I have a slightly strange relationship with Delhi. For most of my time growing up, it was an episodic city to me — a place we’d visit to see my grandparents, a place that required a suitcase full of sweaters, and a city where I’d go look at the monkeys around Connaught Place every Sunday with chole bhature packed for the family brunch. It was the city we travelled to for weddings, family events, and great food. I knew it solely through the people who had already built a life here. That changed when I moved to a spot 30 minutes away from the city border.

That proximity was enough motivation for me to explore the capital over the last five years. Delhi became a city I could move through on my own terms — learning about different quarters through the habits of the residents, where they gather, what they eat, and the accounts they hold about their streets. This specific aspect of Delhi is what Project Mohalla highlights through its initiatives.

Project Mohalla, a Delhi-based cultural initiative, works one locality at a time. The team convenes local communities alongside historians, researchers, and cultural practitioners to explore the backgrounds of the places they call home. Their gatherings, conversations, and food-focused experiences look at these corners through the inhabitants and the traditions that have travelled through them.

Delhi almost demands to meander this way. A short afternoon walk can yield a Mughal-era monument, a family-run sweet shop using old brass vats, a plate of momo, and a family recipe. Each belongs to a different timeline, yet all of them make up the place you are walking through.

The word mohalla carries a meaning that goes beyond geography. It describes a micro-community — a network of streets where neighbours know each other's routines, where specific vendors visit at fixed hours of the day, and where public space functions as an extended living room. The project draws inspiration from the architecture of the traditional Indian courtyard — a shared space designed for collective living. At the centre of this idea rests the paan leaf, an everyday symbol of shared culture that cuts across boundaries of class, region, and background. The mohalla remains an essential unit of Delhi’s social life, shaped by trade, migration, and daily relationships.

The initiative engages directly with the people who inhabit these spaces daily, moving away from treating localities as simple study subjects. The process involves listening to residents, mapping out informal landmarks, and recording oral traditions to build accessible community archives. These living archives serve to preserve local memory for future generations, scholars, and the public.

These documentations come alive through physical gatherings. Organisers set up community walks, panel discussions, and moderated conversations where participants walk through narrow alleys, stop at local establishments, and learn about the social events that shaped each area. By drawing together diverse voices, the project offers a practical alternative to standard heritage tourism. It supports local craftspeople and neighbourhood stakeholders, ensuring their living traditions continue to thrive within modern urban life.

Attention centres on the connective tissue between memory and food. Its sister initiative, the Home Chefs Collective, focuses on the culinary lineage of home cooks across Delhi, giving recipes and the people behind them room to become part of a larger cultural record.

Food acts as a direct carrier of culture and regional identity. While commercial restaurants adapt their menus for broad appeal, home kitchens preserve family recipes, regional techniques, and specific ingredient combinations that seldom make it to public dining spaces. Through curated pop-up meals, supper clubs, and food-focused storytelling sessions, domestic cooks gain a platform to share their culinary heritage with a wider audience.

One of the gatherings at Kashmere Gate, titled Sarguzasht, brought together accounts of the locality with conversations about its past. The event featured a panel discussion with actor Vinod Nagpal, historian Sohail Hashmi, educationist Kamlesh Jacob, and journalist Satish Jacob. The evening eventually led to a six-course meal of Old Delhi dishes prepared by women from the Home Chefs Collective.

That combination makes sense when you think about how people remember places. We remember a neighbourhood through a school we attended, a shop our parents visited, a house where somebody's wedding took place, or a dish that someone in the family still prepares. Historical context materialises through food long before it turns into a textbook lesson.

Famous landmarks leave out the everyday life of a city. Localities become metro stops, markets turn into listicle recommendations, and old buildings become backgrounds for photos on social media. The residents who bring these streets to life get left out of the narrative, and Project Mohalla places those specific residents at the centre.

Local histories hold multiple perspectives. A historian contributes archival records, while a resident offers lived memory. Placing them at the same table expands the narrative past official accounts.

For a city that gets talked about in sweeping terms, the initiative works at a manageable scale. It treats a locality as a conversation, making room for the recipes, routines, and memories that hold a place together. In a city like Delhi, understanding a place comes down to sitting at a shared table, walking down a lane with someone who grew up there, and listening to what they have to say.

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