‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-V

Delhi continues to be an all-accommodating city that imbibes and nourishes everyone who comes in and makes it there home. The inauguration of the British Delhi brought in the bureaucrats, partition saw the refugee influx and the Asian Games of 1982 gave a chance for a large number of migrant laborers to come in and help with the infrastructure projects and settle down here after the hullabaloo subsided. The most recent of such turning points has been the Economic Reforms of 1991 which partially liberalized the Indian economy, opening gates for many foreign companies to come and open offices in the country. Delhi, too, benefitted from it. Many companies chose to establish their corporate offices in the NCR or the National Capital Region, which includes Delhi, flanked by its satellite cities of Gurgaon, Faridabad, NOIDA and Ghaziabad. This brought many young professionals, fresh out of college and loaded with degrees that the new economy valued, to Delhi-NCR and they added another facet to Delhi’s ever-evolving dynamics.

Mrs. Indira Ganesh lives in Sarita Vihar and is a senior educator. She pursued an MBA in the early nineties and, then, came to Delhi to initiate a career. But her association with Delhi goes back a long way. She grew up in Bhilai, in a Tamil Brahmin family and frequented Delhi as a child during her summer vacations to visit her relatives living here. Many members of her extended family had moved to the city in the sixties in search of employment and were readily hired because South Indians were valued in Delhi’s job market and considered honest and hardworking. Her earliest memory of Delhi is of staying with her relatives in their rented barsati – a one-bedroom-kitchen quarter sitting atop a larger house –in Kailash Colony, which was little better than a village then. She remembers getting impressed by the city’s infrastructure which was non-existent in a town like Bhilai. Even simple things like the Delhi Milk Scheme token amazed little Indira. She found the people in Delhi to be very suave and was in awe of their mannerisms: how, for instance, they wished each other ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’, though she now understands that much of it used to be a sham. She enjoyed the street food of Delhi – the chole-kulche – and it became a cherished part of her childhood memories.

Her first job after she completed MBA in 1994 was at PRIA or the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, an NGO and think-tank working towards social inclusion. PRIA’s office was near the Batra Hospital. At PRIA, she was involved in capacity building for the villages in Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and other states. She lived in a working women’s hostel which she remembers as a cheerless place, full of girls from impoverished families with low educational qualification, who worked the graveyard shift. She was part of the NGO, IT and Corporate brigade. They liked wearing FabIndia, which was sold at its only store in Greater Kailash. The store used to have only ten designs to choose from. It would close at five in the evening and didn’t open on weekends. So, it used to be quite a task for Ms Indira to reach there before five on the weekdays. Everybody in her circle wore the same stuff, discussed politics and felt like serious intellectuals! It was the time when McDonald’s had just arrived in India and cable TV was big. There were new outlets with big brands all over the place. Being in Delhi also brought a lot of exposure from all quarters, through the Trade Fairs and Auto expos at Pragati Maidan for instance. They would attend Jagjit Singh’s concerts and enjoy D Paul’s coffee at Janpath. Employees who agreed to stay back for work were rewarded with Domino’s pizza.

She got married to Mr. R. Sreenivasan, a few years later, who went on to cofound Career Launcher India. She left Delhi to start a family and lived in Dubai and Hyderabad for a long time before coming back in 2002. On returning to the city, she felt that safety had improved and it was far better organized. She feels that the internet, FM Radio and services like JustDial have made life very easy. Metro, too, has been a revolutionizing force. She feels that the NGO sector has changed a lot as it runs in a lot more professional manner. Earlier, people running NGOs thought of themselves as the liberated lot, yet were full of insecurities and intolerant of differences. That has changed as people have become more responsible about how they function. The corporate sector, too, has become more transparent and there is little place for crooks now.

She never faced any problem here despite being a south Indian, probably because she had a good command over Hindi. She never dated anyone but made many friends and their mothers kept inviting her over for meals and this, she feels, is very nice about Delhi. Neighbors are as warm as always and the city continues to be welcoming, even if unsafe at times.  She was never made to feel like an outsider though she had to figure out certain limits for herself. She recalls an incident. She went to Purani Dilli once when new to the city and was exploring the space like an inquisitive youngster. She had a casual Kurta on with a pair of jeans. She went to a mithai shop and started touching some weights out of curiosity. The shopkeeper stopped her from doing that in a rather terse manner, asking her to stand aside and talk from a distance. The same fellow was warm and courteous to other men around him who seemed to be his regular customers. That’s when she got conscious of the fact that she was the only woman around and that she’d probably behaved in a way that wasn’t considered gender-appropriate there. One thing that bothers her about Delhi is that many a time people here wear a façade, being sweet to you when they don’t mean it at all. Living in Delhi through the nineties and the two thousands exposed her to a variety of social realities like single parenthood, live-in relationships and the gay subculture and has helped her become more broad-minded and flexible in outlook.

