars at Rajasthan’s desert forts, a bluesy Shillong-born band at Mumbai’s legacy studios, and Berlin house reverberating through Bengaluru’s solar-powered fields, we’ve got more on our plate than we can handle; the country’s live music calendar is booked and busy. The real music-obsessed, accustomed to long-haul flights chasing artists abroad, might certainly appreciate the hop, skip and jump to Indian cities and villages instead. These festivals put homegrown music front and centre, but they’re not shy about inviting outsiders to the party. In any case, neither the Indian nor the international acts will ever be household names, and half the fun is in discovering the underground artists you’ll be name-dropping at dinner parties for weeks after the show wraps. Here are 9 music festivals in India for the melomaniacs to keep an eye on.
Ziro Festival of Music, Ziro Valley, Arunachal Pradesh
25-28 September 2025
A music gig at a past edition Ziro Festival of MusicZiro Festival of Music
Ziro Festival of MusicZiro Festival of Music
In late September, the scenic Ziro valley will come alive with musical artists from across India and attendees swaying to their tunes. The scenic location is the perfect place to connect with nature, revive the body, mind and soul, and feel alive. Spiel aside, though, it really is one of the most beautiful valleys in the country, with layered rice fields and impossibly blue skies, surrounded by a ring of deep green forests and the towering jagged Eastern Himalayan range in the distance. In the middle of all of this is one of the nicest music festivals in India. Ziro Festival of Music is also one of the few eco-friendly music festivals in the country—the infrastructure and stages are built almost entirely of locally sourced bamboo and the hosts are none other than members of the local Apatani tribe, who are known for their utmost respect for nature. It began in 2012 and should be considered as a template for all other outdoor music festivals in India. There is amazing music from across the country, cultural events from the region, delicious food and tons of other outdoor activities, including yoga and meditation sessions, dance workshops and more to partake in. The music festival will feature over 40 bands and music acts on stage. Expect everything from folk and classical to electronica, pop, jazz, rock, rap and blues. While it does feature bands from across India, there is an emphasis on bands from within the region. If you’re attending Ziro, it’s best to be open to discovering new music and indie artists you may never have heard of before. The performances will take place across two stages—the Danyi Stage (folk, classical, jazz and singer-songwriters) and the Pwlo stage (independent rock and pop), the former, a great spot to enjoy the music while lying on picnic blankets in the grass. — Ambika Vishwanath and Hoshner Reporter
Rajasthan International Folk Festival, Jodhpur, Rajasthan
2-6 October 2025
Jodhpur RIFF
Sharad Purnima, the brightest moon of the year, rises over Mehrangarh Fort each October and throws its red sandstone ramparts into silver relief, glowing over the Blue City. That lunar calendar date is also when the Rajasthan International Folk Festival opens, a five-day affair that has built its 18-year reputation on pairing Marwar’s deep-rooted folk traditions with music from far-flung corners of the globe. This year’s line-up has artists flying in from Bhutan, Switzerland, Uzbekistan, Portugal, Finland and half a dozen more countries, but the anchor will always be the state that hosts them: Manganiyar singers carrying centuries of repertoire, Langas on sindhi sarangis, percussionists whose khartals click faster than a metronome. Performances are staged across the fort’s terraces and courtyards, from sunrise ragas to midnight sets where a hereditary bard might find himself bracketed with a European jazz quartet. RIFF’s strength lies in the way it treats these traditions, not as archival, but contemporary, constantly dialoguing with one another. The programme shifts between formal concerts and informal sessions, but the effect is cumulative: by the end, you’ve heard how a dhol can hold its own against an electric bass, or how a folk song in Marwari can sit comfortably beside fado. It’s Rajasthan’s sounds at its most dynamic, and most global.
Gaia Music Festival, Kullu, Himachal Pradesh
4-5 October 2025
Gaia Music Festival
Gaia Music Festival
At Neeralaya, a riverside estate outside Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, Gaia sets up three distinct stages: one pressed into a forest grove, another on the Beas’s edge, and a third wired into a stone cavern for late-night electronic sets. Over two days and 32 hours of programming, the curation swerves from live percussion collectives to downtempo producers to vocalists working across folk traditions, drawing in artists from India and abroad. The site is stitched through with parallel wellness and recreational activities like yoga, art therapy and sound healing. An art village curated with Nrtya scatters installations and live work across the stone and forest, making the grounds feel handmade and provisional. The bazaar pulls in small-batch makers from across India including potters, weavers and independent labels. Gaia’s organisers keep the production frugal with resources: stages and art are built from reclaimed material, no single-use plastic is permitted, and composting systems run on site. The result is a festival that feels less mass-produced, its scale closer to an extended community gathering than a commercial circuit event.
Jazz Weekender, Delhi
11-12 October 2025
Jazz Weekender
Jazz Weekender
The fourth edition of Jazz Weekender returns to 1AQ in Mehrauli, its lawn shaded by a sprawling banyan tree with Qutub Minar just beyond. Over two days, the festival draws about 3,000 people for a line-up that treats jazz as a wide-open form, its vibe peculiarly like an intimate backyard party, just a smidge more elaborate. Past editions have paired R&B vocalists with funk bands, hip-hop producers with Afro-jazz collectives, and straight-ahead swing with experimental electronics. International names such as Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange, Tara Lily and Saskia Laroo have shared the bill with Indian acts including Rhythm Shaw and Gino Banks, T.ill Apes and The Revisit Project. Between performances, food counters, art installations and stalls from small designers keep the grounds busy. By night, the banyan tree becomes the unofficial backdrop, its branches lit and arching over the audience as the final sets close out.
