Garba of Gujarat Became India's 15th UNESCO Intangible Heritage Element in December 2023, and Vadodara Has Since Danced It With More Than 46,000 People at Once

UNESCO inscribed Garba of Gujarat on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the 18th session of its Intergovernmental Committee, held in Kasane, Botswana, from 5 to 9 December 2023. UNESCO’s announcement is dated 6 December 2023, and both UNESCO and the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Government of India’s press office, count Garba as India’s 15th element on the list. Durga Puja in Kolkata, covered in our piece on its listing, was inscribed in 2021.

Garba is the circle dance of Navratri, the nine nights of the Hindu calendar given to the goddess as Shakti, the feminine power. On 7 October 2026 the city of Vadodara held a Garba that Guinness World Records ratified with 46,128 performers on one ground. Incredible India lists that year’s festival as 11 to 19 October, so the record came four days before Navratri began.

What UNESCO’s entry says Garba is

UNESCO’s element page calls Garba “a ritualistic and devotional dance that is performed on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Navaratri”. Dancers move counter-clockwise around a perforated earthenware pot lit by an oil lamp, or around an image of the mother goddess Amba. They sing and clap in unison, starting with slow circular steps and building to a whirling pace.

UNESCO’s announcement adds that Garba is danced for nine days and that it takes place in homes, temple courtyards, village public spaces, city squares, streets and large open grounds. The element page lists the bearers as dancers, musicians, social groups, craftspeople and religious figures, and says the practice “continues to be inclusive of diverse and marginalized communities”.

Transmission, in UNESCO’s words, runs through practice, performance, imitation and observation. Schools and universities teach related skills, from dance and music to costume design, and NGOs, government agencies, choreographers, musicians and the media pass it on as well. The page also ties Garba to the Historic City of Ahmadabad, which UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2017.

How the file reached Paris

India’s national inventory of intangible heritage has carried Garba since 2022. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Ministry of Culture’s national academy of music, dance and drama, keeps that inventory, with help from the Performing Arts Faculty of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The Committee’s decision names the university, the Akademi and the Ministry as the bodies that prepared the nomination, and UNESCO’s 2023 listing gives the date of the nomination form as 30 March 2022.

On 27 August 2022 the Tribune reported, from an event at the National Museum in New Delhi, that India had nominated Garba and that the file was undergoing technical treatment by UNESCO’s Secretariat. Selvedge magazine says the dossier was co-written by Utpala Desai, a scholar of Gujarat’s folk traditions.

The Committee’s decision (18.COM 8.B.32) found that the nomination meets all five criteria of the 2003 Convention. On the first, it says Garba “promotes unity in diversity and fosters social equality”. On viability, it says the practice “ensures its viability in terms of costume-making, music, pottery and dance”. The planned safeguarding measures include research and showing Garba around the world. The file carried letters of consent from government officials, performers, musicians, scholars and NGOs, and the Committee commended India for an excellent supporting video.

PIB’s release of 6 December 2023 adds that the Convention’s Evaluation Body praised the dossier for its supporting material, and that a troupe of eight dancers from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations showed Garba at the meeting venue. It also says the Government of Gujarat (profiled in our state explainer) was organising Garba events across the state’s districts to mark the listing.

The pot, the word and the goddess

The pot is called the garbo. The scholar Jyotindra Jain, in a paper hosted by Sahapedia, describes it as an earthen pot pierced with holes and holding a wick-lamp, placed at the centre while women dance round it singing garbo songs. The pot gives its name to the songs and the dance alike. Jain writes that Garba is peculiar to Gujarat, that it is mainly danced by women in a circle who keep time by clapping, and he adds in a note that in Saurashtra men perform it.

The origin of the word is argued. The Selvedge interview with Desai says the name comes from the Sanskrit word for womb. Jain says scholars have proposed garbha-deepa, an inner lamp, or a pot with a lamp inside, but calls these conjectures and thinks the word probably began in local speech rather than Sanskrit.

Jain also describes the garbi, a wooden frame with shelves for many lamps that stands at the centre in some regions. When the rhythm rises, or when the goddess is believed to have taken hold of a dancer, a few men lift it onto their heads and keep dancing. Jain writes that raas is more connected with the cult of Krishna and Garba with that of the Goddess, though the two overlap, and he cites verses by the poet Narsi Mehta in which Krishna dances garba.

Stone preserves one version. Jain notes that a niche in the Adalaj stepwell near Ahmedabad carries nine carved garba pots standing for the Navadurga, the nine forms of the goddess Durga. He reports that villagers have come there to finish wedding rites and then danced garba in the entrance pavilion. The caption to his photograph dates the carving to 1499. Our piece on Rani ki Vav at Patan covers another of Gujarat’s stepwells.

