Invisible Delhi

The five Dilliwallahs invited to write about theirfavourite books on Delhi suggest a reading wishlist that mainly constitutes ofcity’s monuments, bylanes of old Delhi, leafy avenues of new Delhi and thecolourful lives of dead emperors. One cannot help wonder--where are the lives ofordinary people of Delhi in this empty wishful landscape? There is a goodreason, thinly veiled in the mourning for the "lost city", because ordinarypeople shatter the romance of past with the mess they make, traffic theygenerate, vulgar graffiti on the walls they write and loud music they blarechurlishly on the streets. This unruliness makes theresidents of Delhi a troublesome subject that can’t be written aboutwithout affecting its contours of enchantment.

The wishlist somehow also ends up resurrecting thegreatest clichés of all times about Delhi--that it has "no culture"unless we revert to the romance of Mughal Delhi. This is a predominant sentimentthat I have heard repeatedly over the past years while making my study onpost-1947 Punjabi refugees in Delhi. The received wisdom among the city’sintellectual elite is that Delhi died a cultural death in 1947 with the massmigration of Punjabi refugees who could neither recite Urdu couplets norpractice tehzeeb with ease.

The words are always framed very carefully without makingany direct reference to the city’s post-Partition population, yet the messageis hardly in doubt. Thus, the sighful invocation of city’s past becomes auseful trope in avoiding the gaze of the present. It may seem to thoseunfamiliar with the city that there is nothing worthwhile in contemporary Delhito write about.

Nostalgia and mourning for the lost city is not onlytiresome but also historically inaccurate. It actually reeks of barely hiddensocial class contempt that only elite in any given society can be capable of.The question that writers and historians of Delhi have so far avoided is--mightthere be a history of Delhi outside the imperial and colonial time frame? Is itpossible to talk about Delhi that is not Lutyen's Delhi or Shajahan’s Delhi?Or are there histories waiting to be written in aesthetically unappetisingbacklanes of Lajpat Nagar and shanty towns of Trilokpuri? Clearly, if historywriting is any indication, then a vast majority of the city’s populationexists only as an inconvenient contrast to the magnificence of old Delhi.

Narayani Gupta in her Delhi Between the Two Empires describes contemporary Delhi as aplace where "Tilak Nagars and Nehru Roads proliferate, and hardly anyone knowsof the poetry of Mir and Zauq, the humour of Ghalib, the quality of life thatChandni Chowk once symbolised". In other words, we must continue to root for theglorious days when Delhi was yet to be inundated with waves of cacophonousoutsiders--Punjabi, Tibetan and Afghan refugees, Bihari labourers, Nepalesehousehelps, Malyalee nurses--disturbing its high culture and peace. The poeticmoment is, seemingly, lost.

Historically speaking, Delhi city does not have a "fixedpast", that is, it has both moved locations and has been peopled by movingpopulations--the Hindu Marwaris from neighbouring Rajasthan, Gujjars and Jatsfrom the surrounding villages and the Muslims from north-central India--collatingmultiple cultural influences and traditions.

This transformative, multi-cultural character of Delhi wasuneasily noted by a veteran "native" Delhi Congressman Brij Krishan Chandiwalain his 1950s correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru. Chandiwala complained aboutthe Punjabi refugee population which by now outnumbered vastly the "native"Delhi population. He wrote:

"The people of Delhi are living a life of helplessness…They have on their own wiped out their exclusive identity forever. None remains, neither their language nor their attire and tradition. The Delhi residents have become strangers in their own house."

Nehru replied to this rather curtly, saying:

"Some of the complaints you make are the unfortunate consequences of the Partition and of course, the rapid growth of Delhi. Also Delhi has become a rather cosmopolitan city with a large number of foreigners here, in addition to a very large number of displaced people"

In a thoughtful reply, Chandiwala wrote back:

"..In this city everyone who resides has come from somewhere else. And over the years they became part of this city. I believe even these people (refugees) will one day start identifying their selves as belonging to the city."

This correspondence dates back to mid-1950s when Delhi wasundergoing momentous transformation both socially and spatially. It was an earlyarticulation of fears and misgivings of those who considered themselves the "natives"(and therefore the rightful representatives of local culture) vis-a-vis thenewly arrived refugees who were transforming the landscape of Delhi throughtheir sheer physical presence.

Unlike imperial Delhi, the post-Partition Delhi has littleto offer in terms of monuments that can be showcased for the foreign visitors orurban architecture that will please the critical eye. What is on offer, however,are large indistinct chunks of government built property and teeming shantytowns that are usually off the tourist map. During my research in the refugeeresettlement colonies of Delhi, I found rich stories, lifestyles and opinionsthat are in general disconnect with Dilliwallahs of IIC and farmhouses. Perhaps,we should bravely put the lives and times of this invisible Delhi on our wish-listof future chronicles too.

Ravinder Kaur is the author of Since 1947: PartitionNarratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi. 2007. Oxford University Press.