Muscular commerce, polite politics

In India’s urban landscapes of decay – where the state has normalised 1000 AQI pollution for over 20 years, fails to manage toxin-leaching waste mountains, and aggressively gulps down public land – what bearing can art and culture have on a city’s defining criteria?

Does art become the silver lining in the toxic cloud for its resigned residents, who have nowhere to go, or a bag of sweets as a benevolent bribe for looking the other way till the next winter AQI? Based mainly on the country’s limited English readership, The Guardian recently described lit fests in India as networking ‘carnivals’ attended by people who don’t actually read and come for the “masala” of parties and famous faces. 

Is a first world art week then, just a passing celebrity circus in third world cities, where daily living bears a daily price? Is it a Grand Bargain style unwritten deal that throws an aspirational middle class a shiny object or two, to keep its mind off the real questions that need to be asked? 

The paradox of public infrastructural decay versus private sophistication runs deep in every Indian city and several others around the world. The arts, in their glamour and ability to ratchet up interest, can actually have the disproportionate power to uphold or redefine a city’s brand even if things are falling apart in every other way.

Think of New York’s mythical ‘greatness’ still upheld by the Met Gala, Fashion Week and legendary art institutions that transcend its ageing subways and housing crisis, or the Bombay ‘dream’ birthed by the Hindi film industry that retains its lure despite Mumbai’s crumbly, iniquitous disorder. 

Still, these are four-day events. Can an art week act as a cultural force multiplier that outlasts its limited time and invigorates a modern urban identity? Or is that simply giving these temporary ‘spectacle’ events the power they don’t actually have?  

Take two weeks, two very different cities, two art events, poles apart in scale, reach, branding and staging – the 5th Jaipur Arts Week and the 17th India Art Fair in Delhi. 

Both cities have an existing branding. Jaipur’s brand has been powerfully reimagined in recent years as a sort of  ‘Jaipur Modern’. The city has long ceased to be the mere third wheel of Golden Triangle package mass tourism. Its morphed branding whispers royalty, luxury, heritage, and handcrafted craftsmanship. 

It masks the less than luxurious reality that it is one of the lowest performers on women’s safety indexes or that its groundwater supply is at critical “dark zone” levels of arsenic, nitrates and fluoride contamination or that its pollution levels are 2-4 times the national average. 

Yet there is no question that creatives from around the world and India have flocked to live and work here, setting new dynamics into motion – luxury products, fashion, restaurants, events and desirability. With even the young Jaipur royals pressed into service as part of this renewed branding, ‘palace cool’ is very much part of the city’s cultural core, consciously luxe, consciously away from the mass. 

On the other side, Delhi’s image as a political behemoth has stayed stuck under the fixed lens of being the national capital. Singularly identified with power by outsiders, its brand is usually left to stew in the dumped resentment of states all over India. There is no denying its reality as the seat of government, its heightened state of scrutiny, and its formidable dhai kilo ka haath image. Hidden below is the city of layers and antiquity, whose secret charms have to be ferreted out; one that never makes it to the brand. 

In both cities, ‘spectacle’ art and cultural events navigate pathways to newer or alternate urban identities. 

The Jaipur Arts Week (JAW) effectively cashes in on Jaipur’s branding as a creative, cool hub that perfectly brings together the traditional and modern. Run by Sana Rezwan’s Public Arts Trust of India (PATI), it deliberately prioritises public accessibility over commerce. This means its sites and talks are free, the artists are young and emerging, and their audience is strongly local. Children, schools, and craft artisans underpin its inside binding with the city, even as they are thrown together with international/non-Rajasthan young artists chosen through an open call (600 applications for 15 projects) who bring in an outside lens. 

The mix of very local and very global works well. World-class curators and craft collabs with local artisans at dreamy sites that showcase Rajasthan’s bottomless pitara of treasures ensure the right audience rolls in. By making the entire city function as a site, from traffic circle to ancient fort to modern museum, the exhibits recreate the city spatially, drawing even Jaipur’s residents and visitors to new/old areas they may not have seen. 