Hornbill Music Festival, Kisama, Nagaland
1-10 December 2025
Held at Kisama’s Naga Heritage Village, the Hornbill Music Festival runs alongside the state-organised Hornbill Festival every year. Nagaland’s Cultural and Tourism department brings together all the tribes across the north eastern state to participate, performing their traditional songs, dances and rituals. The festival borrows its moniker from the hornbill, a bird revered by the tribes and central to local folklore; motifs of the bird appear in carved sculptures, woven textiles and ceremonial masks across the site. The music line-up combines international acts with the likes of Japan’s Drum Tao and Yosuke Irie, Wales’ Mari Mathias and Gareth Bonello, and Peru’s Estampas del Perú, with indigenous performers including the Tetseo Sisters, Alobo Naga and the Nagaland Madrigal Singers. Performances take place on stages integrated with traditional morungs and open courtyards. Aside from the main events, attendees will also encounter craft stalls, flower shows and tribal games, making the festival both a music event and a showcase of Nagaland’s cultural traditions.
Echoes of Earth, Bengaluru, Karnataka
13-14 December 2025
Echoes of Earth
Echoes of Earth
Bengaluru’s Echoes of Earth calls itself India’s “greenest music festival” since its launch in 2016, and it certainly makes good on the claim. The event runs on solar energy, eliminates single-use plastic and commissions stages from scrap metal, discarded wood and e-waste. Gigantic art installations are pieced together with obsolete, repurposed materials, the festival’s entire design language becoming inseparable from its ethos of ecological inventiveness. The line-up pulls from across genres and continents; previous editions have swung from Malian desert blues and Berlin house to homegrown jazz and funk outfits. The programming keeps its focus on artists you won’t necessarily catch at India’s bigger commercial festivals, creating a testing ground for new sounds in front of an open crowd. Every year’s edition is built around a specific ecological theme (its most recent one in 2024, on the effect of changing seasons) which dictates the music, as well as talks, workshops and the very look of the grounds.
Madras Music Season, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Date to be announced – typically December
What began as a small germ of an idea in 1927, adjunct to the All India Music Conference has now grown into the nine-week Madras Music Season—better known as Margazhi among locals. Turning Chennai’s sabhas into one of the busiest music circuits in the world, the festival hosts thousands of performers and audiences from across India and its diaspora. At its core is Carnatic music, with stalwarts alongside younger prodigies performing daily kutcheris in performance venues around Mylapore, Triplicane and George Town. But the calendar has quickly stretched far beyond classical music, as dance recitals and theatre joined the line-up, and parallel experiments like open mics and livestreams to audiences outside Chennai have helped to shake up a tradition often accused of being too insular. Part of the festival’s appeal is off-stage too at the canteens run by sabhas, where audiences sneak off to for steaming rasam, bondas and filter coffee between back-to-back shows. For the uninitiated and the purists alike, this is one of the most exciting ways to experience Chennai with its best foot forward.
Mahindra Blues Festival, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Dates to be announced – typically February
For a weekend each February, Bandra’s 70-year-old Mehboob Studios stops being a Bollywood film set and starts sounding like downtown Chicago. For 13 years, the Mahindra Blues Festival has been pulling guitar heroes, harmonica players, and husky-voiced singers to Mumbai, building itself into the largest blues festival in Asia. The audience is a mix of purists who can place every riff on a family tree and first-timers who just want the thrill of live music done big. The venue’s old soundstages and courtyards turn the space into a lived-in backlot rather than a formal concert hall, crowds drifting out between sets for food stalls and single malts before returning for marquee acts. The festival has made space for a lot more than just imported talent. Its Band Hunt has unearthed Indian musicians who now share billing with international stars, and generally, the festival itself has consistently nurtured homegrown voices who’ve grown into the country’s biggest blues performers—among them Tipriti Kharbangar (of the Meghalayan band, Soulmate) and Kanchan Daniel & the Beards. The festival’s signature is the All-Star Jam on closing night, a holdover from the early years when Buddy Guy summoned every act back on stage for a final showdown. The tradition has continued, creating a kind of onstage camaraderie that’s rare at festivals; musicians who might never share a stage elsewhere end up riffing off one another in a final, raucous set. What began in Mumbai has since grown global—Mahindra Blues Chicago is held twice a year at Guy’s own club, tying the festival back to the city where the modern blues was born.
Sacred Spirit Festival, Jodhpur, Rajasthan
Date to be announced – typically February
Mehrangarh Fort has become something of a lucky charm for music: first hosting RIFF each October, then four months later welcoming Sacred Spirit Festival. The latter foregrounds hands-on musical exchange skills and repertoires pass from parents to children, teachers to their prodigal students, and visiting artists to local musicians (and vice versa). The music performed is primarily a medley of Rajasthani folk and sufi producing combinations that will only exist here. Unlike other festivals, these shows begin early in the morning and go on until after the sun sets, allowing each collaboration room and time to develop. The festival also stages Puliyattam, the tiger dance of the Adivasi tribes. Under the patronage of His Highness Maharaja Gajsingh II, craft, history, and environment are nurtured to converge on the fort grounds where audiences have encounters with instruments, rhythms, and forms that are specific to Marwar, yet moulded by the wider world. The 16th edition ran for three days in February this year, when Jodhpur was at its most pleasant weather.
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