Delhi, she believes, is a city for the courageous. If you can deliver you have a job! But Delhi is also the city of networking. Who you know always matters here and yet accountability has gone up in recent years. The infrastructure is improving and the police are more responsive. But Delhi is also a city of freebies and it renders its residents spoilt for choice. Delhi needs to think about the world beyond its boundaries and learn to save. But at the end of the day, Delhi is a city which teaches you a lot of things. One who has lived here can survive anywhere in the world.

Delhi is many cities rolled into one, each speaking of a different perspective, situation and aspirations. It is, borrowing from popular metaphors, both a melting pot and mosaic floor. You can either choose to become part of a hybrid, metropolitan culture or retain your ethnicity. Delhi will always remain the outsider’s city, taking in and giving back anything that is offered to it. There is no one kind of person who symbolizes the essence of Delhi as it is essentially multi-hued. Its beauty, much like India, lies in its diversity. Whoever lives here contributes a crucial share to the larger picture which if removed will never add up to the whole. The reason that attracts an outsider to the city may be political, academic, professional or emotional, but Delhi always manages to fulfill its promise. The search for the Dilliwallah can, thus, never culminate on a conclusive note. It’s because the identity of the city and that of its citizens evolves incessantly and the fun lies in the constant, ambiguous pursuit of the same.

‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-IV

Delhi indeed received millions of outsiders after partition. They came here in search for a shelter after being displaced in the most unfortunate manner, uprooted from their origins and thrown into an almost foreign land. The Punjabi refugees came from the cities and the hinterland that lay on the other side of the border. These were largely Hindus and Sikhs who had opted not to stay in the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan. Thousands and thousands of them boarded the trains shuttling between cities like Lahore and Amritsar, and ended up in different cities across northern Indian. The first few years were tough. There was barely enough space to live in. Work, too, was hard to find. Some of the wealthiest families of undivided Punjab had been reduced to paupers, with no claim on the properties they had been forced to give up and come away and no assured means of livelihood in the new country they had been brought to.

The Guptas are among the hundreds of thousands of families that migrated to Delhi post partition and now live in Lajpat Nagar. Mrs. Girija Gupta (name changed on request) was born to a father who served in the army, and had been forever on the move as a child, owing to his transferable job. She was thirteen at the time of partition, stuck with her family on the wrong part of strife-torn Punjab. When they first heard about the possibility of partition, they rushed to their newly-built house in Rawalpindi. The town was ablaze with riots and her father decided to hide the family in their ancestral house located in rural Punjab. He couldn’t accompany them as he was required to report at his duty. The house the family hid in was owned by Mrs. Gupta’s uncle who was a reputed lawyer and much respected in the year. Rioters may have known about their presence but didn’t come for them because of his influence. Owing to her father’s efforts, they were rescued and flown out of Pakistan, to the safety of Amritsar, managing to complete the most difficult part of the journey quite safely. Once peace was established, her father’s job resumed its transferable nature and they continued moving from city to city. She was married to Mr. KP Gupta in 1955, after which she came to live in the Lajpat Nagar house. More than fifty years have passed since then. Her memories of the years gone by include those of the Indo-Park wars with instructions on how to carry out blackouts. The houses in Lajpat Nagar were double-storeyed, not five storeyes high like today, with lifts and the other paraphernalia. Everything was cheap and affordable. Travelling from Karol Bagh to Lajpat Nagar would cost something like ten paise, she recalls longingly.

