New Delhi, 2 September 2025: The KNMA Festival returns to Sunder Nursery, this time with a focus on music, from October 9 to 12, 2025. Titled “Voices of Diversity”, the four-day festival celebrates the vast and varied sonic landscape of India. This year’s edition is curated by renowned musician and writer, T.M. Krishna, whose thought-provoking practice continues to shape conversations on art, identity, and the ethics of listening. Presenting music as a medium of dialogue between tradition and innovation, the marginalized and mainstream, and memory and aspiration, the festival aims to create a platform for artists from diverse cultural, geographical and linguistic expressions. Their performances embody a commitment to openness and a belief in music’s power to encourage conversations and connections. In doing so, the festival becomes an invitation to listen deeply, and to receive differences with compassion.
This powerful multi-day festival weaves together music, identity, and resistance from across India, and journeys through traditional folk forms, contemporary hip-hop, regional musical traditions, classical instruments in contemporary settings and rhythms from marginalized communities. The curator envisions a celebration where the joy of music opens up possibilities for solidarity, empathy, and shared human experiences. This spirit of openness and exchange is also reflected in KNMA’s ongoing collaboration with Sunder Nursery, where “Voices of Diversity” unfolds. Set against the backdrop of this historic site, the festival transforms the gardens into a space of shared cultural experience. Here, music becomes part of the everyday, where an ordinary stroll might lead to a moment of discovery, connection, or quiet reflection. These encounters embody KNMA’s vision of making art accessible and engaging, extending beyond the walls of the museum into the heart of the city and into the lives of its people.
Artist lineup and schedule will be announced soon.
About TM Krishna
Thodur Madabusi Krishna is one of the pre-eminent vocalists in the rigorous Carnatic tradition of India’s classical music. His tutelage is in this form, that originated in the southern peninsula of the sub-continent nearly five hundred years ago. His training has been under the distinguished gurus B. Seetharama Sarma, Chengalpet Ranganathan and Semmangudi Srinivasier, placing him in the highest reaches of that time-honored system. He has, at the same time, come to occupy a markedly distinct place in the musical universe for the stunning individuality of his renditions, distinguished for an inner luminosity and a passionate intensity that are all his own. His concert stage, whether in his hometown of Chennai or anywhere else in the world, is wholly classical but his concert practice is uncompromisingly his own. As a public intellectual, Krishna speaks and writes about issues affecting the human condition and about matters cultural. His path-breaking book A Southern Music – The Karnatik Story, published by Harper Collins in 2013, was a first-of-its-kind philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political exploration of Carnatic music. For this, he was awarded the 2014 Tata Literature Award for Best First Book in the non-fiction category. His latest book Sebastian and Sons, published by Context in 2020, traces the history of the mrdangam-maker and the mrdangam over the past century. It received the Tata Lit Live Award for the Best Non-Fiction book for the year 2020.
About KNMA
Established through the initiative of avid art collector Kiran Nadar, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opened to the public in January 2010 as India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent. KNMA is a non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. It seeks to foster a dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, and public programs. Committed to institutional collaborations and artist support networks, KNMA actively engages with
diverse audiences through its wide-ranging programming. The museum’s ever-expanding collection of over 15,000 artworks from South Asia features some of the most significant modernist and contemporary works. Now broadening its scope to include classical, folk, and tribal art, the collection spans
historical trajectories from the 3rd century BCE to 20th-century Indian art, alongside the experimental practices of young contemporaries.
In the coming three to four years, KNMA is set to evolve into a landmark cultural destination with a new location, an expansive 100,000-square-meter (over 1 million square feet) architectural marvel, near the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi. It will feature multiple exhibition spaces, auditoriums, an archive centre, a library, restaurants, and a members’ room. Strengthening its role as a cultural epicenter, this expansion will further KNMA’s mission to be a vibrant hub for visual and performing arts, fostering artistic innovation and cultural dialogue.
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