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A heaviness becomes sticky in my chest every time I’ve walked out of something hosted by Arjun Shivaji Jain. It’s one I look forward to. On the last day of his first book club, surrounded by a couple of us in his own living room, he shared that the property on which stands the Red House, an independent cultural centre in Okhla, Delhi, would be sold and likely demolished by the end of this October.
One of the greatest compliments I could pay that space is I’ve not once minded waiting in their outdoors amphitheatre for however long they need, for whatever daring thing they’re doing. Scraped Gothic brick-lined walls and plants that grow wildly, looking up into the bare sky, let out silence scantily found in Okhla. It allows you to prepare.
Born around the COVID pandemic, events at the Red House have been programmed over the years entirely on whims and fancies. Some of them: kintsugi, cyanotype and stream of consciousness writing workshops, guitar and charkha spinning classes, boudoir model painting and poker classes, exhibits of art from across the world and in collaboration with a Chief Justice across the border, concerts, screenings, hours-long poetry readings, and even the occasional wedding and birthday or two. ‘Where’s the calendar?’, I’d imagine, is how Delhi’s gallery circuit and contemporary art spaces would respond.
In fact, the Red House announced a call for punk musicians to perform the morning after Arjun, another book club attendee and I were jamming and talking about metal music. (I have no way of confirming if they’re related.) In Red House discussions, you have an outspoken permission to argue and swear and bring up tangentially related, taboo things, including the stuff of inconvenience and grief, which most certainly makes some uncomfortable.
If you’re lucky, that discomfort is a beginning to having your expectations of an ‘art event’ turn over on its head. This place claims it’s for those ‘unafraid to live’. In short, you’ll never be able to predict what’s next.
For now, the folks at Red House are certain only that their work will continue after the property is gone. Until then, they’re striving to do every last thing they wanted to do inside their thin, high-ceiling, painting-adorned Gothic cathedral, ‘designed to remove psychological distance’. And their garden, their balcony with a painting by 20 artists, and even… a white-curtained Airbnb. Yes, you can rent out the place before mid-September, for yourself or for an event, and it comes with being interrupted by nothing but birds, and perhaps a candle-lit dinner. In South Delhi.
Why you should visit the Red House in Okhla before October
Some of whom the Red House fondly calls Red House Residents are helping them ease the place out. A trekker I met at their last film screening is aiding with moving their delicate plants (some of which can be purchased, by the way). Manual labour, work with your bare hands, is something Arjun feels is crucial to appreciating the arts and the world. Red House was built by him, brick and lime, on top of ancestral property that had housed an electronics factory since the 1960s. The factory was one of the first to produce transformers when colour television came to India.
Arjun does not have a background in architecture – in fact, he describes himself as a nuclear physicist-turned-artist. He is quick to tell anyone who asks (and some who don’t) that his influences were mostly English, John Ruskin, to be specific, how he built up the place with no blueprint, much like a sculpture. Crouched on my opposite end in the amphitheatre, he chews over on that information, before he begins speaking again. ‘See, this all began with COVID. We lost our father. The Red House began because I wanted people who care about music and art around me.’
The place has attracted architecture students for merits of its own. I find myself looking down at the stepping stones. It’s strange to interview someone I’ve just watched a film by, talking about marriage while undertaking the Dandi march.
Sunaina, a former journalist, is sitting beside him, calmly watching for an opportunity to film for their page, as ever. Their mother, Anju, is a full-time teacher, but on weekends, she helps out with a small kitchen behind us they call Coilwinder’s Arms Cafe. I have my opinions on the best coffee in Delhi, but if she needed her time to come up with a small paper cup with a tiny snack, I would give her all day and probably distract her by talking to her. You’d know why if you meet her. She’s been there for their worst days.
A space of your own means control. It means not relying on funding. ‘Suddenly, I found I had the power of making my ideas real. Things that people really think about. We’re unafraid of bad press,’ Arjun says. ‘It’s been difficult to maintain from the beginning. We’ve just been profitable enough.’ At this juncture, Sunaina chips in. One of their biggest wins, she says, is taking workshops to Mumbai, Bengaluru and Goa; and even abroad, to Croatia: ‘Opportunities began to come to us fast.’
I pay for these events, despite the barrage of free exhibitions and sessions you can find at art galleries in Delhi. (The Red House is explicitly for profit.) Summer has only just started to give in to the monsoon. Several spots advertise themselves as an air-conditioned haven to effectively escape the heat or ‘brainrot’. Money is a ‘gauge’, Arjun says, that makes sure people who want to do the thing show up to do the damn thing.
And they do show up. I’ve broken a months-long writer’s block in their workshops. I’ve laughed my guts off and felt tears well in the book club, hosted in Arjun’s house, where I’ve been moved by the same people whose ideas I’ve ridiculed and they have done the same for me. The Jains have chastised them when they’re late. We worked around a ban on literary theory for one and a half hours, every Saturday for five weeks. Not much of a blueprint, there, either.
The details
Where: B-203, Pocket B, Okhla Phase I, Okhla, New Delhi, Delhi 110020
The Red House's Instagram: @redhouse.world
The Red House's website: https://arjunjain.in/redhouseworld