Underneath the ivory lights that turn its white walls into a homely cream, Digging in India, Nishant Mittal’s vinyl store in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat, looks just like my childhood home. Except, mine was never lined with cupboards stacked high with vinyls featuring Nazia Hassan posing with her brother Zoheb on the cover of their 1983 album Young Tarang. Or singer-songwriter Asha Puthli gazing into the distance on the cover of her 1976 song ‘Space Talk’. There are also crates filled with cassettes promising the soulful melodies of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen, and the life-changing tunes of Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead. You’d be forgiven for picturing Mittal as a white-bearded septuagenarian reminiscing about the glory days of music, cigarette in one hand, the other balled into a fist to express his dismay at ‘the garbage being produced today.’ I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted by a millennial-Gen Z cusp on Zoom. “Yeah, I was born in 1995,” he grins. “Records were almost dead by then. By the time I was old enough to understand music, it was 2006, and cassettes were also disappearing.”
Curiosity made him buy the Disco Party vinyl by Percy Faith eleven years ago at a flea market, but it was a fortuitous meeting with his now deceased friend Jeff Valla that changed his life. “He was a big record collector in New York and pursuing his PhD in Gurgaon,” the 30-year-old recalls. “We got talking because the friend I was with was wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.” A reluctant law student at the time, Mittal was instantly captivated by Jeff’s shop talk. “He started speaking about records, and somehow, it was everything I ever wanted to do,” he smiles.
Today, good friends share Spotify playlists, but back then, Jeff took Mittal record digging—an activity that involves fishing out an unexpected banger from a pile of records. Having grown up on a steady diet of Bollywood music, Mittal suddenly found himself completely immersed in jazz, psychedelic, funk, rock ‘n’ roll and disco. “Disco came into the world in the late ’70s, and I discovered that all the best-selling records were also pressed in India,” says the DJ and music archivist, attempting to pass on the knowledge bestowed upon him by his friend to me. “When you start focusing on ‘Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja’ or any Bappi Lahiri song, you realise how electronically complex Indian music was and how futuristic they sounded.”
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Digging in India’s life started as a blog, where Mittal shared rare musical archives from India and the subcontinent. Heartened by readers’ engagement and interest, he converted it into an online record business, before its final form as a record store. He’s been at it for a while, but even today, nothing brings Mittal more joy than chancing upon artists the internet doesn’t recognise. “It’s almost like you’ve discovered something no one knows about,” he smirks. A few weeks ago, a client who was born in Odisha but moved to Hong Kong was shocked to see a pile of Oriya records on display at Digging in India. “He was like, ‘I didn’t even know Oriya music was on vinyl….’”
If Mittal’s buyers are invested in keeping desi culture alive, he is doubly so. He points at his enamel store sign, embellished with kitschy hand-painted lotus and hibiscus flowers often seen on buses and trucks. The posters plastered on the wall speak a myriad of languages; stickers of The Beatles jostle for space with a photo of Rishi Kapoor in his ‘Om Shanti Om’ ’fit. “I just love the Indian street aesthetic. It’s so bright and yellow,” he exclaims. “I found this guy who paints trucks to do some of the artwork in the store, and so many friends and business owners have asked me to share his contact. It’s nice to see people returning to the street signboard aesthetic.”
Vinyls, like bookshelves, have morphed into tokens of street cred—but it’s no longer enough to just have them on display. If anything, that’s pretentious and posey. Owning a turntable, though? Instant cool points. Seven years ago, not a single one of Mittal’s friends possessed a turntable. Now, almost all of them do. “Everyone has a couple of records in their house, if not a proper collection. It could be nostalgia, or people being bored of listening to music on Spotify.” He recalls how it was a fellow crate digger who found Rupa’s Disco Jazz (1982) and put the genre-defying ‘Aaj Shanibar’ on YouTube, earning the album a second life. “It’s one of the most popular reissues of the century, and it all happened through a low-quality YouTube rip,” Mittal says, his eyes alight with wonder. I ask if that’s the reason he uploads obscure albums on his YouTube, and he nods. “People leave comments saying, ‘I’ve been looking for this song for 40 years’. Can you imagine how beautiful that feels?”
It’s this feeling that bolstered his confidence to open Digging in India last year, no mean feat in an industry that appreciates analogue but is forced to reconcile with automation. “I dropped out of law school and had no college degree to fall back on. My best skill is buying and selling records,” he shrugs. It’s an art Mittal has cultivated so well that he refuses to part with some of the records he digs out because he knows he might not find another copy again. For the most part, he’s happy to share his spoils—a fact that the stream of curious visitors at his vinyl store in Delhi can attest to. “I started this thinking there may be other people like me who want to own physical music. But the way this is going, I would say my profession is safe for the next few years at least.”
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