Firstly, people were definitely listening to the Beatles in Delhi in the 1960s. Their music was released in India in the 1960s through EMI's local branch; there are pictures on Discogs of an Indian release of Revolver (the album 'Tomorrow Never Knows' is on), and I think discogs indicates that there were several pressings of the album in India. In fact, India is famous amongst Beatles nerds because, in the 1960s, Indian record labels were still releasing 78rpm records (which had been discontinued in England and America in the 1950s), likely for the section of the Indian market that still used hand-cranked gramophones; as a result, Beatles singles up until 1968 were released on 78rpm in the Indian market.

According to a 2012 masters thesis by Zachary Stockill at the University of British Columbia, there was quite a lot of discussion of the Beatles in English-language Indian newspapers, but less in Hindi language newspapers; given that television had not yet arrived in India in the 1960s, according to Stockill, newspapers in the 1960s were a particularly prominent venue for cultural discussion.

Stockill makes the argument that, in English-language papers in India, the Beatles - and in particular, their association with the Hindustani classical musician Ravi Shankar - were seen through the perspective of a local debate about the importance of tradition; the Beatles were seen as the bringers of new ideas and the disrupters of tradition. It should be pointed out that the kind of music that Ravi Shankar made wasn't folk music, per se, but a kind of music with the prestige and tradition associated with Western classical music, and so the kind of music he played at, say, the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, was a fairly traditionalist version of that music. However, Shankar's ambition and wanting to get in with the hip new Western hippie types meant that he was seen as someone pushing against traditions in Indian circles; Hindustani classical music was seen as a 'pure' vision of India that Shankar was letting 'foreign contamination' into.

Of course, the Beatles in India have to be seen through the perspective the British Empire's long period of control over India, which had only ended barely 20 years before Sgt Peppers was released. The kind of people who'd read English-language newspapers in India were typically well-educated, more cosmopolitan types, who’d perhaps had more interaction with the Empire. Stockill claims that, due to budgetary deficiencies, English-language Indian newspapers of the time often relied heavily on reports from The Times of London or the New York Times (or Reuters), perhaps filtered with local commentary.

As a result of the reliance on big newspapers of the Anglosphere, readers of The Times Of India, for example, would have experienced plenty of coverage of the Beatles, who were covered extensively by the New York and London Timeses. Given their prominence, advertisers in English language Indian papers used Beatle references:

In March of 1968, an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company appearing in the Times of India bore the question: "who wants tradition in the Beatle generation?" The advertisers went on to explain that the reputable people at Hoescht Medicine do, as "tradition sets a standard for the future. A standard of excellence."

The use of the Beatles in references in advertisement likely suggests that, amongst English-language Indians, they were household names.

There was also a vein of Indian social criticism which condemned trends associated with Western 'modernity' and 'their sneering attitude to the purity and sublimity of human character', of which the Beatles were a prime example, and a prominent one with their visit to Rishikesh in 1968. There was some suspicion about the Beatles' visit amongst some; one opposition Indian parliamentarian demanded an official inquiry, claiming in parliament that the Maharishi's ashram had become a centre of international espionage. Additionally, the Maharishi was generally seen in Indian society as something of a charlatan and the Times Of India wrote that he was "easy to dismiss [as] poppycock" due to the "show business techniques".

However, there was also some celebration of the Western counterculture in Indian newspapers; George Harrison's engagement with Indian culture led him to be described in The Times Of India as "the most knowledgeable of the fabulous foursome, and bubbling with initiative and drive", while the Beatles' Rishikesh retreat, according to the Hindustan Times, provided India with "perhaps the widest free tourist publicity that India had in the British press". Conservative cultural values, argues Stockill, did predominate in such newspapers, but their arguments do suggest the existence of a progressive tradition that was taken with the Beatles; it's likely that the arguments in The Times Of India represented older generations, while younger generations - more likely to listen to the Beatles in the first place - made arguments about their music and their relevance to India in other avenues.

A paper by Sharmadip Basu in South Asian Popular Culture points to the Calcutta-based magazine the Junior Statesman as a magazine more in the spirit of what youth were listening to; Basu quotes a reporter from the Junior Statesman as saying that 'we would review the very latest [music] from the West. We were the first in India to put the then ground-breaking Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's on the cover and review it extensively.' The magazine also championed local versions of rock bands, often influenced by the late 1960s hippie bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, including bands like The High and Great Bear; The High also based musical choices on hippie cultural touchstones, including releasing a Tolkien Suite based on the Lord Of The Rings.