Invitation - Bangalore Love Festival 2025

[Manavi Atri]

Bangalore Love Festival 2025

A Celebration of Love and Resistance through Music, Poetry, Performance, and Dialogue

Dear Friends,

In a time when social harmony is increasingly under threat, and hate manifests in troubling ways, we turn to the transformative power of art. As artists, activists, thinkers, musicians, and performers, our response is to create a literature of love—one that embodies humanity, resilience, and connection.

We do this work because we love—deeply and fiercely. Our love for ourselves, our communities, and the world makes us more human, vibrant, and alive.

A group of friends came together with the belief that nothing can substitute art, and that the politics of love is the most powerful antidote to hate. With this conviction, we are thrilled to present the Bangalore Love Festival 2025—our first edition. While small in scale, it is boundless in imagination, care, and intensity.

This festival brings together music, literature, panel discussions, performances, and conversations, all centered around love, healing, and solidarity between movements.

Festival Highlights

1. Songs of Resistance – A powerful evening featuring a Ondede rangatanda - a theatre team presenting songs of love and resistance.  

2. Special Lecture by Arvind Narrain – Lawyer and writer Mr. Arvind Narrain will speak on Love and the Constitution, exploring Babasaheb Ambedkar’s visionary framework as the true safeguard for all, across both mainstream and marginalized spaces.

3. Panel Discussions –

·  Writers, publishers, thinkers, and critics will discuss the voices and choices shaping Karnataka’s present and future.

·  A special panel will bring together representatives from different movements to explore solidarity and how love manifests as a driving force across struggles.

4. Kashmiri Sufi Music Evening – An immersive experience in Sufi traditions, healing, and social harmony.

5. Kavi goshti - Twenty poets whose work is really boundary pushing are coming together to share poetry on love, desire, and resistance.

6. Bikkattu (Play) – A specially devised play tracing the histories, desires, and politics of queer and trans communities, unfolding through the lives of three activists who come together to tell a story of love, longing, and human connection.

The Bangalore Love Festival 2025 is mainly supported by the Mariwala Health Initiative, We have a great camaraderie and collaboration of Maraa, Alternative Law Forum. This festival is Organised by Space for dreams. 

We warmly invite you to be part of this first edition of the Bangalore Love Festival 2025—a celebration of love as resistance, love as healing, and love as the force that binds us all.

With love and solidarity,
Dadapeer Jyman, Akkai Padmashali, Rumi Harish, Soumya A

(Festival curators)