While wandering through Chandni Chowk,there is an image that often comes into my head—it is a famous painting, animage from a naach in progress at the haveli of Begam Samru, circaearly 19th century. In this picture, we see David Ochterlony, British Residentin Delhi, watching the dancing girls while reclining on bolsters, dressed in aMughal court dress.
It’s a strange image to carry in your head when you push through the bustle ofthe electric goods market of Bhagirath Place to reach the almost hidden,crumbling ruins of the Begam’s neo-classical mansion, where anything asgrandiose as a naach is now impossible.
The grand space is now partitioned into many claustrophobic warrens, and smallcubicles leading off those warrens: the heart of Delhi’s wholesale trade inmedicines and surgical goods. The place is filled with a lingering hospitalsmell, that of the gelatin that coats capsules. Porters pass with crates ofscalpels on their heads.
The vast estate of Begam Samru, all around this mansion, once stretching almostfrom the Old Delhi Railway Station to Chandni Chowk, is today Bhagirath Place,the massively built up and massively busy centre of Delhi’s electric goods andfilm distribution trades. In the 1930s, it was known exclusively as the ‘FilmColony’, a still genteel place where those who distributed films ran theatres,printed tickets and posters, lived and worked.
Much more crowded now, the alleys between the buildings are all covered withpeeling palimpsests of A-, B- and C-circuit films; poking out from behindMithun’s grimacing face, a poster of Her Nights. I wonder what theBegam would have made of all this?
Begam Samru was a teenage courtesan from Chawri Bazaar when Reinhardt theSombre, a European mercenary on the make, married her and she became BegamSamru, the ruler- after his death - of the principality of Sardhana. It was theformer naachnewali herself who threw the most lavish naach eventsin Delhi.
Over a century later, in the 1920s and early ’30s, it would not have beenuncommon for those now living on the Begam’s former estate to be heading tothe kothas of Chawri Bazaar, for the refined decadence of kotha culturewas essential to the upbringing of the raees of Dilli.
In fact, when cinema halls were initially trying to attract the public to thisstrangely silent and monochromatic new entertainment, they’d have naachon the stage before the show began, to pack the reluctant public in.
But then the anti-naach movement led by Swami Shraddhanand (whose statueyou can see in front of Town Hall), quite swiftly made the naach a thing ofdisrepute. The naachnewalis were pushed out of Chawri Bazaar to themargins of the Old City, to GB Road. The respectable raees and theirmoney would no longer come, and elegant refinement rather rapidly morphed intomore nuts and bolts sex work.
The raees started throwing their money into that new glamourous thing,cinema. This is just an educated guess, but someone’s PhD is waiting to bedone on how we can link the boom in the cinema business of the ’30s Delhi tothe simultaneous bust of the kotha culture of Chawri Bazaar, and howpatronage shifted from one to the other. And why Hindi cinema, for the longesttime, was obsessed with the figure of the tawaif.
Methinks, the Begam would have been highly amused.
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This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, April 30, 2006
