“Delhi is a city of soldiers, a city of politicians, journalists and diplomats. It’s the Washington of Asia, even if it’s not so picturesque,” wrote Jan Morris, the famous British travel writer half a century ago.
“The only culture in Delhi is agriculture,” added another bashing.
But art and culture follow money, and in the past two decades Delhi has seen a sea change. Thanks in large part to a property boom and the rise of the high-tech suburb of Gurgaon, Delhi doubled its number of wealthy people in five years, built a metro system rivaling New York’s in size, and nurtured a cosmopolitan class.
To find where this creative crowd hops into galleries, shops and otherwise hangs out, head south. The booming neighborhoods of Hauz Khas Village, Lado Sarai and Mehrauli’s “Style Mile” sway on the edge of Delhi’s Outer Ring Road, almost equidistant from Gurgaon’s call centers and the city center’s ziggurats and domes.
“It’s a very dynamic place,” said Bhim Bachchan, who returned to Delhi after a career in US investment banking to run an e-commerce studio and resort clothing store, Ramola Bachchan, in the Soho-esque Hauz Khas Village. “There is a new class of hip, young and often wealthy people from suburban and central Delhi congregating around these hotspots on the outskirts of the city. They were locked down during Covid. Now they are out.
“The East Delhi Village”
The 13th-century, 70-meter-tall Qutab Minar towers above these neighborhoods: a fluted sandstone tower that lights up after dark like an epic beacon for navigating the winding streets. Here and there, medieval ruins sprout like dinosaur bones through modern developments.
Visitors coming by taxi from the village of Hauz Khas – the northernmost and most established of these neighborhoods – are dropped off in a car park a few meters from the three main streets of the village which wind into each other, next to a reservoir and a deer park where sultans once hunted. . Today, teenagers dressed in heavy metal t-shirts, munching on local street food, golgappa (puff balls filled with syrup), sit astride the broken domes of madrasas where Muslim scholars once studied, while that bars and galleries adjoin weathered walls and terraces. The name Hauz Khas is Urdu for “Royal Water Reservoirs”, which still surround the village like sentinels standing guard against the smog and clamor of the city beyond the deer park.
Strolling through the alleys of Hauz Khas, one comes across little treasures like Bana Studio, which sells unique vintage tribal jewelry amid framed photos of past clients, including George Harrison. Or AllArts, an Aladdin’s cave of Bollywood movie posters and lobby cards. For some much-needed relief, I wandered into Blossom Kochhar Spa, Cafe and Natural Beauty Boutique, an upscale flower child nirvana, for an exceptional aromatherapy massage followed by masala tea and of scones.
At night, the action takes place upstairs, where popular bars and nightclubs vie for Delhi’s grunge-chic youth. Currently, Social, with its industrial junk aesthetic, and the Imperfecto roof, awash in sangria and rum drinks, are the winning spots.
Although Hauz Khas is full of small art studios dominated by the Lokayata Art Gallery, with its bus-sized fiberglass iguana on the roof, a more avant-garde contemporary art scene is flourishing a few steps away. blocks east of the Qutab Minar, amidst the tire shops and hardware joints of the Lado Sarai district.
“It’s like the East Village of Delhi,” Shaji Punchathu, the founder of Gallery 1000A, tells me in the heart of Lado Sarai, in reference to New York’s historically hip downtown district. The neighborhood, he said, is now home to the first concentration of contemporary art galleries the city has ever had.
On a recent summer afternoon, Mr Punchathu and his assistants were putting together a multimedia exhibition, “Molecules”, featuring works by five Indian artists, including remarkable, illuminated and iconic prints from this which appeared to be mutating cells. by Delhi-based artist Amit Das. His prints were so unusual that I couldn’t tell how they were produced. “It’s a new method he developed using needles to embed the ink on the paper,” Mr Punchathu said. “Our artists often use local craft techniques that are not well known in the West.”
I walked across the street to Latitude 28, one of the pioneering galleries that anchored Lado Sarai more than a decade ago, when rents here, away from the city center, were still much cheaper. “They have since caught up,” Mr Punchathu said. The gallery was exhibiting a multimedia show titled “The World Awaits You Like A Garden”, featuring five artists celebrating Delhi’s often overlooked, fuel-choked history as a lush, flower-filled city. Some of the most striking works were by Gurgaon-based artist Gopa Trivedi, depicting highly detailed illustrations of invasive botanicals based on Mughal court miniatures.
“India’s contemporary art scene has been booming since Covid,” said Bhavna Kakar, director of Latitude 28. Ms Kakar is also the editor of Take on Art magazine, one of India’s most reputable contemporary art magazines. ‘Asia, which is published outside the gallery. “People spend a lot of time at home and want something good on their walls. They don’t look so much abroad anymore.
Window shopping and portobello tandoori
I was looking for lunch, having already had lunch of a croissant and a coffee worthy of Paris at Miam Patisserie down the street, but here I found the great weakness of Lado Sarai: no pasture, because there is few restaurants. “We have a dozen of the best galleries in Asia, but only one French patisserie to feed us,” Ms Kakar said.
Exceptional food was only a 15 minute walk away on the Kalka Das Marg, which circles the base of the Minar, called the “Style Mile” by Indian connoisseurs. As with many places in Delhi, you have to scratch the surface to find the shiny things, and at first glance the Kalka Das Marg seems like a charmless street. But then, wandering the alleys between the filthy buildings, you emerge into a modern courtyard lined with remarkable shops and restaurants. In one of these alleys, I discovered the whitewashed cubist pavilions of the Ambawatta One complex, where I was speechless at the high-end fashion stores, cafes and galleries that seemed to me to be the Delhi version of Rodeo Drive. Unlike Mumbai, which has only one tropical season, Delhi has multiple seasons and therefore a greater diversity of high fashion looming through its shop windows, including designers, such as Rohit Bal, Ritu Kumar and Tarun Tahiliani, are as familiar to Delhi fashionistas as Michael Kors, Tory Burch or Diane von Furstenberg are to New York.
The Style Mile is especially charming at sunset, when the birdsong of the surrounding park surpasses the din of traffic and the glorious sunset over the city is gradually replaced by the illuminated Qutab Minar, which hovers above like a celestial luster.
One of the hardest-to-get dinner reservations in Delhi is at Rooh in the Style Mile, where at night the young and the bejeweled risk scratching their Bentleys and Range Rovers in the cramped parking lot of the Kalka Das Marg. From there, they head up to the rooftop terraces (insiders know not to choose the restaurant’s less picturesque interior) to feast on unlikely but surprisingly good fusions of Indian and Italian dishes.
Plates of zucchini spaghetti in tomato dum sauce, or tandoori portobello with black garlic butter pao, were accompanied by an impressive wine list and even more impressive bartenders. Here, suspended between gnarled treetops, colorful lanterns, the vast ruins of the ancient sultanate below, and the surreal Qutab Minar against the stars, I finally felt the fantastical garden city celebrated in Latitude’s exhibit. 28. During the languorous evening, the shiny saris and dark suits, the constant clinking of glasses and the formidable gold jewelry offered a uniquely glamorous sense of the city’s newfound wealth and confidence.
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