Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity

Alex Tickell, Ruvani Ranasinha, Alex Tickell, Ruvani Ranasinha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000059939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sprachen unterrichten

In this book, leading scholars working on urban South Asia chart new forms of literature about contemporary Delhi.

Incorporating original contributions by Delhi-based commentators and covering significant new themes and genres, it updates current critical understanding of how contemporary literature has registered the momentous economic and social forces reshaping India's major cities. This timely volume responds not only to the contextual challenge of a Delhi transformed by economic liberalisation and commercial growth into a global megacity, but also to the emergent formal and generic changes through which this process has been monitored and critiqued in writing. The collection includes studies of the city as a disabling metropolis, as a space of marginal (electronic) text, as a zone of gendered spatiality and sexual violence, and as a terrain in which 'urban villagers' have been displaced by the growing city. It also provides close analyses of emerging genres such as urban comix, digital narratives, literary reportage, and city biography.

Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity will be of interest to students and researchers in disciplines ranging from postcolonial and global literature to cultural studies, civic history, and South Asian and urban studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Writing in from the periphery: Partition narratives from Rurban Delhi

Bodh Prakash

ABSTRACT

The concern of Partition narratives has generally been with displacement, loss of identity, alienation, gender and violence, as well as the rehabilitation of refugees. What is elided in them is the tragedy of those villagers who lost their land and livelihood in order to make space for the thousands of refugees who were resettled in “refugee” colonies. This article explores a key aspect of the impact of the Partition of India; namely, the rapid transformation of rural spaces in the periphery of the capital city of Delhi, which saw a massive influx and resettlement of refugees. It does this by looking at the novels of a lesser-known Hindi novelist, Jagdish Chandra, to foreground the alienation and uprooting of members of rural communities from their traditional moorings.

The Partition of India in 1947 that accompanied independence from colonial rule resulted in the displacement of about ten million people, the deaths of about a million, and the abduction and rape of thousands of women across both sides of the border. Several studies have explored the political processes leading up to Partition, including the roles of the principal players, the colonial state, and the participation of subaltern groups in the 1940s. Literary and creative representations in the subsequent decades have explored the human dimension of Partition and its aftermath. Partition narratives in Hindi, Urdu, Bangla and Punjabi have been mainly concerned with issues of displacement, the loss of identities, alienation, gender and violence, as well as the rehabilitation of refugees, often contrasting personal trauma with official insensitivity. The victims of Partition, notably refugees, women and children, the loss of their homes and the violence to which they were subjected form the main focus of many short stories by Krishan Chander, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chugtai and Mohan Rakesh, and novels by Bhisham Sahni, Yashpal, Rahi Masoom Raza and several others. Most works that trace the history and transformation of the city from Shahjahanabad to Delhi locate 1857 and 1947 as two critical moments. Creative writers, poets, historians and scholars have focused on either the decline of Delhi after 1857 or on the transformation of the city after 1947. But what has rarely been explored is the rapid transformation of rural spaces in areas where refugees were resettled.

Indeed, the transformation of Delhi during the difficult post-Partition years was not only the result of the exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and the arrival of Punjabi-speaking Hindu and Sikh refugees. It also involved a massive state-initiated project of refugee rehabilitation that completely remade the city- and mind-scapes of Delhi. Historically Delhi has witnessed several avatars dating back to Indraprastha (of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata) in ancient times, to Siri, followed by the medieval Shahjahanabad or the Walled City of the Mughal ruler Shahjahan and, in the 20th century, colonial New Delhi. Each of these avatars involved a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the city and its spaces in specific historical moments. In the decades after Independence, Delhi once again had to recreate itself to accommodate a huge number of dispossessed people mainly from Western Punjab. In a sense, a new Delhi was created by these migrants. From being an imperial centre of power for many centuries, Delhi was transformed into a major hub of trade and commerce.

Elderly residents of the city who can remember the pre-Partition period nostalgically recall the tehzeeb, the sophisticated urban culture that apparently preceded the arrival of entrepreneurial Punjabis. According to Ravinder Kaur (2007), the “urban expansion that took place post-Partition has now come to symbolize the loss of high culture and nobility that Delhi once stood for” (199). Whether Delhi ultimately lost or gained from this demographic change and the consequent urbanization is a moot point. In this narrative, the only winners or losers were communities that resided in the urban areas of Delhi that included Civil Lines (the older colonial settlement to the north of Old Delhi), New Delhi (the new colonial capital) and, of course, the medieval city of Shahjahanabad. One can look at the tragedy of Delhi from the perspectives of those who left or those who came, but in both cases what is elided is the tragedy of those villagers who lost their land and livelihood in order to make space for the thousands of refugees who were resettled in “refugee” colonies.

