How Bangalore is defining what urban culture means in India…. and why Akhila Srinivas of The Courtyard is the most important cultural figure in Bangalore today.

 

There have been many articles written about Akhila Srinivas and what she has created at The Courtyard. They talk about the incredible pop ups at The Conservatory or the way Wine in Progress makes wine non-intimidating. How The Courtyard incubated Naru Noodle Bar and  how The Middle Room is the best listening experience in town. 

Somehow none of these articles really worked for me. They seem to narrow the scope of Akhila’s work and her significance. Everything comes down to seeing her work through the reductive lens of food, and I’ve never seen Akhila and her work being (just) about F and B.

To me, Akhila Srinivas is the most culturally significant figure in Bangalore currently. Working at the intersection of urban design and community, she is showing us how to make a city more liveable, and helping define what Indian urban culture can mean when it is not rooted in historicity. 

Akhila is someone who is only accidentally in the world of F and B, who finds herself in a position of influence in a space where she never sought it, whose motivations were driven by the broader urban experience than just one aspect of it. But to understand what The Courtyard really is, it is important to understand Akhila’s journey and what led her here. 

Akhila grew up in the Bangalore of PSU’s and broad, tree lined avenues. Her father ran a company that made watch cases for HMT. Life followed the familiar rhythms of Bangalore. Dosas at Chalukya hotel. Sunday morning visits to Russel Market to buy meat followed by a gigantic family breakfast. The occasional restaurant meal at Blue Fox or Nanking or Tycoon. 

This cloistered Bangalore life finally changed when Akhila’s father was appointed as the Chairman of the Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC) when Akhila was thirteen. Sitting and listening to him talk about work, Akhila started looking at the world around her with fresh eyes. Whether it was exploring culture in Kashmir when accompanying him on a work trip, or holidays abroad, or roaming Bangalore and its localities, Akhila started observing how people interact with a city and engage with it. What do they see? What do they seek? What do they remember? What do they do? What do they struggle with? It was a perspective that Akhila had never had and it awakened a new way of looking at places in her. 

This new perspective coincided with a growing social and political consciousness. Having grown up in a politically active family, Akhila grew up as a self-described angsty youth. Influenced by the likes of NDTV and Barkha Dutt, she wanted to be politician or activist, and was driven by the idea of the change she could help bring and the impact she could make.

This focus on public impact led Akhila to study architecture and urban design in university in Bangalore where the projects that excited her were in areas like public housing and parks. This was only reinforced after college where along with a stint at Dutta Kannan architects, she also worked at Auroville and with the legendary Naresh Narsimhan who was changing the way Bangalore thought about urban spaces. 

This exposure let Akhila to America and a post graduate degree in Urban Design at Columbia. For a while it looked like Akhila had found her calling. She came back to India and joined Naresh’s urban design think tank. She then moved to Interland, a French urban design firm doing public space design in India, applying to competitions across the country. And then the pinnacle… her own architectural practice in 2012.

And that’s when the bottom fell out.

Running an architectural startup was a very different ball game from thinking about big urban design interventions with a global firm. And while the work was interesting by almost any standard, working on offices and large residences didn’t inspire Akhila. Her work was excellent, the money was rolling in… but she had lost her sense of purpose. Five years into the journey, in mid 2017, after an exhausting and brain numbing argument about the colour of bathroom tiles, Akhila walked away from her practice in a moment that would change the trajectory of her life forever. 

She didn’t have a plan. With a two year old child, chronic burnout and a severe lack of inspiration, she sought out her younger self and that feeling of impact and possibility. And as she did, her mind kept going back to the family house and courtyard when her grandparents had once lived. 

Akhila kept urging her grandmother to let her take over the space and create something. She knew the place had potential, although it wasn’t yet clear to her how that potential could find expression. A few years earlier, her grandmother had rented the space to Jaaga, an art tech community where artists and techies came together to work and hang, in a highly functional workspace that used palate racks to keep costs low and facilitate engagement. This was the genesis of an idea for Akhila, as she started thinking of a new way of engaging with work and community. 

