Seven Nights in January: The Nishagandhi Dance Festival

For about a week at the end of every January, the amphitheatre in the grounds of Kanakakunnu Palace becomes the best place in Kerala to watch classical dance. The Nishagandhi festival is the state tourism department’s flagship performing-arts event, and unlike a great deal of festival programming aimed at visitors, it is a serious bill watched by a knowledgeable local audience.

How old it actually is

Not very — and this is worth knowing, because heritage settings tend to lend their age to whatever happens inside them. The festival was inaugurated in 1993. The palace around it dates from the reign of Sree Moolam Thirunal, which began in 1885. So you are watching a thirty-odd-year-old festival in a hundred-and-thirty-year-old garden, and the honest version of that is more interesting than a vague “age-old tradition”: this is a deliberate piece of cultural policy from the 1990s that worked, and kept working, for three decades. The associated Nishagandhi Puraskaram award is younger still, instituted in 2013 and first given to the Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer Mrinalini Sarabhai.

What is on the bill

The programme covers the major classical forms rather than specialising: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Manipuri and Kathakali, with dancers invited from across India. A separate Kathakali festival is also staged in the compound. For anyone who has only ever seen one Indian classical form, a week like this is unusually instructive — the differences between Odissi’s tribhangi curves and Bharatanatyam’s squared-off geometry are obvious in a way no written description manages, when you see them on consecutive nights on the same stage.

The open-air setting matters more than it sounds. Kerala in late January is dry and mild after dark, the amphitheatre is banked so sightlines are good from well back, and dance that was developed for temple courtyards and palace grounds behaves differently outdoors than it does in a proscenium theatre. Kathakali in particular, with its lamp-lit conventions and its scale of gesture, belongs under a night sky.

Practical, and honestly hedged

Dates shift year to year within the last week of January, and the year’s programme is announced by Kerala Tourism a few weeks ahead, so check before booking travel around it. Seating is generally first-come; arrive well before the advertised start if you want to be close, and take something to sit on if you end up on the terraces. Evenings run late by sightseeing standards, and the surrounding roads are busy on festival nights, so plan how you are getting back before you settle in.

If your dates do not line up, the compound is not idle for the other fifty-one weeks — its ordinary evening life is covered in The City’s Back Garden, and the palace’s own history is in A Palace Built for Parties. Timings and access are on the Kanakakunnu Palace page.