Aarey forest to host its first-ever music festival

Workshops in origami, mural painting and board gaming will be held at scheduled times during the festival, and freshly painted murals and graffiti blending urban and adivasi motifs will transform the amphitheatre walls into a shifting forest gallery

MUMBAI: A very different kind of noise is set to echo through the canopy of Aarey forest, long described as Mumbai’s “green lung”, music meant not just to entertain, but to defend the forest itself.

Aarey forest to host its first-ever music festival

For the first time in its history, the forest will host a full-fledged open-air music festival this December. And organisers hope the event will shift how the city imagines both itself and its last remaining forests.

The Aarey Music Festival, they told HT, is an attempt to challenge Mumbai’s familiar self-image as a purely metropolitan sprawl. It also seeks to reframe Aarey not as a perennial flashpoint, but as a living cultural landscape, home to adivasi communities, Tamil-speaking families whose grandparents arrived as labourers in the 1950s, and a forest way of life that continues to nourish the city.

Set inside the amphitheatre at Unit 5 in Aarey Milk Colony, the three-day festival will weave together music, dance, art, craft, play and the slower rhythms of the forest. Performances will range from hip hop to Indian/Western folk fusion, including renditions of Kabir’s mystical verses, alongside traditional songs of the Warli adivasis. Instrument sessions will spotlight the tarpa, the curved horn iconic to Warli culture, and the nadaswaram, the soaring reed instrument central to southern classical traditions. Dance artistes will present Mohiniattam and the Warli tarpa dance.

Workshops in origami, mural painting and board gaming will be held at scheduled times during the festival, and freshly painted murals and graffiti blending urban and adivasi motifs will transform the amphitheatre walls into a shifting forest gallery. In spirit, the festival is a gathering of communities, art forms and memories rooted in the land.

“This is the first time we’re doing something like this in Mumbai,” co-organiser Vasudha Rajeev said. “The theme is community, bringing people together as they connect with nature.”

The organising team mirrors that ethos of connection: members of the Save Aarey movement that protested the Metro car-shed project; volunteers from NGOs; artists; and residents from Aarey’s villages. With free entry and a “donate what you wish” model, the festival has collected around ₹3.5 lakh so far, Rajeev said, adding that they may soon have to pause registrations to avoid overcrowding.

Though timed for the pleasant December weather, the festival arrives at a moment that feels urgent. It comes mere months after public outrage over fresh tree-cutting, new construction inside Aarey, and attempts to challenge the residential rights of several adivasi families. Organisers say the event carries a quiet but firm plea for the forest’s protection- expressed not through banners alone, but through the act of gathering within the forest. Rajeev said such spaces are rare within cities, and when they exist, they demand protection.

For farmer–artist and co-organiser Akash Bhoir, a third-generation resident of Aarey, the festival is also an invitation, a chance for the rest of Mumbai to meet a world largely invisible to it, where ecology and culture are inseparable. “When people arrive at the festival, they will see how the forest draws visitors in, and how performances and interactions with artists offer glimpses of lives deeply woven into the land.” To him, the forest is a source of sustenance, material, memory and responsibility: a place to gather firewood, forage seasonal vegetables, find food even in times of scarcity, build homes, and care for birds and animals.

While the amphitheatre has hosted short cultural programmes in the past, this is the first time it will hold a multi-day festival. For artists, it is also a platform to present themselves to the wider world, both offline and on social media. Rajeev expressed the hope that visitors would come for a peaceful gathering, to enjoy the music and dance, and to understand the forest a little better.

Aarey Music Festival is being held on December 12–14, 2025 at 8am to 9pm. Venue: Open-air Amphitheatre, Unit 5, Aarey Milk Colony