Taking back the walls at Lodhi Colony

Explore the evolution of Lodhi Art District, a decade-long experiment in public art and community engagement in Delhi.

Large letters crawl over a blue wall, spelling out questions on water and access. Another wall has portraits of women teaching their children. Elsewhere, there are abstractions in black and white, and colourful spray-painted silhouettes, as though viewed through a rain-splattered window.

In February, the murals in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony went up to 66. As the public ‘art district’, which began as an experiment in 2015 by the St+art India Foundation, turned 10, six new works took up residence. This included a collaborative one by U.K.-based Raissa Pardini and the late artist and St+art co-founder Hanif Kureshi. The mural, which centred on issues of water scarcity, drew on the artists’ long-term exchanges with sign painters in Old Delhi.

A cycle rickshaw tour of Lodhi Art District’s murals | Photo Credit: Courtesy Asian Paints

“We wanted to leave a cultural legacy in our cities, which were being overrun with commercial advertisements,” says co-founder Arjun Bahl, speaking to the scale and ambition of the district, developed around the same time as India’s Smart Cities Mission. Despite being founded through organic meetings among friends, much of its early (and continued) momentum was gained through partnerships with local government bodies, embassies and private companies. If public art was to be rethought as urban infrastructure, a bridge had to be made between street art’s counter-cultural instincts and the institutions that could grant it scale and longevity.

An untitled mural by Elian Chali | Photo Credit: Courtesy St+art

He recalls entering a police station for the first time in 2014, to get permissions for a 150-foot-tall mural. The group pitched a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi to be painted on the side facade of the Delhi police headquarters. The interaction opened a relationship with the Delhi police, which has been developing ever since. For Bahl, conversations with such “stakeholders” are necessary, emphasising that “our only agenda is to put art out there”.