December in India is meant to be a month of movement. Artists, writers, musicians, curators, collectors, students, and the culturally curious pack their bags and chart ambitious itineraries across the country. Kochi, Chennai, Goa, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad each offer their own version of immersion. This year, however, the season began with an unanticipated rupture. As flight cancellations mounted and schedules collapsed amid the ongoing IndiGo disruption, airports turned into spaces of anxious waiting rather than transit. People missed openings, rehearsals, lectures, and long-planned journeys. The irony was unmistakable: just as India's cultural calendar reached its most expansive moment, the infrastructure that supports it faltered.
And yet, culture moved ahead anyway.
For all the chaos in the air, December remains India's most concentrated period of artistic energy. Over the past decade, what was once a loosely connected set of seasonal events has become a dense, national ecosystem of festivals. At its centre stands the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which has fundamentally altered the trajectory of contemporary art in India since its inception in 2012. More than an exhibition, the Biennale has functioned as a corrective to metropolitan centralisation, to market-driven visibility, and to the idea that serious contemporary art must exist only within white-cube institutions.
Set against Kochi's layered port history, the Biennale's use of colonial godowns, spice warehouses, and waterfront structures has always been inseparable from its curatorial imagination. Each edition builds on the idea that art is not merely displayed but encountered through walking, waiting, lingering, and returning. The current edition, inaugurated last weekend, continues that lineage, foregrounding performance, process, and the body as sites of knowledge. Rather than presenting finished objects alone, it emphasises duration, labour, and transformation, echoing a broader global turn in contemporary art toward lived experience and temporality.
The Biennale's importance also lies in how it situates Indian art within a global conversation without flattening local specificity. Alongside internationally recognised practitioners—many associated with performance, socially engaged practice, and site-responsive installation—Indian artists across generations occupy equal ground. Painting, video, textile, sound, archival research, and live action coexist, reflecting the plural conditions under which art is made today. The parallel programmes—the Students' Biennale, education initiatives, talks, and workshops—extend the exhibition beyond spectatorship, reinforcing Kochi's role not just as a destination but as a pedagogical space.
From Kochi, the cultural map fans out. In Chennai, December brings the Madras Music Season, a phenomenon that predates most contemporary festivals and remains one of the most rigorous examples of cultural continuity in the country. For over a century, the city's sabhas have sustained Carnatic music through an intricate ecosystem of patronage and public devotion. What makes Chennai particularly compelling today is the growing dialogue between this classical tradition and contemporary practice. The Madras Art Weekend, now an established fixture, inserts visual art, design, and interdisciplinary work into a city often defined externally by classicism, suggesting that tradition here is not static but adaptive.
Meanwhile, Goa's Serendipity Arts Festival offers a different proposition altogether. Less anchored to a single discipline, it reflects a curatorial philosophy rooted in permeability. Art, craft, food, performance, and public programming bleed into one another, often staged in ways that collapse the distance between practitioner and audience. Odisha's Konark Dance Festival, unfolding against the monumental Sun Temple, offers yet another register where classical forms converse directly with architectural time, reminding audiences that India's festival culture did not begin with the contemporary moment.
Together, these festivals have reshaped how culture circulates in India. They generate tourism, activate heritage spaces, and create short but intense cultural economies. Cafés fill, local transport thrives, artisans and technicians find work, and cities briefly reimagine themselves as hosts rather than backdrops. For young audiences especially, festivals function as entry points to places where art feels accessible, social, and immediate rather than remote or intimidating.
But, abundance has its consequences. The sheer density of December's calendar produces inevitable strain. Audiences move quickly, often skimming rather than settling. Artists and curators operate under relentless deadlines, travelling constantly, producing continuously, with little room for rest or reflection. Smaller, quieter initiatives risk being overshadowed by large, branded events. For residents of host cities, festivals can bring disruption as much as delight—rising prices, congestion, and the feeling of living temporarily inside someone else's spectacle.
The recent travel chaos only sharpened these tensions. When mobility becomes unreliable, participation narrows. Cultural access begins to favour those with flexibility, resources, and proximity. The dream of a truly national cultural circuit is revealed to be fragile, dependent on systems that are not yet built to support it.
And yet, despite the delays and diversions, something persists. People still arrive late, rerouted, exhausted. Exhibitions open. Concerts begin. Performances unfold to half-full halls and deeply attentive rooms. In the midst of infrastructural failure, the impulse to gather around art feels almost defiant.
Perhaps, that is the enduring lesson of December's festival season. It exposes both the strength and the vulnerability of India's cultural moment. It shows how much has been built and how much still needs care. It reminds us that culture is not an accessory to urban life but a form of civic infrastructure in itself, deserving of planning, patience, and protection.
Because culture, unlike flights, rarely gets cancelled, even in a world where people so often do.