Serendipity’s decade shift, and what to expect at the arts festival this year

Sunil Kant Munjal remembers the moment precisely. During Serendipity Arts Festival’s (SAF) 2024 edition, he watched a local fisherman’s family spend an entire afternoon at Thukral & Tagra’s Nafrat/Parvah installation, where visitors exchanged packages of hate for acts of care, such as a haircut. The grandmother, who had never attended an “art event” before, told him it reminded her of communal rituals from her village. “That’s when you realise art isn’t alien to anyone,” Munjal, SAF’s founder-patron, reflects. “It’s the contexts we create that either invite or exclude.”

Ten years after it first began as a fairly outré and small cultural gathering, Serendipity Arts Festival isn’t fringe any more — it’s an institution. When Munjal and his team launched Serendipity in 2016, sceptics questioned whether a free, large-scale interdisciplinary platform could sustain itself while maintaining artistic integrity. The answer has been emphatic. The festival has expanded from eight venues and 40 projects to 22 venues presenting over 250 multidisciplinary projects across eight disciplines: visual arts, theatre, music, dance, culinary arts, craft, photography, and accessibility programming. More than 3,500 artists have participated over the decade.

Shaping memories

Every December, Panjim transforms into a cultural wonderland. Heritage buildings become galleries. Waterfront promenades host performances. Government schools send children on guided tours who later confidently explain contemporary installations to their parents. And chances are that everyone who has visited any of these sites has their own unique memory, their own special takeaway.

“I have found myself in Goa every winter since the first edition of the festival,” says permaculture teacher and current Camurlim resident Simrit Malhi. “I especially enjoyed the art and music installations on the oil barge when (Goa-based collective) HH Art Spaces were curators in 2017, and last year, I enjoyed the food talk on insects by Tansha Vohra, I try to catch the River Raag music performance every year — it is gorgeous sailing down the Mandovi at sunset listening to music.” 

Musician Bickram Ghosh, who curates the River Raag performances, describes stumbling out of a Carnatic Bharatanatyam concert in 2022, only to find the Kolkata outfit Sanjay Mandal and Group and street musicians playing pipes and cans 50 paces away. “There is synchronicity between art forms which cues very easily at Serendipity,” says Ghosh. “That is the beauty.”

For chef Thomas Zacharias, one of the curators of this year’s culinary arts programming, the festival’s magic lies in how “it’s expanded the notions of what art can be” — bringing together food, craft, theatre, music, and dance in ways that give people “permission to slow down, to participate, to engage, to be surprised”. 

On the charts

This year’s edition represents the festival’s most ambitious programming yet, with over 35 curators, many of whom have been associated with it in the past, such as the actor Lilette Dubey and chef Manu Chandra, and including names such as L. N. Tallur, Rahab Allana and Rajeev Sethi.

> Zakir Hussain special: the festival will honour the tabla maestro with a tribute concert. 

> New venues: a barge at Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa and Casa San Antonio in Fontainhas for immersive theatrical dining.

> Book launch: Munjal’s book, ‘Table for Four’, a culinary exploration of India along with his Doon school set, will be released.

> Thomas Zacharias’ ‘What Does Loss Taste Like?’: an immersive installation set in 2100 exploring climate collapse through five interconnected rooms where visitors taste mango as gelatin cubes and encounter descendants who are part-human, part-android. “We wanted people to experience tangibly the impending feeling of loss,” he explains, “but also the agency we have in doing something about it.”

“Our most significant achievement has been proving that a multidisciplinary arts festival can be both artistically uncompromising and deeply accessible,” says Munjal, whose family’s philanthropy extends from the performing arts centre in Ludhiana that opened in 1999, to the forthcoming Brij cultural centre in Delhi. For him, Serendipity represents a conviction that “culture isn’t decorative, it’s foundational to how we understand ourselves and each other”.

Food and craft installations

Beyond building on bold, sometimes risky curation and programming, the culinary arts segment has become its own beast, unlike anything ever seen in India, and mirroring the ambitions of events such as the Mad Symposium in Copenhagen. Food historian Odette Mascarenhas will present The Culinary Odyssey of Goa at the Art Park, featuring five traditional kitchens representing different Goan communities. Through it, she will be asserting that food deserves the same curatorial attention as painting or dance. “The kitchens aren’t demonstrations,” Munjal explains. “They’re active cultural exchanges where recipe becomes narrative and taste becomes memory.”

Craft interventions at Azad Maidan also exemplify this vision. Master weavers from Maheshwar work alongside contemporary designers; Kashmiri artisan workshops become living installations. “We’re saying that craft isn’t heritage to be preserved in amber,” says Munjal. “It’s living knowledge.”

