The music of a city reveals itself in spaces that bring musicians together. The way this happens is rarely accidental; it takes shape around particular spaces, accumulating over time the echoes of music made with the blood, sweat, and tears of people who are hopelessly in love with sound. When rock and roll began sweeping across Indian cities in the 1960s, Bombay and Calcutta found their music in spaces like Slip Disc in Colaba and Trincas in Park Street — spaces that served as social coordinates where a city’s cultural life could coalesce into something palpable.

New Delhi has rarely had such rooms. For much of its modern musical history, the city produced musicians faster than it could find venues to host them. When beat groups like The Thunderbirds and The Living Dead began playing rock and pop in the 1960s, they performed in borrowed environments: college auditoriums, hotel lounges, and occasional clubs around Connaught Place. The music existed, but the infrastructure was largely improvisational.

That trend persisted well into the 2000s. By the late 1990s, Delhi’s independent music culture had begun clustering around a handful of venues offering something resembling continuity. Mezz, Café Morrison, and most famously Turquoise Cottage in Adhchini — near IIT Delhi — became informal anchors for a generation of musicians. Turquoise Cottage came the closest to feeling like an aspirational stage: it had a decent sound system, a large enough space, and most importantly, an young and enthusiastic audience willing to listen. It was a sign that the city might finally be developing a live-music culture.

But in 2007, that fragile hope was dashed when Turquoise Cottage was sealed shut as part of a Supreme Court-directed crackdown on South Delhi establishments violating zoning regulations. It later reopened in a Saket mall, but the same cultural energy did not follow into the new space. After all, scenes rarely survive displacement.

Between 2008 and 2013, Hauz Khas Village briefly appeared to fill that void. A cluster of ad hoc venues like The Living Room, Raasta, Café Zo, and OTB Café gave the neighbourhood the density of a genuine music district. For a moment, Delhi experienced what other cities had long taken for granted: a walkable nightlife geography built around live performance, New Delhi’s answer to New York’s East Village in the early Eighties. But, much like the East Village, Hauz Khas too rapidly became one of the city’s most expensive real estate corridors, and rising rents, bureaucratic red tape, and the economics of commercial nightlife gradually hollowed out the ecosystem.

Depot48 emerged from this absence. In 2013, BAFTA-nominated producer, sound engineer, and musician Girjashanker Vohra had just completed building a professional recording studio when he began discussing a different kind of project with his Sydney-based brother-in-law, Vikas Narula. Narula had spent years around Australia’s small creative venues — intimate bars in Newtown and experimental performance spaces in Brisbane — where hospitality and performance were designed to complement each other. In those rooms, the architecture itself seemed to acknowledge that music required specific conditions, such as attentive audiences, thoughtful acoustics, and a sense that the space existed primarily for listening to thrive. Their question was simple: What would a venue whose entire purpose began with the act of listening look like?

When the space finally opened in August 2014, it was called Depot29 — named after the PIN code of its original location in the Safdarjung enclave. The space occupied the upper floors of an otherwise ordinary DDA market building. The early years were marked by a sense of deliberation that bordered on idealism. Live music ran up to five nights a week, with one clear rule from the outset: artists were encouraged to perform original work across diverse genres such as folk, jazz, ghazal, indie rock, spoken word, performance art, dance, and the experimental. And these performances were ticketed, with musicians receiving a fair share of the profit.

In the Indian independent music ecosystem of the early 2010s, this was quite a radical position. Many venues operated on exposure economics, barely offset by the minimal artist fees and a meagre share of the door. Depot’s founders insisted that live music was an economic exchange in which audiences paid to hear original work and artists were compensated for producing it. “Our focus has always been simple,” Vikas says. “If the artist feels respected, the audience will respond with respect. That exchange builds a scene. And scenes build cities.”

Over time, the room became an incubator for musicians who would later reach far larger audiences. Prateek Kuhad performed at Depot long before his music found global listeners or landed on Barack Obama’s 2019 year-end playlist. Peter Cat Recording Co. used the stage to experiment with songs still evolving in live performance. Bharat Chauhan first appeared at one of the venue’s open mics before developing a cult following; and homegrown synth-folk collective Dindūn (whom I recently profiled) performed here in November 2024.

This history reveals something fundamental about independent venues. While festivals and stadium shows define the visible peaks of the music industry, artists rarely emerge fully formed on those stages. They develop gradually in intimate rooms where experimentation is possible, and audiences are close enough to respond immediately. International artists also passed through — among them, the Afro-European jazz ensemble Monoswezi — confirming that a room tucked into a Delhi market could host conversations between global musical traditions without strain.

Depot’s identity was equally formed by Narula’s decision to embed inclusivity into its operating structure. As a queer founder, he ensured the venue would not treat inclusivity as an occasional gesture. All-gender restrooms, staff sensitivity training, and unequivocal consent protocols were in place before the doors opened. Pink Thursday, its weekly queer night, has run continuously since 2014, years before the Supreme Court read down Section 377 in 2018, and long before Pride programming became a commercial fixture in urban nightlife.

The venue eventually relocated from Safdarjung to Greater Kailash II, adopting the name Depot48 in reference to the new neighbourhood’s PIN code. This new location, designed by Project 810, was purpose-built from the scracth to make it an acoustically sound environment, which would be a pleasure for both the artists to perform as well as the guests to experience. More than 4,700 performances have taken place in its rooms since 2014: on roughly every other evening for over a decade, a musician, poet, drag performer, or experimental artist has stepped onto its stage.

This consistency has made Depot48 one of the few enduring anchors in Delhi’s independent music ecosystem. As India’s live music industry has expanded — with international tours, Lollapalooza India, NH7 Weekender, and a growing stadium market — it is easy to measure cultural health through the set-piece spectacles of these massive music festivals alone. But those events depend on smaller, more intimate listening rooms where emerging musicians first learn to perform, and audiences first learn to listen to them.

Depot48 is one of those rooms. Its significance lies not in any single landmark performance but in something more modest and more difficult to build: the slow accumulation of trust between artists, audiences, and a space that exists primarily to hold the moment when music is made and heard.

Depot48 is located in Greater Kailash II, New Delhi. To learn more, follow @depot48 on Instagram.

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