Mr. KP Gupta (name changed on request) has a far more heart-wrenching story to share. He was fifteen at the time of partition and lived with his rather well-off family in Lahore. Problems and disturbances had begun simmering since 1946 and they knew something wrong was underway. In ’47, Mr. Gupta’s school was attacked by ‘bottle bombs’ – glass bottles filled with kerosene, with a wad of paper stuffed in the mouth and lit, spreading fire wherever they fall. Many of the houses were attacked with these bottle bombs all through the partition-induced riots. The attack on the school was indicative of the more difficult times that lay ahead. As the days went past, violence directed at Hindu families escalated. The whole of Papad Mandi, a prominent market in Lahore, was burnt down one day, and it broke the spine of the Hindu merchant committee. It was around those days that Mr. Gupta was confronted by four burly Muslim boys on his way to school, who had probably come to beat him up, but he escaped. As rumours about imminent clashes grew, people started smuggling out their valuables, like jewelry, to India. He managed to escape with his family to the other side of the border as part of a convoy of about fifty cars. He ended up in Delhi in 1949 after brief stopovers in Amritsar, Jallandhar and Dalhousie, where he had to deal with ill-resourced refugee camps, lack of livelihood and treacherous relatives, completing his matriculation exam along the way.

Mr. Gupta’s father had reached Delhi a few months before his family. He was a lawyer, though he never had to practice back in Lahore because of all the wealth he had inherited. As the family arrived in Delhi, they rented a room in Khari Baoli. The Indian government was making partial compensation for the monetary and material loss that the refugees had faced. For instance, families that had left behind properties worth Rs 8-9 Lacs were paid a Lac and those that had lost something like 35-40 Lacs were given 2 Lacs. The Guptas belonged to the latter category. Remembering the Delhi of those days, he says that the posh areas of the city included the Lutyens’ zone, Civil Lines and Sujan Singh Park. Old Delhi had a tram service running from Daryaganj to Red Fort and further down to Sadar Bazaar via Chandni Chowk. There were also many yellow-and-black taxis plying through its streets.

It was frightening, how the rich merchants of Lahore who had come to Delhi as refugees had been reduced to paupers. To survive, they had started selling things at roadside kiosks. They would buy commodities, like sugar, at wholesale rate from big shops and resell them sitting a short distance away, for a marginal profit per kilo. Everything, from shops to house, was available through the ‘Pagdi’ system, wherein you got a place on lease in lieu of a large sum given to the owner, with reselling rights to the lessee and a cut assured for the original owner. A little while later, Mr. Gupta’s family moved to a small flat in Jangpura which they shared with two other families. Delhi didn’t look bad now. Their business had picked up. But the relations of the refugees with the residents – established merchants and old families – of Purani Dilli were rather formal. They didn’t like the loud, non-vegetarian refugees, and the latter, too, kept away from them, choosing to populate the newer Delhi that was coming up on the periphery of the old one.

The Guptas, then, moved to Lajpat Nagar. They had bought the double-storey house for eighteen thousand rupees, where two thousand was for the land and sixteen for the house – hard to believe in today’s context. Almost everyone who came to live in Lajpat Nagar was a refugee. The colony initially had community taps, personal ones came much later. Parts of the central ridge were blasted off to make space for the expansion of the colony and for a long time, jackals lurked in the colony’s outer reaches that touched the thickly forested ridge. The Gupta family’s first few businesses failed, but they gradually started doing well. All the refugees did, and it was observed resentfully by the old residents of Delhi. Mrs. Gupta agrees that it was a good move to have migrated to India in retrospect. She can’t imagine herself as a part of Pakistan’s conservative society. She points out to her daughter, Megha that she could not have enjoyed such opportunities, exposure and freedom being a woman, were she born in Pakistan. The refugees generally don’t like to talk about Gandhi and Nehru with the same reverence as is the norm. They have only grabbed the limelight, they say. “It’s us, the migrants who had to pay the price of their decisions”. It was they who have made the journey from a sprawling haveli to a two hundred square feet house.

Ms. Megha Gupta (name changed on request), their daughter is in her early forties, was born and brought up in Delhi and now teaches at a prominent South Delhi School. She shares how life in Delhi today is different from her own childhood and adolescence. She tells that her family, like millions of others from Delhi’s middle class, journeyed from a chulha to a heater, to a stove and, finally, the cooking gas. Kerosene was sold door-to-door in those days and every nook had a tandoor where you could take kneaded dough to be made into fresh rotis. Milk used to be available in exchange for the aluminum tokens issued by the Delhi Milk Scheme. There would always be a shortage of it in summers, and then the government would issue an order prohibiting the use of milk to produce sweetmeats so that the yield may be diverted to the general population. There weren’t many houses with refrigerators and the ones that did mostly had Allwyn. Housewives stored milk and other eatables in netted cupboards placed in the kitchen. In summers, slabs of ice were bought and used for cold water and soft drinks. Theirs was the second or third television in the colony. She remembers how people just walked in to watch programs being aired and nobody would mind. People in Delhi, she feels, have now become a lot more competitive and envious of each other’s accomplishments. This wasn’t the case earlier.

