Rave, rinse, repeat: An incomplete history of Delhi’s nightlife through the ages

In the 1950s-60s, Delhi was finding its legs in a freshly independent India. Those who could, would flock to members-only colonial clubs — Constitution Club, Delhi Club, the Gymkhana, the Roshanara club and the Chelmsford Club. Meanwhile, Regal Theatre in Connaught Place was the hub for Western classical music and Shakespearean theatre performances, years before Mandi House took centrestage.

Restaurants such as Volga, Gaylord (in the Regal building), Standard, Kwality, United Coffee House, Embassy — mostly in and around Connaught Place since before Partition — offered a respectable, PG atmosphere for families to savour plates of naan-chicken curry. At some point, Gaylord introduced a wooden dance floor (till then Gymkhana was the only place that boasted one) where jazz bands played Elvis and Sinatra covers.

The ’70s brought the groove to Delhi. It’s a toss up between The Cellar at Regal and Tabela at the Oberoi for the capital’s first discotheque — but both were haunted by Delhi’s young and restless, “where couples stole kisses, men wore long hair and bell-bottoms, and the air was thick with smoke from questionable sources,” as a 2009 India Today piece put it poetically. There was also Wheels (“It’s a Moving Thing” went the tagline) at the Ambassador hotel. “‘Hey swinger!’ called out an ad, ‘This is the scene!’,” wrote a senior journalist in The Hindustan Times in 2012.

“One Coca-Cola which sold for one rupee outside could be consumed there for Rs 4 in pitch darkness,” reminisced Neemrana hotels’ co-founder Aman Nath, of hanging around Tabela, in an article for Outlook in 2020. “As school kids, we considered it bad value for money but we hovered like bees till they introduced cover charges and we laid off to go instead to the Cellar in the Regal Building at Connaught Place.”

The legendary Ghungroo dropped the needle at ITC Maurya in 1978 and very quickly came to dominate Delhi’s nightlife. Within two decades, club culture had flourished, mushrooming mainly inside Delhi’s prestigious 5-star hotels. To name some places worth their shiny disco balls: There was Djinns at the Hyatt, My Kind of Place at Taj Palace, Annabelles at Hotel Intercontinental, Mirage at The Surya Best Western Hotel, and Float at The Park Royal, Nehru Place Community Centre — all of which stayed open till 5-6 am on weekends. It was, in a way, a real party circuit.

For the 23-odd years that Ghungroo was alive — it tried to gain second wind in 2013, when it was opened at WelcomHotel Dwarka, and failed — it epitomised club culture and nightlife in Delhi. According to What’s Hot, “Ghungroo was a pioneer with club music under DJ Sunny Sarid to the first girl DJ who took over the console. It also organised Delhi’s first ‘Ladies’ Night’ which was called ‘Please Senorita’.”

DJ Sunny Sarid, considered something of a pioneer in the world of Indian DJs, is also thought to have brought Bollywood and indie-pop to the club dancefloor, which had been until then dominated by disco-based chart toppers from the West. And there was the rising profile of their patronage: Ghungroo’s (and the others’) immovable position on the radar of Bollywood celebrities (like Zeenat Aman, Amitabh Bachchan and Dimple Kapadia) and cricketers has been widely documented.

Even as clubbing began to seem more desirable — an aspirational activity — at their peak, these discotheques and nightclubs in 5-star hotels perpetuated the exclusivity of colonial clubs — except the gentry now was made up of the jet setters, the fashion designers, pilots and air stewards, the models and socialites, business scions and cricketers.

Of Hyatt’s Djinns, a “faux English fun pub”, Conde Nast Traveller said: “Soon, the line outside became the most famous thing about it. Substituting an official membership with a strict door policy meant that (Hyatt Regency’s current GM), often stationed at the entrance, was under strong orders from the [then] general manager to ‘control the profile of the guests’.” By Y2K New Year’s Eve party time, club bouncers were making headlines.

But early in the new millennium, the nightclub lost a lot of its sheen. “Disco is dead in India's metros,” declared an India Today piece in 2004. The reasons for this were many, including “unreasonable curfews” that ended the night at 1.30 am; and a shift in culture, where people didn’t want to go do the “Macarena” as much as just “chill out”. In fact, what remained of Delhi’s clubs — F Bar, Dublin, Shalom, Agni — no longer wanted to call themselves clubs. Now they were lounges. Bars. Restobars.

