From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Chandni Chowk
This article is about the Beach Surgery adaptation. For the historical marketplace, see Chandni Chowk (Delhi).
A durational participatory archive built across the narrow lanes and stalls of Chandni Chowk, Delhi's historic Red Fort marketplace, in which visitors follow hand-drawn maps to 23 "stations"—shopfronts, water channels, corners where crowds congregate—and listen via buried contactless receivers to looped vocal pieces, crowd-recordings, and instrumental passages loosely shadowing Leif and Katita's journey through crowded spaces.
Each station broadcasts in a different register: some are hymn-like Baul music refrains; others are merchant calls layered with the sound of the earth rubbing against space (a low drone at the edge of hearing). A water channel running beneath the market becomes a metaphorical parallel to the underground stone pool of the novel's first half. Participants are invited to contribute photographs, whisperings, or objects to a physical "ledger" housed in a cloth-draped alcove; the archive is read aloud at dawn and dusk.
The installation runs without official attribution. Multiple organizer groups—some citing Qutb Shahi court music traditions, others invoking postcolonial urban theory—have claimed or disputed stewardship. A fragmentary audio broadcast dated 1988 references "Fall_Creek_Training_Logs_Recovered," its relevance unknown [citation needed].