Ms. Megha feels that childhood was a lot more fulfilling back then. Children would gather every evening without fail to play in the neighborhood park. Now, it’s difficult to tear them away from their video games and Facebook profiles. There is barely any curiosity left in them. There are so many things about their city that has been lost and they’ll never have an exposure to it. Delhi’s stock exchange or the share market used to be at the Asaf Ali Road, next to the Turkman Gate and, in the absence of electronic methods of keeping track of market trends, people would shout out their bids to the brokers there, lending the place an infectious energy. She remembers a doctor who used to sit at the weekly market close to her house with a table and a microscope, waiting to carry out blood tests for customers. She, then a child, would stop by to observe the man and strike up a conversation with him, even managing a peek into the eyepiece at times. That kind of openness to people and experiences is not found in Delhi now.

According to Ms. Megha, it was her family members’ decisions – big and small – that have shaped them.  Her elder sister, for instance, was selected for an MBA course at Delhi University’s incredibly reputed Faculty of Management Studies back in the eighties. But she gave that up because it was an evening course and she didn’t want to risk travelling from the north campus to Lajpat Nagar daily at nine in the night. Ms. Megha had decided to pursue Economics Honors and had even secured an admission at the Rajdhani College but she withdrew after witnessing the student politics, bordering on hooliganism, which was rampant in the college. She studied Mathematics instead. It was the educational exposure that really divided Delhi. But the quality of education was better. The government schools used to do a great job. Today, education means so much more than the syllabus and that has only broadened the divide.

Talking about the Punjabi spirit, she quotes some more personal examples. Her younger sister wanted to get admitted to a reputed English medium school that catered almost exclusively to students from the Tamil community. She was politely declined an admission, but she cheekily responded that it was the school’s loss because by not letting her join, they were giving up on the girl who would go on to become the topper of the school. She  was eventually accepted. When her father, a few years before the incident, had gone to seek admission for the same sister at the Lady Irwin School, he was told that the school doesn’t have any seats left. He offered to buy them five-six seats with desks! “So, that’s how it is with Punjabis,” she says. “We try to get things done by hook or by crook. We are not too finicky about ethics.” Ms. Megha shares the story of another neighbor who was very thrilled to discover that she teaches at a famous South Delhi school. The neighbour wanted to know the amount she’ll have to bribe her with in order to get her ward get admitted in the elite school. “So, there is nothing called subtlety here,” she explains wryly.

Talking about the issue of women’s safety, she says that Delhi, like every other city, has its safe and unsafe areas. There are places where you can feel free and others where you shouldn’t let your guard down. Sometimes, you don’t feel safe in the very neighborhood where you grew up. Lajpat Nagar, today, has many people from outside moving in. These are people from less affluent parts of the city who made it big in their businesses and, therefore, could afford buying property here. Their sense of accomplishment comes through as aggression and brashness. They feel that they’ve finally arrived and are superior to the old timers. She recalls one such incident where a man in his late twenties picked up a fight with her over something trivial and, then, went on to tell her that she is a mere teacher while he is a rich businessman, not realizing that she’s standing on a property six times the size of what he owns. She dropped the fight because she didn’t see the point in engaging with the uncouth man. The new arrivals have a lifestyle that is flashy and in-your-face. She can now understand how the Old Delhi residents must have felt when they looked at the refugees who had arrived after partition.

Though the Gupta family’s earliest links with Delhi were through the walled city, Ms. Megha never thought of it as home. When younger, she loved visiting it for its shops and eateries but deep down was scared of having to move base to the area again. She didn’t fancy living amid the squalor, and struggled with a baseless fear that she, too, would be forced to wear a burqa as a consequence of the shift. She enjoyed watching ‘Buniyaad’ and so did the rest of her family because it brought alive the tale of loss and bereavement that they understood too well. Tamas hit them harder. But her father was always dismissive about these shows. His attitude is representative of that of the average Punjabi refugee who tried to crush his emotions under the crudeness because that was the only way to survive. Her father couldn’t even have food the day he – then a fifteen-year-old boy – hopped on to a car and fled across the border. What he misses is not the wealth that they had to leave behind but more valuable possessions like his kite collection or the notebook in which his father wrote his Urdu poetry. So, you could either brood over what is lost or gear up to claim what lies ahead. The choice they made is apparent.

‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-III

While Hashmat Begum’s story gives an insight into the life of an average resident of the walled city, it also leaves many questions unanswered. And this, in turn, leads us to the other facets of life in Delhi. Talking only about the lost charm of Old Delhi can never complete the picture of the quintessential Dilliwallah. That focus must move to the New Delhi that came up under the British rule. The earliest of British residents lived in Shahjahanabad, in sprawling mansions, willingly and lovingly opening themselves to the tastes and lifestyle of the city’s population. This proximity was precisely what compounded the horrors of the 1857 mutiny as the earliest of mutineers to have entered the city dragged its British inmates out of their houses and vengefully butchered them in its streets. The British forces returned to settle scores but the mutiny made them realize that it wasn’t safe to live among the natives. The British decided to build the Civil Lines, to the north of the walled city, which followed the European pattern of town planning with wide and straight roads, lined by symmetrically shaped houses on either sides. This was the birthplace of the cosmopolitan Delhi.

Civil Lines was succeeded by the British capital of New Delhi. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and full of broad vistas intersecting each other at right angles, the brand new capital was an unprecedented example of the European idea of a city. The British rule created the modern middle class in India, composed of families exposed to western education and sensibilities. It was the salaried class that worked for the government and those who were part of it were transferred from one location to another, depending not on their personal ethnic preferences but the requirement of the government apparatus. This migratory pattern of people in the services opened Delhi to a new kind of residents – the bureaucrats. These government servants came in hordes once Delhi became the capital of British India as they were required to work in the different public offices that the city now housed. They were the original bourgeoisie of modern Delhi. They were exposed to the western cosmopolitan ideas and were forward looking. They had made western education accessible to their children too, believing in letting the daughters have equal opportunities as the sons.

One such daughter is Mrs. Padma Chander who is in her eighties and lives in Sarvapriya Vihar. Her association with Delhi goes back a long way. Mrs. Chander grew up in the city through the thirties and forties. Her family lived in a flat in Connaught Place and she would walk to her school at Panchkuian Road. Mrs. Chander’s father worked for the British army, in the accounts department. After school, she joined the Isabel Thoburn College in Lucknow for her bachelors. She returned to Delhi in 1946, after four years of undergraduate studies, to pursue an MA in English Literature and joined the Indraprastha College. Delhi was a lot safer back then, she remembers. The hostel at Indraprastha used to be in a bungalow a little away from the college and she never had a problem walking the distance, even in the night. The free time was spent listening to radio or shopping and eating with friends in Old Delhi. However, she never felt very happy in the Indraprastha hostel. Most of her classmates were from Chandni Chowk and she didn’t have much in common with them. There were no activities to get involved in after the classes, unlike Isabel where the campus life was quite alive. She expressed her distress to a friend called Joy Michael, a firebrand student from St. Stephen’s who went on to become an internationally acclaimed theatre artist, who spoke to the vice-chancellor and helped her move to the St. Stephen’s girls’ hostel near Kashmere Gate,  and here she felt more at ease.

Mrs. Chander finished her MA in 1948. That was the time when Delhi was experiencing widespread communal strife because of partition. Her family was warned against moving out with their guards down. Their friends feared they might get targeted because they looked like Muslims. It was a difficult phase. The Muslims in the neighborhood felt very threatened. Most of the ones living in Connaught Place left. She remembers this one Muslim man who was found, to their bewilderment, hiding in his flat for over a month without much food and water because he feared getting attacked by the Hindus living around him. She was sent to Bombay, away from the city’s disturbances, where her parents lived and, then, she moved to Pune for a year to pursue B.Ed. after which she returned to Delhi.

Her fondest memories are associated with Connaught Place. The inner circle had fewer cars but lots of tongas. Her brothers would often treat her at a restaurant called Davico’s, located above Regal Cinemas. Vegetable vendors would frequent their neighborhood and they lowered a stringed basket to take up the purchase. There used to be a coffee shop at Janpath and if her brothers called them, their bearer would bring the coffee all the way to their flat in the B Block, something hard to imagine in today’s CP. She remembers that there were lots of open spaces in Delhi and the civic amenities were in a great shape. There was place available everywhere, in the buses and trams, in schools and colleges. There was no hastiness about anything. Fashion, too, was very basic. Girls wore either sarees or salwar-kameez and boys opted for shirts and kurtas.

