Naraka is the underworld, hell for Hindus, where souls are tormented. The nearest earthly equivalent might be Palika Bazaar in New Delhi, a sprawling, unsavoury underground market of almost 400 stalls selling counterfeit fashion, pornography and stolen goods, located beneath Connaught Place, the city’s main commercial area during the Raj and now a collection of western brand shops, banks and overpriced coffee shops.
The air below ground is heavy with the smell of sweat, pan, urine, detergent, spices, fried food, cheap alcohol and exhaustion. Police raids are common. For the past decade, the long, barely neon-lit corridors and stalls have also been home to some one hundred tattoo shops – many cubicle size with just barely enough space for the tattooist and the client – making Palika Bazaar quite possibly the largest permanent tattoo market in the world. Prior to its existence, Delhi’s commercial tattooists often worked out of barber shops, much as the sailors who opened the first small tattoo booths in the back of hairdressers in 19th century USA.
Today, Delhi’s hip youngsters descend below the city to get inked for as little as 300 Rupees. Palika Bazaar is a weekend hang-out. Hell is almost fashionable. Ravi runs the Real 4 Lee Tattoo Shop. The walls are covered with hundreds of photographs of terribly dated, clichéd tattoos lifted from the pages of tattoo magazines. Ravi sports tattoos of Shiva, creator and destroyer of the universe, somehow appropriate in this world of shadows and pain.
“Most of our clients come here with an idea they have seen on the Internet. We do a lot of cover-ups because people can’t afford laser removal.” One of Ravi’s tattooists is busy putting the crude outline of the Statue of Liberty on the arm of a customer who’s barely out of his teens and too shy to tell us why he’s picked this particular icon as his first tattoo. Hygiene here is better than on the street, the artists all use gloves and fresh needles, but the general environment is grim.
Becoming a shop tattooist in India is no mean feat and involves a five month apprenticeship, for which a show owner will collect some 50.000 Rupees from his charge. This system weeds out the undecided, but it creates phenomenal challenges for poor artists who spend years saving up money to pay the fees to their mentors. Outside the Real 4 Lee Tattoo Shop, a man in white alligator shoes and a loud shirt counts through a thick bundle of Rupee notes with movie bad guy flourish. He won’t tell us his name, but he’s the boss and he’s collecting, not just from Ravi’s shop. Welcome to Naraka, the underworld. text and photos Laure Siegel and Tom Vater
