Letters from Gandhi Bazaar
Looking at a neighborhood through its visual culture. Link to workshop details
We were invited by Impart to facilitate a walkthrough and workshop as a part of the Historic Cities Series 2026, a joint initiative by the National Institute of Urban Affairs, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and DRONAH Foundation. The idea was to capture a fragment of a historic city that included both tangible and intangible aspects of the urban character.
Rather than looking at heritage only through buildings and monuments, we found ourselves drawn to the visual culture of the market-its colors, lettering, motifs, facades and hand-painted signs, and the many layers that everyday commerce has created over time.
The challenge was then to find a tangible way of capturing these observations and memories. How could we translate what we noticed while walking through Gandhi Bazaar into something people could collect, interpret and take away with them? That became the starting point for Letters from Gandhi Bazaar.
So we called the workshop “Letters from Gandhi Bazaar”.
Participants walked through Gandhi Bazaar, looking beyond the obvious landmarks at details that often disappear into the background: old shopfronts and facades, hand-painted signboards and lettering, colours, patterns and motifs, and the cultural influences that shaped the way the neighbourhood was organised, from its streets and buildings to its conservancies.
We noticed Art Deco influences alongside traces of the Arts and Crafts movement, and looked at how old and new visual languages coexist. Some of the hand-painted signs were particularly interesting—their irregular lettering, colours and compositions shaped by the shops they belonged to. These may not always be considered heritage in the conventional sense, but they tell us a great deal about the character of the place.
We also began connecting these observations to the history of Gandhi Bazaar. Surrounded by temples, mutts and other religious institutions, the market has long been closely associated with festival shopping and everyday cultural life. Its story is also part of the development of Basavanagudi and the planned neighborhoods that emerged in Bengaluru after the plague.
The market, then, is more than a collection of shops. Its architecture, commerce, religious life and everyday activity have all contributed to the visual character we see today.
From looking to making
After the walk, we gathered at the Indian Institute of World Culture, another historic part of Basavanagudi. Founded in 1945 by B. P. Wadia, the institute was conceived as a cultural space for ordinary people, with a library, lectures and programmes around art, culture and ideas.
It felt like a fitting place to move from looking to making. We had designed a small pocketbook for the participants, tucked inside an envelope. We wanted it to feel less like a worksheet and more like a personal record of the place-something they could fill, fold, collect and carry with them.
Some sketched directly into it, some copied lettering and motifs, while others made collages from old magazine papers. Colours, textures, notes and drawings gradually came together, creating very different interpretations of the same streets. Some were detailed and observational; others became bright, almost pop-like versions of what they had seen.We had all walked through the same Gandhi Bazaar, but each person came back with a different one.
Why a letter?
The form of the workbook came from our association with letters and postcards. We have always liked the physicality of old letters-the paper, handwriting, little sketches, folds and things tucked inside them. An inland letter, in particular, could hold so much within such a small space.
We wanted to borrow that idea. Instead of a conventional workbook/sheet, we made an envelope booklet that could hold sketches, scraps, words and observations gathered along the way. The envelope became a small metaphor for memory - a container for things that might otherwise be lost.
Looking at the everyday
For us, the interesting part of a historic city is not always the grand architecture.
It is often the everyday things - the lettering on a shop sign, an old typeface, a painted border, a recurring motif, the colors of a particular street, or the way a new sign has been placed over an older one. These things are easy to overlook, but together they form the visual memory of a place. Letters from Gandhi Bazaar was our attempt to slow down and notice some of that memory.
To see that heritage can exist not only in buildings and monuments, but also in lettering, colour, motifs, shopfronts and the traces of people who have used a place over generations. For us, the little envelope booklet became a way of holding on to a moment of that writing—a collection of sketches, scraps, colors and observations made by 18 people who had walked through the same streets.
These were our letters from Gandhi Bazaar.
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