In stylish new hotels across India, a generation of young entrepreneurs and hoteliers show off their own modern design vernacular. Andy McCord takes their measure

Set back only slightly from a busy street, the latest Park hotel is a cement block with angular buttresses. It looks out on a cityscape where Art Deco and the Raj survive in abundance and the mix-and-match of the contemporary has only lately come into view. The city, Madras, is the capital of Tamil Nadu, the large state on the southeastern tip of the Indian peninsula, where British power first took root in India. It is a megacity on the Bay of Bengal, but lately it has localized its name. It's now Chennai, as if a proper Tamil village name would characterize it better for the twenty-first century. Chennai/Madras is an inward-looking hometown. At its celebrated winter music festival, the "fusion" programs mix North Indian and South Indian musicians, not saxophones and sitars or anything so outlandish. And yet, the hotel where I have come to stay is bringing something new to the old-fashioned city.

When I arrive at the Park Chennai, film loops project on a whitewashed cement facade as well as on scrims that hang inside the atrium lobby. A crowd of college-age kids are milling about in the lobby and around the black leather furnishings of the small bar. The kids are sober but happy and intent, like good students at a high-level school. The new hotel's lobby and bar, in a town where only a few years ago there were no bars, is an atelier of cool.

I wake up refreshed the next morning in cotton sheets, after jet-lagged dreams of wild Tamil song-and-dance numbers. Out my window is one of the more heavily traveled roads of downtown Chennai, yet I'm buffered against the tumult by a terrace planted with green grass. White curtains hang over the glass walls of the bathroom and shower. The furnishings are a pale lime green. The floor is blond wood, an extravagance greater than marble in deforested India. Diana Vreeland declared definitively that "pink is the navy blue of India," but the palette here is nothing so saturated.

As I travel from south to north in India, a country where I grew up, I've chosen to stay in a selection of new hotels that are independent of the big and better-known alternatives run by the famous Indian hotel groups and the international chains. The styles of these places are more individual than a national style could be. If in the Park Chennai I see a rendition of international cool, in the next place I get a new take on preservationism. Then I alight in a pared-down reimagining of a maharaja's palace, and at last I wander into a tented camp that is integrating itself into its ecological and social surroundings. These hotels are a far cry from the guesthouses, Inter-Continentals, government tourist bungalows, and hippie flophouses where I stayed on my parents' junkets and my own travels as a teenager in India. These distinctive hotels are of a piece with a bright side of the contemporary story in India. Traveling here now, I am continually delighted by their variety and the talent with which things are made new. If there is a common thread connecting the hotels I stay in, besides the fact that their rates are a notch lower than their five-star competition, it is that each promotes a sensibility as much as it does a strategy.