After partition, the refugees came in. While many came from rural Punjab, there were others from places like Lahore and Rawalpindi. The latter were artistically inclined and tried to recreate the cultural ambience of Punjab in Delhi. One such person was Late Mrs. Shiela Bhatia, considered to be the grand dame of Punjabi opera and who happened to be Mrs. Chander’s sister-in-law. Shiela ji, along with many others, helped revive the theatre in Delhi. She remembers frequenting the Sapru House on Barakhamba Road to watch plays. This predates the establishment of the National School of Drama which made Mandi House Delhi’s cultural hub. In 1957, she got married to eminent journalist and theatre critic Late Mr. Romesh Chander.

Soon after their marriage, they moved to Jaipur, where their children were born. Mr. Chander also worked for the government and was sent to London, along with the family, for a six months long training programe. After returning to India, he assisted in the launch of Doodarshan, assuming the role of its first Director-General and, thus, ushering India into a new era of information and communication. With this the family moved to Kaka Nagar. Mr. Chander was the only person there who owned a television. The family’s drawing room would witness an overflow of people who came to watch the movie on Sunday afternoons. In fact, they moved to a ground floor flat to be able to accommodate the crowd. By this time, Mrs. Chander had started teaching at RS Junior Modern School. Television, she remembers, was a part of the school curriculum. There were specific periods designated where children were taken to watch educational content on television. The student-teacher ratio was as low as 1:25 which meant a more affectionate relationship shared between them.

Though highly inaccessible, television had become a very important part of the public life. Many important events like Nehru’s funeral was broadcasted live on it, Mr. Chander doing the commentary for part of it. He lived in Kaka Nagar till up to his retirement after which the family moved to Defence Colony. The later years saw Delhi changing like never before. Something even as basic as transport became a problem. Life in the early years was far more sedate, interspersed with picnics to the Qutb area, where families would travel with a motorcade and the cooking arrangement.

Central Delhi itself was very different. The northern and central ridges were covered in a thick jungle, beyond the Gole market. Yamuna, too, was much cleaner. Mrs. Chander’s goes back to her days as a student and, then, a teacher and recalls how different things were in those days. Children loved and felt belongingness for their surroundings, their home, parents, institutions and the city. Much of it has changed and she blames it on the lack of good parenting. Another major change in the demographics of the classroom has been that second, third and fourth generation learners are all clubbed together and a difference in their approach towards education reflects evenly across the classroom. She can’t point a finger at any one particular trait that sets the Dilliwallah apart. She finds it easier to do that for someone from Lucknow, who is more sophisticated, or Tehzeeb-dar, or a South Indian who is quite particular about hygiene and cleanliness. Maybe it is easier only for an outsider to tell as to what makes us so different.

‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-II

Dinpanah, or what is today called the Old Fort, is among the last of the ‘lost Delhis’. What followed after that was another phase of reviving Delhi’s resplendence – political, economic and cultural. In 1648, Shahjahan inaugurated the new Mughal capital at Shahjahanabad, moving upwards from where Dinpanah was, along the banks of Yamuna. The city of Shahjahanabad was unprecedented in terms of scale, opulence and architectural refinement, befitting the grandeur of the Mughal Empire. Shahjahanabad takes Delhi’s story ahead and deserves to be talked about at length, as it still exists – robust and thriving – but a mere shadow of its original self. Having survived many attacks and invasions and, more recently the mutiny of 1857, it continues to stand tall, eager to share what it has been through if only the passer-by has the patience to halt and listen. And paying attention to it will make much sense. Shahjahanabad, or more widely known as Purani Dilli – the old city of Delhi – is arguably the immediate predecessor of Modern Delhi and getting acquainted to it will, thus, take us many steps closer to understanding the Delhi of the twenty first century.

Shahjahanabad was built to look grand enough to represent the magnificence of the Mughals. Shahjahan was born with an uncanny flair for architecture, developed a refined aesthetic sensibility and inherited a huge treasury. This made it possible for him to realize the dream of building a city that the world would talk about. Shahjahanabad was rich and beautiful and attracted the most accomplished artists, who made it into a cultural hub. While the wealth faded with the decline of the Mughals, the cultural refinement stayed and still lingers. With the mutiny, the city received a shattering blow. Most of its residents fled to save their lives and only about one-third managed to return and reclaim their property. Delhi, once again, lost a large chunk of its original population. The partition in 1947 was another turning point that saw mass exodus of Shajahanabad’s population, including the city’s literary elites, to the newly formed Pakistan. Hundreds of families chose to migrate, risking their lives and surviving a horrifying journey, in the hope of recreating in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar what they had left behind in Delhi. Their havelis were bought or taken on rent by the newly arriving Punjabi refugees from the other side of the border. Many of these properties were also occupied by those Hindus who had the luxury of staying back. Many elegant structures were converted into workshops and warehouses in the bargain.

