The Story
OrganizerPercussion, as the tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh likes to point out, is a magnum opus in India, one of the most evolved rhythmic traditions in the world, and yet it rarely gets a festival of its own. The Mahindra Percussion Festival was created to change that: a two-day event in Bengaluru devoted entirely to rhythm, where the drum is not accompaniment but the main event.
Launched in 2023, the festival is part of a broad stable of cultural events built up over the years by India's Mahindra Group, alongside the iconic Mahindra Blues Festival, the Mahindra Kabira Festival in Varanasi, the Mahindra Roots Festival and the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards. Curated by Bickram Ghosh and produced by VG Jairam of Hyperlink Brand Solutions, under the Group's cultural-outreach arm, MPF has been held each March, in recent editions at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, and reached its fourth edition on 7 and 8 March 2026. Its curatorial approach deliberately balances tradition and innovation: each year the programmers identify artists and then build new collaborations, regional showcases and unconventional instrument pairings around them.
The result is a festival where classical maestros, folk renegades, experimental heavyweights and young virtuosos share a stage. Editions have brought together figures such as ghatam maestro Vikku Vinayakram, djembe exponent Taufiq Qureshi, Trilok Gurtu, Aruna Sairam and Ranjit Barot, and large-format productions such as Nada Pravaham, a circle of sound uniting mridangam, tabla and drums, Drums of the East, and Women Who Drum, a collaborative soundscape of women percussionists. In foregrounding percussion as both a historical anchor and a contemporary creative force, and in positioning itself, in the Group's words, as a long-term cultural investment rather than a one-off concert, MPF has established itself as one of India's few sustained platforms dedicated to rhythm.
The Mahindra Percussion Festival is significant as one of India's few festivals dedicated entirely to percussion, a tradition central to Indian music yet rarely given its own stage. By foregrounding drummers and percussionists across classical, folk and contemporary idioms, and by commissioning collaborations that pair maestros with emerging artists and regional styles, it both celebrates and evolves India's rhythmic heritage, keeping traditions relevant through contemporary presentation. As part of the Mahindra Group's cultural stable, it also exemplifies sustained corporate patronage of the arts, treating a festival as a long-term cultural investment. Its focus on inclusion, through projects such as Women Who Drum, and on cross-generational dialogue, adds to its distinctiveness.
In a festival landscape crowded with genre-blending music events, the Mahindra Percussion Festival matters for its singular focus: putting percussion, and the artists who devote their lives to it, centre stage. It gives rhythm-led music a dedicated national platform, nurtures collaboration and new work, and demonstrates how corporate cultural patronage can sustain a specialised art form. For the Atlas, MPF is a distinctive node in mapping India's music festivals and the contemporary presentation of its rhythmic traditions.
