Ragini Festival

The 2023 edition of Rāginī Festival offers a month-long, cross-oceanic immersion into folk, classical, and contemporary art of the Indies, both East and West. This year, Rāginī Festival takes inspiration from the term “baithak”, meaning “sitting down”, that describes a type of sitting together with the intention of creating closeness between listener and performer in a communal salon or ”mehfil” setting essential to South Asian classical music. ‘Baithak’ has also become a Caribbean Hindustani term, “Baithak Gana”, which has also come to define “local classical” Indo-Caribbean folk singing that traveled ancestrally to the West Indies.

Seeking to build threads of connection and also to acknowledge rifts in diasporic identity, Brooklyn Raga Massive’s Rāginī Festival journeys through expressions of Surinamese baithak ghana chanting, Trinidadian Bhojpuri folk song, Queer “Coolitude’‘ poetics, and South Asian classical music. Taking place across the city in spaces such as Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum, and Joe’s Pub, Rāginī Festival will turn New York’s premier venues into intimate gathering spaces for poetry, music, dance, and visual arts. Join artists Barkha Patel, Natie, Renluka Maharaj, Lasya, Liany Mateo, Radikha Samson, Roshni Samlal, Shailesh Shankar, Satya Maraj, Pratima Doobay, DJ Cardamami, DJ offering rain, Shivanee Ramlochan, and more as they reach across oceans of time to find each other in song.