Shahjahanabad became Old Delhi because the British shifted their capital to Delhi in 1931, building a newer city to the south of the old one. Shahjahanabad once had a wall around it, with fourteen gates, and hence the sobriquet ‘the walled city’. Today, only four gates survive and the wall exists as a kilometer long stretch. It was razed because land was at a premium in the capital city of the newly independent India. Population had swollen up to several millions in a matter of months and the wall became a casualty to the manic pace of urbanization that the city witnessed. The walled city looks squalid and badly organized today. The congestion is daunting. The administration, indeed, leaves much to be desired, but it also has to do with the fact that the space originally meant to cater to a few thousand families is now being shared by lacs of people. Every entity in the walled city seems to be struggling for space. But the squalor isn’t emblematic of any destitution. The average resident of the walled city isn’t struggling for livelihood. It has a commercial ecosystem, made up of small-scale industries and wholesale markets, which is unique to it and attracts buyers from all over Delhi. The walled city has its own intelligentsia, comprising doctors, lawyers, journalists and university professors – people who grew up in the area, hailed from well-to-do families, had access to the best education available and yet chose to stay put and not move out in search of a home in the swankier colonies of New Delhi, unlike many others in their extended family.

And yet, the name ‘Purani Dilli’ evokes the image of a traditional Muslim household, with its members speaking chaste Urdu, pulling off a God-fearing existence, their roots going back to those of Shahjahanabad itself. They assiduously observe the rozas all through Ramzan, assemble at the Jama Masjid every evening of the holy month, with friends and family, to end their fast with the iftaar and invite you to share sewaiyyan on Eid. Their women go to Khari Baoli, sheathed in a burka, to buy the spices that make their food smell so heavenly and know the perfect recipe for Biryani like the back of their hand. They represent the Delhi the way it originally was, before it was forced to assume the role of a megapolis, due to socio-political compulsions. They represent one of the most enduring images of a Dilliwallah.

Hashmat Begum is somewhere in her late sixties and doesn’t remember having lived anywhere but in Purani Dilli. The Delhi of her childhood was a much easier place to live in. Everything was cheap and running a house wasn’t such a challenge for the common man. Her earliest childhood memory is of travelling to Mehrauli with her family. They would make the trip every month by bus for picnics that would last a few days. She remembers climbing up the Qutb and sleeping on the terrace of the Auliya Mosque in the same area. She lives in a mohalla called Farrashkhana, near the Lahori Gate area – named so because it was originally the colony of the ‘Farrash’ or masons who had built the Red Fort. Her mother passed away when she was very young and was raised by her relatives. Raising children was not such a task in those days, she maintains. They used to be obedient and less demanding. People managed to fend for a large family because the commodities, in her view, were more affordable unlike today.

At the time of partition, many Muslims in the area left for Pakistan. You weren’t required to have a passport. You could just pack your bags and catch a train. But the journey was very dangerous. She doesn’t remember anybody who returned. Many people they knew, in fact, died. The madness of the partition days affected her family too. She remembers how her relatives had packed their bags and were ready to catch a train to Pakistan but dropped the plan when her father, who was the patriarch of the family, talked them out of it, enumerating the many horrors that lay along the way. She is glad they stayed. She doesn’t want to leave Delhi because there is a lot of love here and the next place she wants to move to is the house of Allah. Her idea of Delhi doesn’t take into account what lies beyond the walled city. She hasn’t travelled much and her heart is understandably in Farrashkhana. The larger city of Delhi doesn’t interest her and she hasn’t seen much of it either.

Hashmat Begum grew up in the same mohalla, a few lanes away from her in-laws’ house. Her daughter, too, was married into a family settled in Farrashkhana. Her husband runs a workshop that makes steel and aluminum wares. Everything they need is available here and it’s only for weddings and other similar reasons that they go to shop at the nearby Fatehpuri market or Chandni Chowk. But making the purchases isn’t as fun anymore because of the rising prices. This has taken away from the enthusiastic preparations made for festive occasions.

