Four days in Arunachal where the music has a valley
What the Ziro Festival of Music is really like — bamboo stages, Apatani rice fields, permits, long roads — from a curator who has done it twice.
At around 2 a.m. on my first night at Magnetic Fields, I found myself in a queue for chai behind a man in a full sherwani and silver sneakers, in a 17th-century palace courtyard in rural Shekhawati, while somewhere beyond the ramparts a sunrise stage was being tuned for a set that would not start for four hours. The chai cost thirty rupees. The moment was priceless and also about 6°C.
That temperature is the first thing I tell anyone who books this festival through us, so let me deal with the obvious question early.
What is Magnetic Fields and why is it held in a palace?
Magnetic Fields is a boutique music and arts festival held each December at Alsisar Mahal, a heritage palace in Rajasthan’s Shekhawati region, roughly a six-hour drive from Delhi. It is small by festival standards — a few thousand people — and built around electronic music, design and desert nights, with the palace itself as the venue.
The palace is the point. Most festivals happen in a field with the atmosphere trucked in. Here the atmosphere was built by a Rajput family generations ago, and the festival just moved in politely. You wander from a courtyard stage through frescoed corridors, up a staircase worn smooth by a century of feet, and emerge on a rooftop where the dance floor has a view of the Milky Way. Nowhere else in India do bass lines and wall paintings of hunting parties share a room this comfortably.
December in Shekhawati is a climate with a sense of humour. Afternoons sit near 22°C and feel like a blessing; by midnight the desert takes its heat back and you are grateful for every layer you doubted while packing. The festival’s famous dress code — there isn’t an official one, but nobody told the crowd — solves this beautifully. Bandhgalas over band t-shirts. Shawls that belonged to grandmothers. I saw a woman DJ a sunrise set in a puffer jacket and gota-patti dupatta, and both choices were correct.
Where you sleep decides your festival. The options run from palace rooms — few, glorious, booked out absurdly early — to the tented city just outside the walls, in tiers from basic to genuinely comfortable, to guesthouses in Alsisar village. My first year I cheaped out on the thinnest tent tier and spent one night wearing every garment I owned, including a towel worn as a cummerbund. My second year I let someone plan it properly. There is a lesson in that, and I now am that someone for other people.
The music deserves its own paragraph, because the lineup mixes international electronic acts with the best of the Indian underground, and the scheduling is humane. Nothing important clashes at 3 p.m. The day belongs to talks, food, a flea market and the pool if the sun is earning its keep; the night belongs to the stages; and dawn belongs to the desert stage a short shuttle away, where watching the sun rise over scrubland while a few hundred people sway in blankets is the single best thing I have done at any Indian festival. I missed it my first year because I “would definitely wake up”. Set an alarm. Set three.
Now the honest caveat. This is a remote village hosting a small city for one weekend, and the seams show. Hot water is a rumour in the lower tent tiers, phone networks wheeze by Saturday, and food queues at 9 p.m. can run twenty minutes. The festival is also not cheap once you add tickets, accommodation and the Delhi transfer — budget honestly rather than optimistically. None of this ruins it. All of it is better known in advance.
Getting there is half the design problem. The drive from Delhi crosses about 250 kilometres of Rajasthan and takes six hours with a proper dhaba stop — parathas at a highway place near Behror have become a personal tradition. We time departures so you arrive by mid-afternoon, checked in and shawled before the first act you care about.
This is precisely the kind of event our Signature journeys exist for — the Magnetic Fields journey handles tickets, the right accommodation tier for your tolerance of cold, and transfers with people you will actually enjoy. If your festival taste runs more to pine valleys than palaces, read about our Ziro Festival journey in September — it is this festival’s gentler cousin.
Tell us whether you are a sunrise-set person or a rooftop-by-ten person. Alsisar has room for both, but only if someone plans for it.
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