According to an internal impact assessment report in 2018, 84% of local Goan residents (who made up 55% of the 630 audience members, besides 200 stakeholders and 80 team and volunteer members surveyed), said “they would encourage their children to take up arts as a career after the ‘Serendipity Experience’”. Munjal sees this as proof that “creative communities aren’t built top-down through curriculum mandates; they’re built through lived experience and cultural permission.”

Expansion plans

The festival now visits Birmingham, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Varanasi, Chennai, Gurugram, Dubai and Paris before culminating in Goa.

Whose heritage gets highlighted?

There is a more tangible impact on the city that Serendipity has made its home. The festival has actively restored heritage buildings, including the Adil Shah Palace, Old GMC Building, Directorate of Accounts and Excise Building. Many people we spoke with believe that the festival has repositioned Goa — itself in transition between the raver’s terra nullius and the devout’s sanctuary — into a viable cultural destination. The economic impact, the SAF team say, extends through employment creation and support for the local creative community. 

But not everyone is buying it. Joanna Lobo, a Goa-born journalist who has attended multiple editions, says: “My biggest issue with Serendipity is I don’t find too much Goan representation there.” While acknowledging the festival’s importance and past programming that had local representation, Lobo argues that after 10 years in Goa, there should be more of it and featured prominently. “You are holding it in our State,” she says. “Teach people about our culture, our musical and dance forms, our artists.” 

She also notes the festival’s evolution from entirely free programming to ticketed workshops during weekdays, and paid vendor stalls at Nagalli Hills — the main stage for big musical performances. These, she believes, muddies the framework when it comes to access. “When you make it so prohibitively expensive, it’s only the bigger brands and bigger restaurants who can afford to put up a stall.”

Beyond accessibility

The festival provides ramps, tactile Braille artworks, sign language interpreters, and Indian Sign Language poetry performances as core design principles, not afterthoughts.

Word of mouth has it that the vendor stalls cost anywhere between ₹10,000 and ₹15,000 per night at the 10-day festival. (It might also be worth noting that entry to the festival remains free, curators receive a small honorarium, says Zacharias, and to Malhi’s knowledge, artists aren’t paid.) “It isn’t a place for small businesses,” agrees Malhi. “But for artists, absolutely.” Megha Mahindru, editor of The Nod magazine and a resident of Siolim since 2019, observes that ticketing becomes a problem at any fest — be it IFFI Goa now or MAMI Mumbai years ago. “But here, even if you woke up too late to register, there’s still plenty to see for free,” she says.

The question of permanence

The matter of representation reveals a broader question about festivals rooted in place: how do you balance global artistic ambition with local representation? Serve international audiences while centring local communities? It also underlines a different kind of tension brewing along the Arabian Sea coastline: whose Goa are we talking about?

Perhaps more immediately: if Serendipity creates its own geography for a week or so each year, and that map vanishes come Christmas, where is this cultural melting pot to endure? Munjal believes culture needs both: to breathe in open air and four walls to preserve it. “Yes, culture needs permanence — it needs institutions, archives, training centres, physical spaces where knowledge is preserved, transmitted and built upon,” he says. That’s why his foundation is building The Brij in Delhi: an eight-acre cultural centre with a museum, academy, gallery, library, stepwell gallery, arena, theatre, black box, crafts centre and an artisanal village, all 100% accessible to differently-abled visitors. “But culture also needs to be experienced in unexpected places, to transform entire cities into living canvases,” he continues. “The magic of the festival is precisely that it’s ephemeral yet recurring.”

The Brij and Serendipity are meant to function as complementary ecosystems. The Brij will provide year-round infrastructure for deep research, education and preservation. Serendipity provides public celebration, experimentation and democratic access. “Think of Serendipity as the public face,” explains festival director Smriti Rajgarhia, “and The Brij as the engine room. Together, they create a complete ecosystem from learning to livelihood, from experimentation to sustainability.” But why not build The Brij in Goa? “Goa already has something permanent — the festival itself,” Munjal argues.

Ghosh, who orchestrated the festival finale last year — a concert titled Three Divas, featuring Shubha Mudgal, Usha Uthup and Aruna Sairam, that, he says, drew over 20,000 people — has always had an expansive vision for Serendipity: a space where classical tradition swirls with fusion, where rap meets the nine rasas, where the fading surbahar (or bass sitar), sarangi and harmonium encounter iPad musicians (in ‘Fading Traditions, Emerging Sounds’). “Cultures do not need to live in isolation,” he insists. “If you are smart enough, you can create bridges. And those bridges are very important for humanity because then we start identifying with the other.”

He offers a final metaphor: “Goa’s proximity to the ocean is key. You look at it, and you can’t help but think: every kind of species lives inside the ocean, and it has such harmony. That is what Goa gives Serendipity and Serendipity gives Goa.”

The Mumbai-based independent journalist writes on culture, lifestyle and technology.