Left to fend for themselves and hemmed in by urbanization, some of these communities continue to live in the so-called urban villages that are now in the heart of an ever-expanding urban Delhi in lal dora areas.¹ Scorned by urban elites and stereotyped in media representations, these communities were also indirect victims of Partition. Given the preoccupation with the narratives told by refugee victims of Partition, their stories have rarely been heard or written about. The marginalization of these communities in social, cultural and political imaginaries during the post-Independence period when Delhi was undergoing a seismic transformation can be understood in terms of the more urgent concerns of refugee influx and rehabilitation. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize their role in the process of rehabilitation. The inclusion of their narratives deepens and enriches existing studies of Partition.

Village, town, city

The expansion of towns into modern metropolises has usually been associated with gradual urban growth and commercial expansion. But Delhi’s evolution followed a somewhat different trajectory. The imperial capital for much of the medieval period, Delhi remained largely confined to the walled city, before the British decided to make it their capital in 1911. By 1931 they had completed the construction of a separate and distinct enclave, New Delhi, to house their administrative and residential buildings. The decision to shift the capital from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi was announced in the coronation durbar of George V in December 1911. Lord Hardinge quickly moved to implement the plan of building a new city to house the imperial government: the existing Civil Lines was considered rather inadequate. The site chosen personally by the viceroy for the Government House and Secretariat was Raisina hill. This would enable the imperial gaze to look down at existing Delhi, right across to the river Jamuna (Yamuna) that flowed on the eastern periphery. Lord Hardinge (1948) claimed that

[f]rom the top of the hill there was a magnificent view embracing old Delhi and all of the principal monuments situated outside the town, with the River at a little distance. I said at once . . . “This is the site for Government House.” (72)

The hill and the surrounding areas (where the “Imperial Way”, now Raj Path, and the boulevards and approaches were to be constructed) mainly belonged to the villages of Raisina, Malcha and five other villages: Kushak, Pilanji (present-day Jor Bagh), Dasgarah, Talkatora and Motibagh. As Dean Nelson (2011) notes: “Between 1911 and 1916, just under 4,000 acres were cleared and 300 families were evicted from Raisina and Malcha villages to create the Viceroy’s House, the grand sandstone palace which towers over the Indian parliament and ministry buildings” (n.p.).

The villagers were summarily ordered to vacate the area and offered compensation at the rate of 3 or 4 rupees a bigha – or 15 rupees an acre for non-irrigated land and 20 rupees an acre for irrigated land (a bigha is a traditional unit of land, a third or quarter of an acre). There were protests and the villagers resisted eviction, but cannons were brought in and they were forcibly removed. From Raisina village they were pushed across the Barapulla nullah to Bhogal even as many refused the meagre compensation offered for the land. Others from Malcha village moved further to villages in present-day Haryana. As Akanksha Jain (2017) explains in an article in The Hindu, the successors of these dispossessed villagers have recently filed petitions in court asking for fair and adequate compensation after obtaining copies of records from 1911. Jain highlights the plight of Sajjan from Haryana, who went to court demanding that the government compensate him for the 32 acres of his forefathers’ land in Malcha village that was acquired by the British in 1911. Father and son, Kallu and Nathu, who are fourth-generation descendants of families who owned and farmed land in Raisina village, also hope for some compensation from the government.²

In 1947, land acquisition took place in somewhat different circumstances. According to Veronique Dupont (2004), in 1947 Delhi, with a population of about 900,000, saw an influx of some 495,000 refugees from western Punjab and Sindh, while 329,000 Muslims left the capital and migrated to Pakistan (160). The Indian state required large tracts of land to resettle the newly arrived refugees and the farmlands of villages that lay on the peripheries were acquired. Unlike in 1911, however, the residential areas of the villages were not touched and colonial laws that restrained the state from interfering with rihaishi or residential land continued to be in force. Hence villagers not only lost their agricultural lands, but were also excluded from urban development and planning. According to Nayanjyot Lahiri (2011), for example, in the 106 villages located within the urban spaces of Delhi that have been inhabited continuously for about 500 years, “municipal regulations did not apply” until very recently, leaving inhabitants “with no control over basic light and ventilation requirements in buildings”. Lahiri quotes the architect Ranjit Sabikhi, who states that although these villages “have provided a safety valve to the city”, guarding it from the massive increase in population, the municipalities have not provided “water, electricity and sewage services” (29–30). Dupont (2004) highlights the contrast between these enclaves and the planned housing colonies set up by the postcolonial government, explaining that “there is a marked discontinuity in the urban fabric between these urbanized villages characterised by their vernacular architecture and their organic street pattern, and the planned housing estates that surround them” (161). As in 1947, it is these “rurban” communities that have provided the residential space to house the new immigrants.³

