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As luck would have it, my visit coincided with Delhi's Seventh-Annual Fashion Week. For several fascinating days, I attended runway (or "ramp") shows and tried to guess who might be the next star of subcontinental design and style.

Maybe it will be Manish Arora, who already has a lucrative deal with Reebok for Fish Fry, his whimsical line of sneakers. Or Malini Ramani, whose sexy, flirty clothes are already a hit at Indomix, a store on Elizabeth Street in New York that sells up-to-the-minute Indian looks. Or Rajesh Pratap Singh, whose tone-on-tone shirts are so exquisitely subtle in their extraordinary embroidery.

The abundance of embellishment—hand-loomed fabrics, raffia and felt appliqué, tie-dye, crystals, beads and sequins—was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Indian style is spontaneous, free flowing and impatient of categories. Decoration from a camel's saddle ends up on a woman's belt. A man's turban is unwound and becomes a bathing towel. Apparel and home design are particularly blurred.

Jivi Sethi, a Delhi-based interior designer explains this fluidity. "Until colonization, India had no concept of separate rooms with distinct functions. There was no dining room, per se. No living room. Chairs and sofas were largely unknown to us. We would simply recline on the floor. You'd have a good carpet, and you'd lie there, maybe with a white sheet put out when it came time to eat. Shoes were left outside. It was spare, gracious and elegant."

Moving on from Delhi into the northern state of Rajasthan, I stopped en route at the Sanskriti Foundation, where exhibition spaces showcase Indian mastery of terra-cotta, textiles and household instruments or what is considered "everyday art."