It reminded Akhila of her time in New York as well as her vists to Berlin, a city that served as a continual source of inspiration. She thought of how the Brutalist style National Theatre was designed in a way that the ground floor became a place for young people to congregate and skateboard, creating a vibrant young energy instead of a place for rich, old people. More importantly, she kept thinking about how the reason this happened was because this was an approach based on design intent rather than core functional usage.

Nothing like that existed in Bangalore. While a few community based places had emerged, they were usage and interest led like Ranga Shankara for theatre or Humming Tree for music. The questions of how design leads to community, how urban culture forms organically through this community… these were questions that had never been explored outside of the communities in Cubbon Park, a space created over a hundred and fifty years ago. 

So Akhila took a loan of 1.2 cr to design and build the space of her dreams, a space for community and culture, and that didn’t seek to define what culture meant at the outset, be it music or theatre or comedy or food or drink. The idea was to create three spaces. An open space, a semi open space, a closed space, each of which was adaptable to different interests or use cases. The design approach was Corbusian, highly flexible, with no walls, only columns, using beams and metal sheets instead of brick.. a highly flexible approach that allowed for adaptable spaces. 

True to her vision, The Courtyard began as an eclectic art and cultural space. Dance workshops. Theatre practices. Music performances. Movie screenings. Food was never a focus or even an active thought until the realities of the bank loan and Bangalore real estate yields pushed her to think about how to make the space financially self sustaining. That’s when she realised that food was the element of culture that was the most economically sustainable, while also being the quickest pathway to build community.

A little known fact is that Kanishka of Navu was the first person to kick off food at The Courtyard. She was already a star in Bangalore’s food scene with her supper clubs and with Akhila’s encouragement, she opened her first physical space operating a cafe at The Courtyard. And it was while sitting there one day that they decided, to try and experiment with popups, with the first ever popup at The Courtyard being a Thai meal cooked by Kanishka. It wasn’t easy to get people to see The Courtyard as an F and B space in 2019 and even twenty seats were hard to sell. But gradually the concept began to catch on, with one chef every month, including the first ever Navu popup where Kanishka and Pallavi collaborated, and the birth of a partnership that would lead to Bangalore’s favourite restaurant. 

After the pause during Covid, the popups started taking a life of their own. I don’t need to narrate this chapter of the story. Everyone knows how The Conservatory became the place where Bangalore experienced the best food that the country had to offer. The place where the world discovered the breadth and openness of Bangalore’s appetite. And more importantly the place where Bangalore discovered there was more to their palate than comfort! It was the place that made the city realise that this city of gigantic brewpubs actually craved intimacy, connection, community… that tiny spaces driven by passion and courage were as much a part of the Bangalore’s DNA as the comforts of biryani and gobi manchurian. And it helped the city discover a whole new generation of talent. Kanishka and Pallavi. Kavan Kuthappa. Aditya Kidambi. Anurag Arora. And many many more. The Courtyard and The Conservatory and Wine in Progress and Naru changed how Bangalore ate and drank, and as Bangalore’s influence grew, this space that Akhila created started impacting how every large city in India looked at F and B.

This was success by any measure, except Akhila’s own. This is one of the things I respect about Akhila, her integrity of thought and action. For all the success and recognition, The Courtyard had become a curated F and B landlord. It has community and culture, but only through the lens of food. And if the mandate was to create a space that allowed urban culture to form and emerge, then it wss important to not let it be highjacked by F and B, which is often the path of least resistance. 

This is how the Middle Room came to be. After Subko launched at The Courtyard, Akhila was inundated with F and B offers but she pushed back. She was determined to get culture back into the heart of The Courtyard. Like everything she has done, the Middle Room has been a path breaking success, an immersive listening experience unlike any other place in the country, a place where creators, curators and listeners can meet, engage and connect over a shared love of music. And going forward, the next iteration of The Courtyard will see a re-emphasis on all aspects of culture while sitting on a bedrock of F and B.

