Depot48 Delhi: Inside the City's Queer-Friendly Live Music Pioneer
The room Delhi’s queer scene built, and the indie music scene with it: twelve years inside Depot48
The pioneer
Delhi's queer nightlife in 2014 lived mostly in private flats, invitation-only parties, and events that moved from venue to venue by whisper. Section 377 was still in force. The city did not have a reliable, walk-in, come-as-you-are bar where a queer couple could show up on a weeknight without first calculating the room.
Then two brothers-in-law opened one in M Block Market, Greater Kailash 2. Depot48 occupied the second floor and the rooftop of a corner bungalow. It was intimate, acoustically treated, and run by people who had the taste to build a listening room that actually sounded good and the lived experience to build one in which queerness could be ordinary rather than an occasion.
Twelve years later, it is still Delhi's longest-running live music venue, and still the queer scene's most consistent room.
The founders
Vikas Narula and Girjashanker Vohra co-founded Depot48 in 2014. Vikas, a marketer and writer, had lived in Sydney and Bombay and come back to Delhi feeling the gap between what the city offered and what it could. Girja is a National Award-winning sound engineer, which is why the room sounds the way it does. Between them, they have run the place with a conviction that is now rare in Indian hospitality: original music only, no cover bands, warm and slightly lived-in interiors, pricing kept accessible on purpose, and inclusivity structured into how the staff is trained, how security operates, and how the room is programmed, rather than deployed once a year in June.
"I never wanted Depot48 to be a queer-only venue," Vikas has said about the project. "I wanted it to be a space where queerness could simply co-exist naturally and visibly, without constantly needing explanation or justification." Which is the quieter achievement of the bar, and arguably the more useful one. Queer regulars share tables here with musicians, diplomats, students, allies, and the rotating crowd a good listening room in a major city attracts.
What's on at Depot48, on Urbanaut
Scroll Depot48's upcoming lineup on Urbanaut and the breadth of what the room programs comes into view in a single afternoon. MIRAYA is a college-age band breaking into the Delhi scene, following a lineage of Depot48 debutantes (Ashwin Shaji, Olive Regan of Pain Protocol, Parikshit of Beshaq) who went on to play rooms far bigger than this one. Moonraker is a rock classics night, the kind of set that fills the terrace with people who know every word. Mehfil-e-Ghazal with Tanushree brings Dr. Tanushree Kashyap Sharma, a Hindustani Classical vocalist and ghazal artist, into the intimate second-floor room for an evening designed to feel up close rather than performative. Mehfil-e-Yashraj is twelve-year-old ghazal and Sufi singer Yashraj, trained by his guru Sh. Sudhanshu Ehsaas, in what is likely to be one of the quieter standout shows of the season. And Green Day Tribute is a covers night powered by Shor Machao, Infinities, Delhivision, and Purple Cassette, built for anyone whose teenage years ran on American Idiot.