Lighting in Indian Festivals

Urban festivals are increasingly experienced after dark, where illumination operates as ritual symbolism, spatial infrastructure, and a medium for staging collective experience. This article examines festival lighting in India as a coupled experience-infrastructure-sustainability issue and synthesizes how lighting shapes cultural meaning, public-space experience, temporary infrastructure, and sustainable event practice. A systematic literature review of festival-lighting scholarship published between 1987 and 2023 was conducted, synthesizing forty-one peer-reviewed studies across festival types and urban contexts. Following PRISMA 2020 reporting guidance, study characteristics were extracted, and thematic synthesis was used to identify convergent patterns, gaps, and design implications. Five themes emerged from the review: lighting as a carrier of cultural meaning and ritual performance; perceived safety, accessibility, and crowd comfort; atmosphere, emotion, and memorability; temporary infrastructure and governance constraints; and sustainability and technology transitions, including LED adoption, modular systems, solar integration, and smart control. Based on these themes, the article develops a Hierarchy of Festival Lighting Needs as its central theoretical contribution. The hierarchy links lighting attributes to physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs in festival settings and translates the evidence into reusable design parameters for festival organizers, lighting designers, and urban stakeholders. The article also proposes context-sensitive pathways for sustainable festival lighting in Indian metropolitan contexts, including light-pollution mitigation, energy planning, modular deployment, and event sustainability management. The study contributes by reframing festival lighting beyond decoration as an integrated experience-infrastructure-sustainability framework for safer, meaningful, and more sustainable night-time celebrations.