And like it was important for The Courtyard to be seen as more than just F and B venue, it was equally important for it to be seen as more than an event space. That’s why the design intent is based around smaller units. Each unit speaks to an individual and asks “what’s your jam?”, and in that process begins the process of creating micro communities within The Courtyard around different interests and aspects of culture. 

Let’s zoom out for a moment and try and understand what it is that Akhila has created. It is an attempt to understand what a person of culture in urban India means. And it is an attempt to understand this in a way that is easily accessible and stripped of intellectual gatekeeping or pretension. 

A person of culture goes beyond one great passion. They may love their food or their beer. But they may also enjoy listening to analog music or a live performance. They may enjoy sipping wine while chatting with the person sitting alongside at about a heritage walk. So yes, F and B is a big part of it, but the idea is to complement that with layers of conversation,community and connection, infuse it with other forms of culture, and create a space that feels richer, for a person who wants more from urban life than work and a few hobbies. 

This goes to the heart of what The Courtyard is about. How does one nourish a person who seeks to engage with the culture of city life? Because culture is created in an ethos, a sense of space, of historicity, of philosophy and not just the consumption of food or the opening of new restaurants and bars.

The challenge we have in Bangalore is that our sense of historicity limits culture compared to Delhi. Yes I know the history of Bangalore, even before Kempe Gowda 1. But the Bangalore we know today is a very modern, urban construct. It doesn’t have millennia of historical layering that is visibly and tangibly present like the palimpsest that is Delhi. Culture is created through melting pots, and the melting pot has been stirring for centuries in Delhi but only decades in Bangalore. In some senses, this is what Bombay was able to achieve until the 90s, when it created a template for a post-independent modern Indian city, a city that wrote and defined its own culture in real time, linked to its history but not defined or chained by it. 

But as Bombay became Mumbai, its cultural impact became monochromatic, largely defined by cinema. Today, Mumbai is wrapped up in money and Bollywood and transactions. Delhi in power and history. Chennai and Kolkata are culturally rich but insular and inward looking, while Hyderabad still feels provincial. That leaves us with Bangalore, a Petri dish where urban culture is being created and defined, and where The Courtyard is the beating heart of this process. 

The essence of urban culture in Bangalore today is micro communities that overlap and meet and merge and evolve like living organisms. They are rooted in space (like Bangalore International Centre) or interest (like Sisters in Sweat or the book club at Cubbon Park). And these communities don’t live in silos. A person may go for a guided walk through Chickpet on a Friday night, spend Saturday morning in Chakra, spend the afternoon at a flea market, the evening at a Bangalore Cocktail Club get together at Soka or jamming to music at the Middle Room. All these places share an ethos, a sense of community, a sense of shared experience that was catalysed and crystallised through The Courtyard. Most importantly, all these places are inclusive. There’s no intellectual gate keeping, no class or caste heirarchies, no separation of the new Bangalore from “Old Bangalore”. 

Culture allows you to go from surviving mode to thriving mode. It creates a sense of autonomy, an escape from the sense of monotony and routine that defines most urban Indian landscapes. And in Bangalore, this city of rootless professional migrants, this intersection of culture and community creates an anchor to hold on to, a sense of belonging, an end to transience. 

I moved to Bangalore from Mumbai seven years ago. And I wouldn’t live anywhere else. This is a city whose soul is finding expression in a way that feels fresh and renewed and exciting. And Akhila Srinivas has played a bigger role in this journey than anyone I know. Which is why I find it crazy when people write articles defining her as an F and B entrepreneur. Because she is creating the template for being a person of culture in urban India today. And in the process, she is enriching our lives in ways that go far beyond food.