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ABSTRACT
This article engages with the messy streets of post-Partition Delhi. The author engages with a relatively understudied facet of the Partition: its impact on the everyday life of a city. Through physical sites which carried imprints of former inhabitants, to letters that refugees wrote to express their anxieties, the article constructs identities that were forged in the everyday life of Delhi. Questions of ownership, self-making, and governance help answer how the trauma of riots was negotiated in mundane paper trails. The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Virginia Vandenberg for her editing help; Sarai, the media initiative of the Centre of Studies in Developing Societies, New Delhi, Ravi Sundaram for an internship that led me to Delhi and its wonderfully chaotic histories in 2007-8. This article has been simmering since then.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Jailed for Theft,’ Hindustan Times, January 14th, 1948, page 3.
2. Letter dated 29 April 1956, in which AD Pandit, an official of the Local Self Government, Delhi State writes to the Ministry of Health in File No. F-10 (11)/56- MT&CE/LSG, ‘Papers relating to the Mosque in Irwin Hospital.’ Delhi State Archives.
3. ‘Aurangzeb is now Abdul Kalam Road.’ Damini Nath, The Hindu, 4 September 2015, Page 1.
4. ‘Trouble over Occupation of Guest House.’ Hindustan Times, 11 January 1948, Page 3.
5. ‘Refugee squatters before P.M’s House.’ Hindustan Times, 5 August 1949, Page 3.
6. Advertisement, Hindustan Times, 4 January 1948, Page 1.
7. ‘Sweepers as Water Carriers,’ 7 January 1948, Hindustan Times, Page 3.
8. ‘Savings Bank Accounts,’ Letter to Editor, Hindustan Times, 12 January 1948, Page 5.
9. F. No. 13 (12) /56 C, ‘Representation from Mrs Lajwanti Charan Staff Nurse against the Termination of her Services,’ Delhi State Archives.
10. Mehr Chand Khanna is the first displaced person to head the Ministry of Rehabilitation. Before migrating to India, he was the Finance Minister of the Government of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in West Pakistan. He was an Advisor to the Ministry of Rehabilitation and since 1955 as Minister. He was made Ministers of Works, Housing and Supply, Government of India from 1962. Not much else can be gleaned from his private papers in the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi. There is a major commercial spot in South Delhi, which is named after him. His rise from refugee camps in Delhi to Ministerial positions would have been significant to this narrative, but unfortunately there was insufficient material.
11. Letter dated 28 September 1964, Mehr Chand Khanna Private Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
12. The name of the colony reflects where ‘home’ was for those who lived in it. Naming their new home after the original home is an effort to rebuild it.
13. Letter dated 6.11.55 in F. 12 (8)/56 MT & CE/CC. ‘Representation from members of the Multan Cooperative Housing Building Society Ltd.’ Delhi State Archives.
14. There are historically specific reasons for Kaur choosing the Ford Foundation. They fall beyond the ambit of this article.
15. Mayer had been an army engineer in Burma and India during World War II and helped develop a Master Plan for Bombay and the Etawah rural community development project in 1948. He designed most of Chandigarh before Corbusier joined the project. A letter from Ford Foundation representative CitationDouglas Ensminger to Albert Mayer dated 19 January 1956 indicates that the Prime Minister himself had ‘expressed the hope’ that Mayer became the coordinator of the most comprehensive city planning project ever attempted in India by western planners. (CitationGoodfriend 2).
16. ‘Refugee Colonies Changed South Delhi’s face,’ Hindustan Times, 13 August 2016. http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/refugee-colonies-changed-south-delhi-s-face/story-qYpc0OQI28vP5syqnvYYCO.html (Accessed on 15 October 2016).
17. Whether these new incursions of the city into its neighboring territories changed the Old/New duality that was built into planned Delhi, is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.
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Aprajita Sarcar
Aprajita Sarcar is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University, ON. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis, specializing in the urban history of families in postcolonial India. She has a Master’s in Political Studies, and a M. Phil in Social Medicine, both from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Before joining a PhD program, she has briefly worked as a journalist and directed a documentary. Her interests have been on urbanity, gendered citizenships and identities emerging in the cities of postcolonial South Asia. She currently lives in Kingston, Ontario.