Mumbai Fringe Festival: India’s First Edition Includes Haunted House, Sherlock Holmes, Macbeth, Comedy, Magic & More (FPJ Exclusive)

After nearly eight decades of shaping global performance culture, the Fringe is finally coming to India. What began in 1947 as a rebellious act on the margins of the Edinburgh International Festival has grown into the world’s largest open-access arts movement, spanning more than 300 festivals, including Edinburgh, Prague and Adelaide. It has launched careers, challenged conventions and redefined what live performance can look like. This March, that spirit lands in Mumbai for the very first time.

The Mumbai Fringe Festival will make its India debut from 10–15 March 2026, opening at the iconic Tata Theatre, NCPA, before unfolding across Bandra’s creative circuit, including Khar Comedy Club, 3 Art House and Indifferent @ Gharonda. Over six days and nearly 60 performances, the festival will transform the neighbourhood into a dynamic cultural map where audiences move between venues, discover new voices and experience comedy, theatre, poetry, storytelling and experimental work in its most immediate form.

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This is not a single-stage spectacle. It is a city in motion. The India edition launches with a powerful lineup of leading Indian voices alongside internationally celebrated productions. The festival features artists such as Rohan Joshi, Kanan Gill, Varun Grover, Aakash Gupta, Priya Malik, Amandeep Khayal, Urooj Ashfaq and Amit Tandon, alongside acclaimed global works including Nigel Miles Thomas’s award-winning solo performance Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act, a striking solo adaptation of Macbeth presented by UK-based theatre company The Shakespeare Edit, and David Hoskin’s Haunted House, a genre-blending mix of mime, comedy and storytelling. True to the Fringe ethos, the programme is intimate, inventive and unafraid to take creative risks.

Steve Gove, Founder and Director, Prague Fringe

A long-held Mumbai dream: Steve Gove

“Bringing Fringe to Mumbai has been a long-held dream. Cities around the world have embraced this model and watched it reshape their creative landscapes. Mumbai has the energy, the appetite and the talent to make this extraordinary.”

Simar Singh, Organizer, Mumbai Fringe

Fringe creates space for artists: Simar Singh

“Growth of it within the city has been very limited after a certain point for artists to be able to explore and experiment with their work. What Fringe does is it brings all the artists together into one space at one time, and that is very unique to just Fringe Festivals, and I think that has been missing in Mumbai for a long time. Large-scale festivals in India are big commercial festivals where you have thousands of people attending and there’s a lot of crowds — and I love that, that’s amazing — but in a Fringe Festival, there are thousands of people who attend, but you’re in a room with just 50 or 100 or 200 people at one time. It’s still an intimate setting, so you’re part of something bigger but in a very intimate way, and I think that makes Fringe very, very kind of special.”

Suhani Shah, Mentalist

Mumbai Fringe sparks curiosity: Suhani Shah

“ Edinburgh has a very distinct energy. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the city almost breathes performance for that month. Audiences walk into shows expecting to discover something new, strange, experimental. There’s a beautiful openness to risk. The Mumbai Fringe feels different but in a very exciting way. Fringe culture is still growing here, so the audience comes in with a lot of curiosity. There’s a sense of discovery. People are surprised, delighted and sometimes even a little shocked by the format, and that makes the reactions very alive.”

Rohan Joshi, Comedian

Creating beyond the algorithm: Rohan Joshi

I think it means being able to write what I want rather than what I think the algorithm wants. The ability to trust myself and say, “If I build it, they will come,” as opposed to, “The algorithm says I should build this so they come.”

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