Kamathipura Kala Mela is a vibrant, community-led arts festival that celebrates creativity, dignity, and the cultural and human rights of sex workers. Held in the heart of Kamathipura, Mumbai, the Mela is imagined, created, and hosted entirely by sex workers and women artists of the Haan Hum Collective. It is not a festival about sex workers, but one led by them—rooted in authorship, joy, and collective power. For over a century, Kamathipura has been spoken about through stigma, moral judgement, and silence. Sex workers have rarely been allowed to speak for themselves in public cultural spaces. Kamathipura Kala Mela consciously shifts this narrative through a rights-based approach to art and culture: the right to self-representation, the right to creative labour, the right to occupy public space, and the right to dignity without rescue or saviourism. Here, sex workers are recognised as cultural producers—artists, performers, curators, storytellers, facilitators, and hosts. The festival brings together theatre, visual art, clay work, zines, photography, music, food, games, and interactive installations created by the women themselves. At its heart is “Raasta”, a powerful theatre performance devised and performed by sex workers, drawing from lived experiences of work, migration, friendship, violence, humour, resistance, and hope. The performance invites dialogue rather than sympathy, and solidarity rather than distance. Designed as an open, inclusive, and intergenerational space, the Kala Mela welcomes neighbours, families, artists, students, and allies into a shared cultural commons. Participation is intentionally accessible, with free entry for sex workers and community members, and an invitation to others to contribute in solidarity rather than charity. Joy, rest, laughter, and political clarity coexist here. Kamathipura Kala Mela is a celebration of rights in practice—affirming the presence, agency, and creative leadership of sex workers, and reimagining what people-centred, justice-rooted festivals in India can look like.