Postcard: New Delhi

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The Jantar Mantar observatory, in the bustling heart of New Delhi, was built in the 1720s to monitor the celestial movements that India's royal rulers believed governed their fate. Today, the distinctive red structure is still an observatory of sorts — a vantage point for watching the workings of Indian democracy, a process every bit as complex, and as inscrutable, as the progress of heavenly bodies.

For the past decade, the busy thoroughfare overlooking Jantar Mantar has served as New Delhi's officially designated protest zone. All other public spaces and government buildings are off-limits. As a result, the area surrounding Jantar Mantar hosts a rich daily marketplace of complaints, ranging from tribal members demanding compensation for lost land and farmers seeking better prices for their crops, to demonstrators demanding greater rights for women and gays, and everyone in between. The 18th century observatory is now witness to what the writer V.S. Naipaul called "India's million mutinies" — the dizzying array of fault lines, small and large, that fracture this heterogeneous nation of 1.1 billion.

To stroll around the observatory on any given day is to sample the local grudges and global grievances that draw protesters from across India. A bureaucratic spelling error has brought a group of Dhangars, dressed in the red and yellow colors of their tribe, here for the fourth time from the western state of Maharashtra. "We hope this time our voice will be heard," says the group's leader, Gunderao Bansode. Under Indian law, certain castes and tribes are guaranteed places in educational institutes and legislatures, as well as government jobs. The Dhangars are supposed to share these advantages. But they accuse officials in their home state of deliberately using a transliteration error — in Marathi, the language of Maharashtra, the name of their tribe is pronounced "Dhangad" — to deny them their due benefits, since Dhangad, unlike Dhangar, is not an officially recognized tribe.

A stone's throw from the Dhangars' camp stands a tent housing a dozen men dressed all in white. They're representing the Greater Cooch Behar People's Association, which is demanding that eight districts currently divided between the states of Assam and West Bengal be recognized as a separate state of Cooch Behar. "Our language and culture are different from these states," says Babua Barman, who, along with other Cooch Behar activists, has been camping near Jantar Mantar for two years now.

Autonomy is a demand familiar to the Tibetan activists nearby, who have arrived from all over India to join a 24-hour hunger strike. As the protesters use loudspeakers to relay pro-Tibet speeches, a couple of cops stroll by, ogling the rosy-cheeked Tibetan girls. Police and protesters share mutual disdain. "They hate us," laughs Rachna Dhingra, an activist with the International Campaign for Justice for Bhopal, which has been camping here since March to demand legal action against the corporation responsible for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, which killed more than 3,000 people. "We're making the police earn their keep," Dhingra says. Life at Jantar Mantar isn't much fun, she admits. Public toilets are filthy and demonstrators have to go to a nearby Sikh temple to shower. Distrustful police and civic authorities "just want us to go away," she says, but protesters are buoyed by strangers who offer money and encouragement.

Scattered among the righteously aggrieved are solo protesters whose vigils seem downright quixotic. Ramdev Kumar, for instance, claims that his wife left him for someone else and his brother usurped his house. For the past two years, Kumar has been agitating for some sort of recompense. "I want the government to do something," he says simply.

Outsiders might view the cacophony of complaints at Jantar Mantar as a metaphor for India's vital civil society, where even the loneliest petitioners are entitled to a soapbox. But many in the Jantar Mantar crowd are not so sanguine. Dhingra, the Bhopal protester, says that having this space is better than nothing, but sees Jantar Mantar as a symptom of flawed democracy. "You must scream within these 500 meters," she says. "And even then, you can't be sure you'll be heard."