The tragic fate of the rural communities that dotted the peripheries of Delhi to its west is taken up by the Hindi novelist Jagdish Chandra, in two novels published in the 1970s and 1980s. Muthi Bhar Kaankar (1976b; A handful of pebbles) and Ghas Godam (1982; Barn) offer an evocative and complex representation of this process during the early 1950s. Together they trace the dramatic transformation of the village Basai Darapur from the perspective of its inhabitants, as they come to terms with the developments in Delhi following the influx of Punjabi and Sikh refugees. Basai Darapur – like Naraina, Shadipur, Tihar, Tatarpur and a few other villages – was sufficiently far from “Lat ka bazaar”, the local name for Connaught Place in the early 1950s. Outside the city limits until as late as 1950, Basai Darapur today is an urban village in west Delhi, and is notorious as the largest manufacturing hub for counterfeit electronic goods.

Chandra is best known in the world of Hindi letters for his novels on Dalit oppression, Dharti Dhan Na Apna (1972; The wealth of land is not ours), Zameen Apni To Thi (2001; The earth was ours) and Narakund Mein Vaas (1994; A hellish existence). Like his renowned predecessor Premchand, Jagdish Chandra’s literary works are rooted in the struggles of the landless and the dispossessed. If Premchand’s (1936) Godan (The gift of a cow) explores the descent of Hori from small farmer to landless labourer, Chandra’s novels foreground landless Dalits. His protagonist Kali in Narakund Mein Vaas struggles to transform Dalit existence, but like Premchand’s (1924) Surdas in Rangbhumi (Rangbhoomi: The arena of life) the deprived and the oppressed fail to get justice. According to Tarsem Gujral (2007a), both

Yashpal and Jagdish Chandra are writers who share Premchand’s commitment to a reality-centered aesthetic tradition. But unlike Yashpal, whose concerns rapidly expanded to include urban, middle-class existence, Jagdish Chandra’s focus remained the inequalities and oppression in village communities. Chandra believed that it was the ordinary villager [who was his inspiration]. (172)

When asked why he had focused on rural communities, despite having spent most of his life in cities like Jullunder and Delhi, Chandra explained that his early years were spent entirely in a village and that he did not “find the problems of the city as significant as those of the village” (quoted in Gujral 2007b, 49). He also cited the location of his novels in the 1960s – a time before the emergence of big cities in North India – as another reason for his village-centred works.

Most of Chandra’s novels are concerned with the displacement and impoverishment of village communities when confronted by the forces of urbanization. He was fully aware of the contradictions of development and the pressures it placed on the dispossessed. In Kabhi Na Choden Khet (1976a; Never leave the land), he narrated the exploitation of small farmers as they became entangled in the complex web of land disputes and court cases, bribes and corruption. In Muthi Bhar Kaankar, the focus becomes the loss of land and livelihoods of rural communities on the outskirts of Delhi in the 1950s. The location of Muthi Bhar Kaankar and Ghas Godam remains the village, but the scene of the action shifts to the periphery of Delhi in the years after Partition. The displaced refugees from Pakistan enter a city that expands to provide shelter for them by acquiring land from the villagers. While other novels by Chandra take up the struggles of village communities in the post-Independence years, the spatial and temporal location of these two novels brings three players together: the refugees, the local villagers and the state.

Like other Hindi writers, such as Mohan Rakesh, Bhisham Sahni, Kamleshwar and Badiuzzaman, Ja...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Delhi: New writings on the megacity
• 1 Writing in from the periphery: Partition narratives from Rurban Delhi
• 2 No home for the disabled: The disabling metropolis of Delhi
• 3 Desire and disappearance in Delhi
• 4 “Capital” consciousness: Reading Rana Dasgupta
• 5 From Cybermohalla to Trickster City: Writing from the margins of Delhi
• 6 Resisting re-orientalism in representation: Aman Sethi writes of Delhi
• 7 Transporting metropolitanism: Road-mapping feminist solutions to sexual violence in Delhi
• 8 “Out of place” women: Exploring gendered spatiality in Delhi
• 9 Urban comix: Subcultures, infrastructures and “the right to the city” in Delhi
• Index