Kathputli colony, the slum of Delhi artists (watch pics)

New Delhi: Kathputli is a slum located in West Delhi's Shadipur locality. It is a popular stop in the city for foreign journalists and amateur photographers.It came into existence in 1970 when a handful of itinerant performers from Rajasthan settled here.Over time, they were joined by a variety of artists from states like Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, and together, they began to cohere into a single settlement known as Kathputli after the type of string puppet theatre performed by its residents.Now the slum is populated with Hindu, Muslim and sikh communities from different states of India, such as Bihar, Uttar-Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab and Andhra-Pradesh. The Rajasthani community has a large number of puppeteer artists,some of whom have performed in Europe and continue to show their art to tourists in Delhi hotels. All came here decades ago and Kathputli has been their home ever since.Kathputli came into lime light in 1980 when artists from the colony gained international recognition through performances at the “Festival of India” in the U.K. in 1982 and in the United States in 1985. This colony may well have been the inspiration for the “magician's ghetto” in Salman Rushdie's “Midnight's Children”.With its narrow streets and narrower alleys, this colony is among the Delhi government's first experiments in the so-called in situ development strategy under which residents of jhuggi jhopdi clusters transition to temporary housing while the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) reconstructs the settlment, and then shifts the slum-dwellers back onto the original plot and into improved housing.The blueprint envisages that a private developer, Raheja Developers Ltd, will construct at least 2,000 flats to accommodate residents of the neighbourhood and at the same time develop 170 luxury flats. On the face of it, the strategy is a winner: the residents get constructed flats, the builders access to plum real estate and the government, which has already initiated a census of the neighbourhood to establish residency, stands to reap enormous goodwill. But inhabitants of the colony are suspicious of the offer as they weathered demolition of their homes in 1970s. Moreover they work for themselves, they depend on being in the center of the city in order to find out quickly about jobs like weddings and birthday parties, which is why they say they have said no over the years to moving to sites that are further away.