Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
It is Narada Gana Sabha Isai Natya Nataka Vizha 2025 Inauguration Day on 13th Dec, 2025 at 17.30 hrs. Well, typically the hall is half filled with well wishers. A search for the canteen leads to the basement, newly commissioned this year. The offerings, one trusts, remain a familiar mix of old favourites and cautious novelties. As one waits, thoughts meander across several terrains, demanding to be woven into this piece.
Between November 2024 and January 2025, the familiar alchemy unfolded once again in the humid, jasmine-scented neighbourhoods of Mylapore and T. Nagar. Chennai’s Margazhi Mahotsav returned in all its excessive, exhilarating glory. What is casually called a festival is, in truth, a cultural phenomenon—simultaneous, sprawling, unapologetically intense—where music is not scheduled around life, but life around music.
At least a dozen major sabhas anchored the season: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan from November 22 to December 12, the Music Academy’s formidable 98th Annual Conference and Concerts, and the bustling circuits of Krishna Gana Sabha, Bharat Kalachar, Parthasarathy Swami Sabha and Sri Thyaga Brahma Gana Sabha. Alongside them thrived Charsur, Naada Inbam, Sunaadalahari and others. All told, some 10 to 13 sabhas functioned in parallel, creating an overlapping soundscape that left rasikas spoilt, exhausted and grateful in equal measure.
It is fashionable to grumble that sabhas ought to stagger performances across the year, instead of compressing everything into Margazhi. The idea is elegant, even idealistic. Yet it is utterly impractical. Margazhi has become sacred time—ritualised, anticipated, magnetic. The very simultaneity that appears chaotic is its defining strength. It is this concentrated abundance that has earned Chennai its recognition as a UNESCO Creative City for music. To dilute Margazhi would be to misunderstand its soul. Better to surrender to it, as generations have, beginning each dawn at 03.30 a.m., when Margazhi itself announces the day with devotion rather than alarm clocks.
Even conservative arithmetic astonishes. With each sabha hosting 30 to 100 concerts over six weeks—many far more—the season easily accounted for 600 to 900 performances, with broader estimates placing the total near 1,500. Each concert brought together five to eight performers: vocalists, violinists, mandolin and flute players, percussionists of every stripe. Across the season, between 4,000 and 7,000 artistes likely appeared on stage, excluding the steadfast tambura artistes whose quiet constancy undergirded it all.
Audiences were no less prolific. Halls seating 300 filled and refilled several times a day. Even allowing for repeat attendance, an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 rasikas passed through the season, numbers swelling during Christmas and the New Year, when devotion and vacation converged.
No Margazhi account is complete without the canteens. In 2024–25, whispers suggested food revenues outpaced ticket sales. With dozens to nearly 200 dishes on offer—idlis, vadas, sambars of every temperament, biryanis, sweets and indomitable filter coffee—the season doubled as a culinary carnival. Veteran caterers, including Mountbatten Mani Iyer Catering, fed tens of thousands daily.
As November 2025 to January 2026 approaches, expectations rise further: 800 to 1,200 concerts, 5,000 to 8,000 performers, and audiences possibly exceeding 300,000. Margazhi remains Chennai’s great annual surrender—to sound, taste, memory and repetition. Let it unfold as it always has. Some traditions are not meant to be optimised, only lived.