Sana Rezwan (Founding Chairperson of PATI), Badi Chaupar traffic circle in Jaipur, and Dr Amin Jaffer, art historian and Director, Al Thani Museum

At newish contemporary landmark sites like the Gyan Museum, for example, Brazilian artist Natasa Galecic, shortlisted on JAW’s worldwide open call, exhibits her waste ‘mandala’ Fractured Orbit, inspired by Charles Correa’s architecture. The waste art is shown alongside the museum’s own priceless antiquities and jewellery. Both burnish Brand Jaipur Modern.  

At Central Park, artist Poojan Gupta’s ‘corridor’ A Sacred Walk made of used blister packs that reconfigures pill taking shaped by environmental awareness of waste ‘becomes’ an impromptu shelter from a sudden downpour, locating a familiar site differently, with a pop of the new and entirely unfamiliar.

Artist: Poojan Gupta; Installation: A Sacred Walk

Delhi’s India Art Fair couldn’t be further away from these intimate, close-up encounters tied closely to the city’s own sites, legacy and regional identity. 

It is unabashedly giant, commercial, gallery-oriented and global. The city’s heft as a powerful world capital already situates the event, giving it the potent buzz of a single-site global marketplace for fashion, food, wine, and celebrity where the whole world congregates. This is a Big Daddy global platform that needs its big city site to punch as high. Delhi lives up to that. 

Its serious social power pulls in ultra-sophisticated elites, fashionistas, diplomats, corporate honchos, aspirational influencers, and literally everyone from the art world, even as its critical mass audience comes from local residents, who over 17 years have made the fair a non-negotiable on the city’s social calendar. 

This is cliché ‘masala’ territory. Is the buzzy atmosphere all about the buzz and nothing about the art, or can these non-negotiable social events stretch the impact of their cultural clout on the city? Looking at content and appeal provides some clues. What is being shown, who is seeing it, and how much do they absorb?

Families flock to Jaipur’s Jawahar Kala Kendra, designed as a classic Indian Navgraha or 9 square mandala by Charles Correa with its  stunning ‘cosmic’ ceiling dome, to attentively hear curator Anita Dube discuss playwright Dharamvir Bharti’s famed 1953 Andha Yug, set within the Mahabharat epic. It throbs with extraordinary prescience in 2026 by questioning war, democracy, moral choices and the imbalanced nature of privilege, caste and minority. Children take in the 200-odd works on display, inspired by this intense curatorial theme, with curiosity and attention. 

That’s too much for Delhi to handle. Content is definitely king, but who is seeing it, what are they interpreting, and where will the line be drawn are questions that make an inevitable, weary appearance. That’s when Brand Capital makes its presence felt.

IAF’s ambitious programming sees no dearth of experimental work. Apart from the big guns like the Bharti Khers, the Dodiyas, the Shilpa Guptas et al., the sheer profusion of works with embroidery, materiality, digital art, and industrial process has taken the cross-disciplinary visibility of contemporary South Asian art to breakthrough levels. Ashish Anand, CEO and MD at Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), calls it the “accelerating global recognition of South Asian modernism”. 

Yet the key thing about the IAF is not the exciting plethora it offers but what it doesn’t. Despite the “recognition” and “breakthroughs”, few are asking the questions that art usually asks in an age of a single state-run narrative. Hardly anyone is interrogating the big questions of the day: domestic or international. Modi – or Trump, for that matter – have left the building. 

One of the most viewed works in the fair, Atul Dodiya’s fascinating Rope, uses his signature garage shutters to explore works in his current cinematic series, referencing a Hitchcock film. 

The device, however, captures attention not just for what it is but for what it was. It is impossible to forget Dodiya’s original shutters with Gandhi’s portrait that spoke viscerally about the state of his battered, aflame city in 1993 when downed shutters signified public anarchy, minority fear and the breakdown of state machinery amidst the Bombay riots. 