Delhi, she agrees, has changed a lot since her childhood. The earliest sign of change that she remembers noticing was the influx of refugee population from Punjab. Many of them had found lodgings in the walled city but her mohalla wasn’t affected much. The greenery, too, has been lost. All that was jungle and fields – Mehrauli and surrounding areas – has now given way to new colonies. Much of it was sold around partition for as less as fifty paise per square feet. But a few changes have been for the better. Every house in her mohalla is now electrified and they no longer need to use lanterns and oil lamps. Cooking gas has replaced the ‘angithi’ and there is regular water supply in every house, unlike the old days when water was sourced either from the mashakwalla, the nearest municipality tap or hand pumps. She owns a passport but has never used it. She has many relatives living in Pakistan and she’d tried to get some of their daughters to marry into her family but the plans couldn’t materialize. She wants to go for Haj though, and then die peacefully.

‘Conversations’: In search of the Dilliwallah-I

There are many ways to understand a city. Data and statistics on economic trends, demographic analyses and socio-political perspectives proffer intriguing insights into all that contributes towards a city’s dynamics. Studying a city through these tools lends the results so obtained an almost clinical precision, providing scope for debates and deliberations. But there is another, diametrically opposite, vantage point where a city can be observed from. This method is about understanding a city through the people who reside in it, their lives and their stories, linked inevitably to that of the city. The city that this piece of writing focuses on is Delhi, attempting to understand as to who a ‘Dilliwallah’ – the real resident of Delhi – is, who qualifies to be called one and what sets him or her apart.

Delhi has, for millennia – documented and imagined – acted as the nodal center where the collective destinies of the entire Indian subcontinent and the millions living within have collided and concurred, acquiring a resonance with India’s eclectic identity in the bargain. Delhi has always been the political center, nurturing dynasties, destitution and all that lies between them. Delhi remains one of the most populous cities in the country, loved and hated with equal passion. Whoever has been part of the ‘Delhi experience’ has much to share about the city, ranging from exciting to outrageous. Delhi, not unlike many other urban conglomerates, is one city containing several others within it. Each of these ‘Delhis’ came up because of different socio-political compulsions, occupy different positions in the chronological order and are emblematic of different aspects of the city’s multi-hued existence. None of these smaller Delhis is buried in the recesses of an obscure past but are alive and active. These smaller Delhis are all entwined, overlap with each other in an almost rhythmic manner and come together to make up the grand narrative that the city stands for.

Delhi has always been the outsider’s city. It is very easy to stride in and find some space amongst its multitudes and, then, graduate to affectionately calling it your home. And it has been this way for centuries. It, thus, belongs to nobody and everyone. Historically speaking, the earliest city that came into existence within Delhi’s present political boundaries was the capital built by the Tomar rulers and later nurtured by the Chauhan Rajputs and stood at what we today know as the Qutb complex. Quila Rai Pithora, as it was called during Prithvi Raj Chauhan’s reign, was invaded and captured by Mohammed Ibn Sam’s army. With this Islam arrived in mainland India and the new city of Lal Kot rose up at the same site where Quila Rai Pithora once stood. The descent of the original residents, who were largely Hindus and Jains, is practically untraceable. Lal Kot became the first epicenter of what manifested itself as the Delhi Sultanate. Siri, Tughlaqabad, Jahanpanah and Ferozabad, all lie within modern-day Delhi and were built in continuation of the same story. Humayun, the Mughal emperor, built the city of Dinpanah (which we today know as Purana Quila), adding another epoch to this legacy. There were several reasons why people kept returning here in search of the perfect site for their capital city. Delhi was centrally located and close to the northern plains, lay along the course of Yamuna and fell on the international trade route.

What is important to note is that none of the cities mentioned above exist anymore. They all stand as protected monuments, under the care of the Archaeological Survey of India. They were all meant to be fortified structures, big enough for a few thousand people – who were required for the functioning of the capital – to live in. There is no habitation left in these places. Around independence, most of them were surrounded by villages that were far newer in comparison. Mehrauli, where the Qutb Minar stands, can boast of residents with a fairly ancient ancestry, but it’s hard to establish if they have descended from the very people who once dwelt within the gigantic walls of Lal Kot. The life of the common man living in these cities has been sporadically documented, relegating much of it to the domain of conjecturing. We’re talking about variations in demographics, ethnic concentration and migration and settlement patterns over an incredibly long period of close to a thousand years. That, too, of a region that has faced some of the worst kinds of invasions and armed struggles, stimulated by political upheavals of all varieties. It is, therefore, difficult to identify any one group that may lay claim on the city of Delhi in terms of nativity.