INTRODUCING INDIAN SUMMER FESTIVAL 2026: RAGAS FOR A RUPTURED WORLD

Indian Summer Festival is thrilled to announce our 16th edition’s curatorial theme, Ragas for a Ruptured World, taking place July 9th - 19th, 2026:

Ushering in an era of deepening planetary entanglement is the intense, incoming horizon of a haunting perishability. The combustive forces of life and death colliding without mediation. How to suture the wounds that bind us?

We cannot overwrite the inertias and hangovers of the general, everyday corruption of an unravelling system. All the parables left unsaid. Everybody knows the dice are loaded. 

This year's festival conspires to rekindle dormant solidarities when we live in a time of fire and flood, flesh and blood - enmity as a feature, not a bug. 

Indian Summer Festival 2026 proposes to momentarily call for a reprieve to this abyssal atmosphere and reconfigure an improvisation of intensification, rhythmic intervention and bodily response. We conspire towards a jovial, garrulous puncturing of the claustrophobic loop we unconsciously inhabit. 

Of this we are certain: there remains a necessity for sacred and mysterious lullabies. A poetic investigation as a prelude to assembling a durable ruckus. The space and time for the conjuring of new mythologies. Reinventing the outlines of a grammar for a world we desire.

We will honour our commitment to retain the courage of a clown and hold the line on the sanctity of creative irascibility.

In this time of monsters, come as you are. Build your mafia.  

Come for the kulfi, stay for the tamasha. 

Please stay tuned as we begin announcing our first wave of programming starting April 30th.