In the old areas of Chennai, you’ll often see a brightly painted deity on the corners of the streets. It’s not primarily an expression of piety, however – its main goal is to stop people pissing there. No matter how desperate or secular you might be, you’re unlikely to urinate on a god. 

There are mini shrines at a lot of the T-junctions as well. The thinking here is that the sight of a deity prevents a driver from rushing into the junction without stopping, and perhaps looking both ways. 

And here’s a tailoring one: each block has a little pressing booth – that’s one below. Every morning these pressers gather bundles of clothes and bedding from the neighbouring houses, and press them during the day, delivering them back in the evening. 

A tailor would find the irons themselves fascinating. Not only are they solid iron and heated over hot coals, but some also have coals placed inside them. It looks like a regular iron but stretched and squared off, to create space for the little fireplace inside.

I’ve always adored India. I love its colours and its sprawling culture. I’ve been here as a backpacker, with my family and on business. But there’s nothing to beat travelling with a local, and we made some time when we visited Chennai recently to walk the old neighbourhoods with Mahesh Ramakrishnan, the owner of bespoke tailor Whitcomb & Shaftesbury. 

There is a relevance to tailoring here as well, because part of the reason I wanted to visit Whitcomb was to tell the story of the workshop, its people and the locality – to chip away at the idea that work is only offshored because it’s cheaper. 

Like the 100 Hands workshop we visited a few years ago in northern India, I found the people here incredibly talented, producing work as good as Savile Row and with as much passion and dedication as Paris or Naples.

Culturally, the thing I find fascinating about a neighbourhood is the way it reflects wider changes – the undercurrents of politics or economy.

Chennai is growing fast for example, but as often happens, at the expense of some traditional ways of doing things. “You can spot the old houses around here because they’re all on two floors, with lots of space around them,” he says. “Those spaces are usually planted with hibiscus or jasmine, because the residents pick them in the morning to take to temple.”

The new developments, by contrast, are four or five stories tall, and built right up to the edge of the plots. “These are the flats that are popular with the rich right now,” says Mahesh. “Although I bet in a few years time they’ll all want to knock them down and build those big old houses again.”

The local economy is growing fast, and there’s a lot of money washing around. “Our father was a civil servant, and at one point he tried to introduce regulations to control the buildings that could go up. But there was too much money involved – he ended up getting death threats,” says Mahesh.

Visually it’s always the colour that hits me first in India. It’s a cliché of course, but like many clichés there’s a reason for it. People wear brighter coloured clothes – shirts, saris, lungis – than I’ve seen in other parts of Asia. Local buildings also often have striking colour schemes, my favourite being a bank that was entirely painted in acidic lemon and lime. 

To be fair, the trucks I’ve seen in Pakistan rival India’s for decoration, in fact probably exceed them. But then perhaps its best to see the Indian subcontinent as one culture – or even better, a continent with its own identity and then scores of local ones intertwined, given the variety in languages, practices and even scripts. 

I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of this. But I do find it interesting, and it was a frequent topic of conversation between us and the people we met – at Whitcomb, at Original Madras and elsewhere.

A European might suggest the cultural variation across India is akin to that of Europe, for example. But you don’t get different scripts in Europe until you go a long way east. And Mahesh, though he grew up in Chennai, can’t read Tamil because he was largely educated elsewhere. The idea of living in a city where you can’t read all the slogans written on the walls is a strange one. 

Anyway, there’s no tailoring link to this cultural meandering – merely an extension of that earlier idea of understanding and so appreciating a place and its people. I feel more connected now to the tailors in Chennai than I do to almost anywhere else. And I’m proud to wear the fruits of their work.  

Mahesh and everyone at Whitcomb, thank you for your hospitality. More on their tailoring here.

www.whitcombshaftesbury.co.uk