While those looking for strobe lights and dancefloors headed out to Gurgaon’s Fireball at 32nd Milestone and Elevate in Noida; in Delhi and the NCR, standalone bars, pubs and cafes took off. Turquoise Cottage was one of the first rock-pubs to open in Adhchini in 1997. On the menu were Thai and Chinese crowd-pleasers and beer on tap; and from its speakers blasted classic rock.

As a RedBull.com piece notes, TC’s owner Gaurav Soral struck up a friendship with the late Amit Saigal, the venerated founder of Rock Street Journal. With Soral’s space and Saigal’s eye for talent, TC would soon attain cult status as the destination to discover Indian rock bands — at a time when rock had become the soundtrack of our lives.

With Mezz at NFC, RPM in Vasant Vihar and Cafe Morrison at South Ex (and yes, Hard Rock Cafe and TGIF! too for a while), we now had a rock pub circuit: More accessible to university kids both in terms of cash and coolth. This was where a lot of Indian indie rock royalty, including Parikrama, The Superfuzz, Indigo Children, Them Clones, Undying Inc and many more found their feet, fame and fans for a lifetime. On a larger scale, music began to figure more prominently in both the way spaces were designed and the profile of their clientele. Going out was, it seemed, becoming a matter of taste, not access; and Delhi’s nightlife was, within its limits, beginning to offer up a smorgasbord of options.

The 2010s exemplified this. There were false starts, sure. In 2009 blueFrog Delhi, with its eclectic programming, heavy duty focus on live music and success in Mumbai, took the party to Mehrauli (not too far away from the erstwhile original TC). It couldn’t survive. A much-hyped Playboy Club opened at the Samrat hotel in 2017, complete with hydraulic islands for VIP tables, light and sound installation by international designers, an island bar and multiple consoles for VIP DJs. The only time it’s in the news now is in connection to drugs or violent activity.

Other, more organic endeavours had more success, perhaps because they spoke to India’s rising middle class youth. Rakshay Dhariwal’s speakeasy PCO opened in 2012, and became the buzziest spot in town overnight; an early mover in the mixology movement in full swing today. Keshav Suri’s Kitty Su opened at The Lalit in 2011. The OG bastion of queer culture, it’s where India’s drag queens and kings found their wings. This was a different kind of exclusivity, one based on shared interest and community, rather than gatekeeping.

Techno and hip hop heads made a beeline for Auro, Summerhouse or AntiSocial. Arjun Sagar Gupta’s Piano Man Jazz Club (2015) came through with a strongly defined identity as a jazz bar; and thrives to this day, catering to folks with eclectic taste in music and whisky. Neighbourhoods like Khan Market, Greater Kailash-II, Hauz Khas Village morphed into fine-dine or party districts, mirroring what Connaught Place or Pandara Road were till the 1990s — just with more neon.

A pub crawl in Hauz Khas Village in the early 2010s was the "it" thing, when it metamorphosed into the city’s hippest destination. At its peak circa 2014, navigating HKV’s lively, narrow, crowded streets on a weekend was an ordeal — with everyone packing it in before bouncers started handing out plastic glasses and escorting you out before midnight.

New spaces, pockets, destinations have emerged. Today, Delhi’s nightlife enthusiasts congregate at Dhanmill Compound and the Qutub Institutional Area. In tune with India’s craft liquor boom, award-winning microbreweries, whisky and cocktail bars — such as Sidecar, the Drunken Botanist, Whisky Samba, Kakapo, Perch, Diablo — have emerged across Delhi and the NCR. Especially post-pandemic, there’s been an absolute boom in the number, range and type of spaces flinging open their doors in every corner of the city.

Indeed, a lot of it’s crapshoot: The whole F&B business is, and probably always will be. But more public-facing hours for these spaces — so Delhi’s hard-working population can sample and savour this bevy of options at greater leisure — has been a long time coming. After all, to paraphrase the wise singer-songwriter Ke$ha, the party don’t start till we walk in.