Disappearing acts: Delhi's 'magicians' colony' is braced for the bulldozers

The summer heat appears to have no effect on Bhagwan Das Bhat. He sits in a dimly lit, light-pink room with his legs folded on the cement floor, sipping hot tea and smoking a beedi (a cheap hand-rolled cigarette), as the mercury touches 43 degrees Celsius. Surrounded by musical instruments, metal trunks and rucksacks stuffed with bright, but very small, clothing, the 65-year-old leisurely inhales long puffs of short, thin tobacco granules wrapped in a leaf and blows the smoke towards a rickety table fan, gusting warm air. 

Bhat is a puppeteer by profession and has been in the family business for almost six decades. Soon, four French tourists will arrive at his house, for an afternoon performance given by the puppet master, a son and a grandson.

Once a prominent performance art in India, today Bhat's kathputlis - "wooden carved dolls" - are seen mainly by tourists and people with personal connections to the shows.

Bhat lives in New Delhi's fabled Kathputli Colony, the inspiration for the magicians' ghetto in Salman Rushdie's 1980 novel Midnight's Children. However, an inspiration it may be, this "colony" is living on borrowed time, as it faces demolition to make way for a shopping centre and a block of luxury flats. The residents were told they had to start moving out in February, but so far few have left, and no one is sure what the next move will be.

The area is categorised as a slum - it's a bona fide version of the raw poverty portrayed in the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire; an eyesore on Delhi's horizon - but Kathputli Colony's character, argue many, outweighs the definition. This is a slum with a soul. It is a beautiful, solitary conglomeration of India's traditional folk artists - many of whom have been ambassadors for their country - and the world's largest community of street performers.

Spread over 5.22 hectares - roughly the size of nine football pitches - the quarter is home to more than 13,000 people, living in about 3,000 houses painted bright turquoise, green and pink. It's a maze of meandering, narrow lanes where open sewage flows like a stream in between the tightly packed houses, and where magic, craft and performance linger on every street corner.

Fifty years ago, this was a campsite for travelling gypsies who were passing through Delhi. With increasing opportunities in the capital, people such as Bhat and his family opted to settle here, in makeshift tents, in an area that was surrounded by jungle. And this is where puppeteers, magicians, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, dancers, acrobats and snake charmers from far-flung states prospered.