I was fortunate to be able to attend a part of this year’s Gudiya Sambhrama — Bengaluru’s annual temple festival curated by Heritage Trust, commenced on January 17 and concluded on February 8, 2026. The festival has always been so much more special than a celebration of the arts; it is a conscious return to regarding the temple as a civilizational space and a living repository of culture and religion. Heritage Parampara has, over the years, quietly yet boldly shaped a format that re-centres temples as living cultural institutions, and hubs of learning, aesthetics, sculpture, ecology, and community life.

 

This year’s theme, Svaraloka, offered a profound and reflective conceptual frame to the festival. Described as “tracing the thread of reality from Swara to Īśvara,” it positions sound not merely as aesthetic vibration but as an ontological principle. From the primordial nāda that animates creation to the contemplative silence in which the Divine is intuited, Svaraloka situates music within a metaphysical continuum. It invokes the lineage of sāma gāna, the auditory wisdom of the vedas, and the lived tradition of sangīta as embodied bhakti. In doing so, the theme itself reminds us that sound is not merely performative— it is ritual and a sacred revelation in itself. 

At the Śrī Varaprada Venkateswara Devasthanam (Devagiri Temple) in Banashankari, the festival became a layered experience. We were graced with the music of the Trichur brothers and Prince Rama Varma, along with many talented dancers of Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathak, etc. Alongside music, dance, and discourse, there was Divya Varna — an exhibition featuring beautiful works by 35 different artists — and Vṛkṣaka Vinyāsa, a curated display of sacred plants. The plant and art exhibits were curated along the conceptual arc of the theme of Svaraloka, drawing from the meanings of each of the svaras, their divine embodiments and interpretations to explore resonance across nature, consciousness, and sacrality. Each evening opened with children gathered to play traditional games, organised by Krida, rediscovering traditional Indian board games rooted in the purushārthas, or a program called Hasta Kala – Chant & Paint, where mantra, coloring activity converged in a tactile act of learning.

 


Artists, young and seasoned, came together in shared devotion to perform — their offering of bhakti before Veṅkateśvara. The festivities as a whole were a reminder that temple culture originally integrated the aesthetic and the ecological; the ritual and the artistic; into one organic whole. Bhārata’s civilizational architecture is fundamentally, the social anchored in the sacred. Temples historically generated economies, sustained guilds, shaped pedagogy, and gave artists both patronage and purpose. The dancer was not merely an entertainer; dance was a divine act, a Kaiṅkarya to the Lord. This is an orientation that conferred dignity and ritual purpose that transcended the material — dance especially was not commodified, or stripped of its religious purpose as it sometimes is in contemporary times. 

Gudiya Sambhrama gestures toward such an integrated worldview. By situating artists, scholars, and artisans within temple precincts, it restores context and reinvigorates art’s sacrality as an offering to God. Art regains its metaphysical reference point. Community regains a shared aesthetic language. Nature regains sanctity. Within this framework, nāṭya and saṅgīta are approached as sādhana or yoga — rather than mere performance, as a consecrated art form that refines the inner instrument of the performer on their own spiritual journey while simultaneously elevating the consciousness of the spectator. In smaraṇam, kīrtanam, śravaṇam, both the performer and the spectator are bound in a shared ascent toward the Divine. Through the showcasing of artistic expression within temple precincts, Gudiya Sambhrama, year after year, reaffirms that the journey from svara to Īśvara is veritably, experiential.

 

In a time when culture is often abstracted from its roots and presented as consumable and sometimes alarmingly, as “secular” fragments, divorced from their Hindu roots and purpose, the festival deliberately takes a stand, insisting on wholeness and the inextricability of bhakti in art. Moreover, in Bhārata, culture and art must not be confined to auditoriums or art galleries, but must first and foremost be celebrated in temples. As government control of temples tightens the noose on the use of temple spaces and funds for art, culture, bhakti and dissemination of religious ideas and sacred knowledge, temples have, in modern India, become unilateral in their function — reduced to a largely administrative and ritual bare minimum. Given this context, the feat of organizing this festival is no small feat. That this has been stewarded by the Founder-Trustee and Secretary of Heritage, Vijayalakshmi Vijayakumar, underscores her vision and persistence required to reinvigorate temples as living civilizational spaces.

Learn more about the festival here https://heritageparampara.org/gudiya-sambhrama/

Read our coverage of previous years’ Gudiya Sambhrama here https://www.brhat.in/dhiti/bangalore-s-gudiya-sambhrama-the-temple-festival