In the Selvedge interview, Desai says the pot is “regarded as a shrine and the dance is a prayer”, and that dancers go barefoot. She describes Garba as a thanksgiving for a good harvest, and notes that of the four Navratris in a year, the one in the month of Aaso (Ashwin) is held most auspicious. Garba is also danced at weddings, baby showers and, in Saurashtra and Kutch, on Janmashtami.

Garba beside raas

Garba shares the season with raas, the stick dance usually called dandiya raas. In Desai’s account on Sahapedia, raas is tied to sowing and harvest and is traditionally danced by men in troupes of 16 to 20, and the pair of wooden sticks (dandiya) marks the beat. Mishra or Gop raas, danced by men and women, is the exception, and she writes that it emerged in the early 1960s, when Bhavnagar University formed a student troupe to dance in Delhi for Republic Day 1961.

Raas has older roots on paper. Jain cites the 12th-century Bhavaprakashana of Sharadatanaya, which lists a stick form called dandarasaka, and he finds stick dances in Gujarat’s temple paintings, wood carvings and textiles. Desai writes that “Raas-Garaba is a unified cultural identity of Gujarat”, with each form keeping its own character.

The lanes of Ahmedabad’s old city

Ahmedabad’s old city is divided into neighbourhoods called pols. PTI reported on 3 October 2024 that Sadu Mata Ni Pol is one of 184 pols in the old city and that more than 1,000 people live in it. On the eighth night of Navratri, Ashtami, men of the Barot community, traditionally keepers of family histories, dance garba there in sarees.

PTI says the custom is about 200 years old. It reports that the community sees it as atonement for a curse laid on its ancestors, and that men also join to give thanks for prayers answered, such as a child, good health or success in business. One participant had worn a saree for five years, the agency says, and it describes the act as “a symbolic gesture of humility and respect”.

Cloth, mirrors and the people who sew them

UNESCO’s decision counts costume-making and pottery as part of what keeps Garba alive. The Selvedge interview shows how much cloth is involved. Women wear the chaniya, a long skirt, with a choli, or blouse, and an odhna, a drape about 2.5 metres long, while men wear the kediya-chorni, a fitted, flared top with a loose lower garment, sometimes with a turban.

The communities of Gujarat dress differently for the dance. The interview lists the Mer of Porbandar in a red skirt and green blouse with a bandhani (tie-dyed) odhna, the Thakor in skirts that take 12 to 15 metres of cloth, the Bharwad shepherds in wraparound woollen skirts, and the Rabari in Persian blue skirts with pink embroidery. It says most pieces are now bought from artisans or stores instead of being embroidered by the wearer, and that the demand keeps tie-dyers, embroiderers and makers of trimmings in work.

On the teaching side, the interview lists a short course on Garba at Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, the kind of course UNESCO’s description mentions.

What the nine nights draw

Social Samosa, an advertising trade site, reported on 23 September 2025, in a piece on Navratri that year, that the Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Ltd expected more than 4 million tourists, and quoted the founder of the agency Zero Gravity Communications, Khushboo Solanki Sharma, as saying the larger venues see more than 30,000 revellers a night.

DeshGujarat reported on 2 September 2025 on ticketed Garba events in Ahmedabad. Its list gave a single-night pass at Rs 499 for several of them, season passes from Rs 2,799 to Rs 10,824, and a group pass at one event at Rs 18,999. The article also noted that a growing section of the public asks whether the prices put Garba out of reach.

Vadodara’s record

Vadodara’s big Garba ground belongs to United Way of Baroda, an organisation set up in 1986 by the Baroda Citizens Council with support from United Way International and UNICEF. Incredible India, the Ministry of Tourism’s site, lists its Garba Mahotsav at M M Farm in Atladara, running nine nights from 11 to 19 October 2026, and says the event is listed in the Limca Book of Records as the largest Garba ground in the world.

On 7 October 2026 the Vadodara Municipal Corporation and United Way held the Viksit Bharat Sankalp Garba there, with the folk singer Atul Purohit performing. Business Today reported that a Guinness adjudicator was present, that the attempt needed 30,000 participants, and that about 3,000 students presented banners on heritage, cleanliness, Nari Shakti (women’s strength) and Viksit Bharat, the national goal of a developed India. DeshGujarat adds that the evening opened with an aarti of Maa Ambe and that the record dance began after 11 pm to the rhythm it calls Tran Tali.

The counts differ. Business Today gave 46,818 verified participants, DeshGujarat reported nearly 50,000 people, and Guinness World Records’ own account, published on 16 October 2026, gives 46,128 performers. The Guinness article names the venue as M M Patel Farm and the record as the largest Garba dance. Its adjudicator, Rishi Nath, said Garba “brings together families, friends and entire communities, passing cultural traditions between generations”.