Artist: Atul Dodiya; Installation: Rope

Today, Gandhi’s image on an artistic work could be construed as disruptive, ironically even as it drives all the business at the fair. 

Vibha Galhotra's Echoes of Time installation references environmental degradation close to home – the Aravalli Hills, narrowly defined recently by the Supreme Court to open them up to vast mining and construction interests. Activists have challenged these as irreversible and permanent. Vibha’s work was made with material from the actual site, and her signature ghungroos reflect this permanent ecological loss caused. 

Artist: Vibha Galhotra; Installation: Echoes of Time

Yet hardly anyone wants to examine ultranationalism, majoritarianism or ‘the way we were’. Neither is this new. Last year’s fair was flagged by art publication The Art Newspaper for its caution in exhibiting “anti-BJP sentiments and art about inter-communal violence, Hindu Muslim relations and Pakistan.” This year feels similar, as if institutions have calibrated programming to keep out explicitly political referencing for fear of a backlash and repeat of 2020 when police shut down a CAA protest work. Safety first. 

Yet though content is king, it isn’t the only one that drives the narrative. Participation, immersion, connectivity and commerce also power ripples of change in the city’s identity and branding. 

To transition its legacy crafts into contemporary avatars, Jaipur had to attract the right alchemists. Despite the city’s lurking Romeos and its arsenic-laced groundwater dark zones that an estimated 92% rely on, both JAW and JLF – which travel writer Pico Iyer calls the “grand daddy” of lit fests – have helped the city build an ecosystem of global collaborators and creators that allows it to moor the Jaipur brand as international yet anchored.

Amin Jaffer, who will be curating the soon-to-be-established museums in the recently emptied North and South Blocks in Delhi, contextualises how this local, regional and rooted event becomes the city’s cultural booster in the hierarchy of the global arts world. 

Dr Amin Jaffer, art historian and Director, Al Thani Museum, and Joanna Chevalier, Artistic Director, CMS Collection and Saudi Arabia Biennale

Similarly, despite the polite version of art without dissent, it is the IAF’s muscular sales and attendance – or commerce – that makes it such a powerful event. 

Setting aside the social brawn or ‘masala’, it is also an exceptional, high-quality event with serious art represented by a record 135 exhibitors and serious commerce revealed by a widening collector base and several 90 percent sold booths, including high-priced works up to $1,300,000 (Rs 12 crore) sold in 2026. IAF’s role as a gateway between South Asia and the international art world has entered a “decisive new chapter”, according to IAF Director Jaya Asokan. “Our 2026 edition shows that that exchange now flows powerfully in both directions.” 

It is why over 17 years, the IAF has also positioned Delhi as the global art capital of contemporary South Asian art with an ecosystem of robust art institutions, collectors, art districts and museums, giving the ‘hidden city’ a chance to crawl out of its Capital avatar – a place where the average citizen’s powerlessness in a city of power, is in itself, a defining narrative.

For a moment every year at flagship events like this, a Delhi resident can forget their city requires four teams to keep stray cattle away from the AI Summit, that their river currently has toxic foam bobbing on it like cotton candy or the nagging feeling their sense of belonging is irrelevant; and simply enjoy this power, of feeling their city’s synchronicity with other cities of consequence the world over, of changing the script and seeing a gateway into fresh urban identities, away from the ones they are saddled with. 

In the hierarchy of requisites to call an urban conglomeration a city – such as roads, hospitals, schools, covered manholes where people don’t drown in sewage, air that doesn’t choke, rivers that don’t foam, and essential services that actually collect garbage – art and culture may appear to be at the bottom of the list.

In fact, the art event – the ‘passing circus’, the ‘spectacle’ – gives the possibility of redefining cities beyond the fixed lens of decay, unworkability, datedness or stuck branding. 

Whether by its commercial muscle, as with Delhi or by public accessibility and legacy skills like Jaipur, it can establish, build, reshape and propel identity out of its dusty, boxed-in frames. No mean feat. 

Yet in a messy, inconvenient way, it can also become a beautifully staged act of looking away at the moment it is most crucial to see.

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