Delhi: New writings on the megacity

The world was changing; an imperceptible hysteria was pulsing through the city. For as long as I can remember Delhi looked like a giant construction site [ … ] but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. (Sethi 2012, 38)

The old was dying, the new was in preparation, and we were living in the in-between, when nothing was resolved, everything was potential. Everyone was trying to absorb, to imagine what the city – and their own lives – might become. (Dasgupta 2014, 39)

A sense of accelerating, dizzying change and heady possibility cuts through recent writing on the city in India. Delhi, as the nation’s governmental heart and epicentre of the wider urban sprawl of the National Capital Region, has become the most urgent sign of this transition from national capital city to globalized megacity. The moment at which Delhi became a “megacity” occurred at some point between 1990 and 1991 when its urban population tipped over the 10 million mark, a moment that coincided with the country’s much-vaunted liberalizing structural adjustment reforms. Delhi’s continued growth means that it is set to be a megacity three times over by 2020, with a population of nearly 30 million, rising to a projected 36 million by 2030.¹

To put these figures in a broader context, India as a whole has a population of 1.2 billion, of which 65 percent are below the age of 35 and almost 50 percent are below the age of 25. By 2025, India is forecast to surpass China as the most populous country on earth. The Indian government expects the next wave of economic growth to be driven by the nation’s centres and cities may account for nearly 70 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. Nevertheless, one-third of the world’s poorest people are Indian citizens, with 69 percent of the population living on less than two US dollars a day, and this underclass remains largely excluded from the story of India’s recent economic growth (https://data.worldbank.org/). Such selective access to the rewards of the “New India”, which seems congruent with global trends towards greater economic inequality, has resulted in an increase in informal urbanizing labour patterns and a continual pressure on urban residential space. Cities in the subcontinent are “anticipated to [become] the largest urban conglomerates of the twenty-first century”(Mehrotra 2008, 205; see also Mehta 2004; Chattopadhyay 2006; Chandavarkar 2009; Sanyal and Desai 2011; Prakash 2011), and the expansion of the Indian megacity, and its related infrastructural demands, thus present profound social and development challenges.

For Delhi’s writers and journalists, the sense of change in the last two decades has been less apparent in abstract population statistics and more evident in tectonic shifts in the city’s temperament, its urban culture and its economic possibilities. The literary “emergence” of the megacity (and the imaginary of Delhi as “global” megacity) is difficult to summarize, but can be defined as a series of propositions bracketed historically by the National Democratic Alliance government of 1998–2004 (which included the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] and ran for re-election in 2004 on the “India Shining” campaign), and the more fully mandated BJP government which swept to power in May 2014. It can be argued that, as they consolidated earlier reforms, these governments presided over a changed Indian political landscape. For many of the writers discussed in this issue, these changes were registered in the following six ways: (1) as a sense that the city had exchanged a relatively uneventful administrative-governmental urban culture for one that had suddenly become frenetic and unpredictable (Sethi 2012); (2) in the new creative energies and the cultural avant-garde that emerged in the decade after liberalization (Dasgupta 2014); (3) in a neo-liberal economics that had unleashed rapacious warlike or murderous forces in the city (Adiga 2008; Dasgupta 2014); (4) in an awareness that the city was being transformed meretriciously along World Class aesthetic lines in order to showcase India’s development at the 2010 Commonwealth Games (Roy 2017, 96); (5) in new democratic demands for inclusiveness and representation; and finally, (6) in fears that the city’s urban - even though it might hold out the promise of greater freedom from ‘traditional’ values - culture was not becoming any more secure for women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) communities (Deb 2011, 227). In this period too, the city became the site of both a resurgent Hindu nationalism, as noted above, and an increasingly vocal middle class, which lobbied on issues like corruption, public accountability and civic order.

It is the literary consciousness of this radical urban change that forms the starting point for “Delhi: New Writings on the megacity”, and our editorial aim has been to promote further “dialogue between the politics and poetics of urban space – both real and imagined” (Detmer et al. 2011, 483). This special issue examines the relationship between the shifting contemporary urban form of Delhi, which some commentators believe is without precedent, and narrative attempts to register such shifts. These efforts take multiple and emergent shapes, and include new iterations of the literary and popular novel, narrative reportage and non-fiction, city biography, modes of (digital) short-storytelling, and hybrid genres such as comix and graphic novels.

Genealogies of the city

As might be expected from a colonial archive, writing in English has not been kind to or celebratory about India’s cities. In the colonial paradigm, the city features as a place of wary governance, concealed violence and suppressed terror. Indeed, if cities in the Global North have often been regarded historically as structured and ordered signs of civility and modernity, the cradles of liberal democracy and a civic culture, the cities of the subcontinent have more often been relegated to the other end of a developmental scale and dismissed as metropolises of “mismanagement”, “excess” and “overpopulation”. While theories of the political culture of Indian cities stretch back to the second century ce, to the writings of Kautilya and the detailed city-state treatise of the Artha Shastra, the largely Eurocentric linear concept of the Indian city as a developmental problem was augmented by Indian nationalist thought, which saw cities either as places of alienation and moral corruption (a position famously taken in the writing of M.K. Gandhi) or as sites that bore the deracinating imprint of colonial hubris. For India’s first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, the tainted colonial legacy of cities like Delhi could only really be neutralized by the construction of completely new urban centres (such as the steel town of Bhilai or the administrative hub of Chandigarh), which represented a progressive break with the colonial past (Roy 2007).

In the years that followed India’s Independence, the need for rural-industrial schemes such as hydro-electrification and mechanized agriculture meant that the city was often presented as a secondary national-developmental concern. Indeed, when defined in contrast to the rural, the city occupied an ambiguous, gendered position in the Indian nationalist imaginary: a space where anxieties about urbanity, modernity and transgressive, non-normative female behaviour, particularly in terms of sexual mores, converged. Following Independence, then, subcontinental literature and cinema represented the city as the space where both “the promise and failures of postcolonial citizenship were played out” (Prakash 2008, 199; see also Bannerjee-Guha 2009; Roy 2007). These equivocal projections of the city continued into the 1970s and 1980s, facilitated by commentators as diverse as Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul and Dominique Lapierre, all of whom presented the Indian city as a sign of negative, chaotic excess. In the international media, the postcolonial Indian city commonly featured as a sign of problems – poverty, disease and infrastructural failure – to be overcome: a transnational urban imaginary that Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane represent as the “city of stasis” (2011, 3).

At the start of the 21st century, however, this long-standing ambivalence towards the city in Indian nationalist, public political discourses and, more widely, in international perceptions of India’s cities was replaced by a more celebratory emphasis on the “entrepreneurial” or “World Class” city, as the prime signifier of economic arrival. The so-called “city of stasis” started to be displaced by the “city of action” (Shapiro Anjaria and McFarlane 2011, 3). As Swapna Bannerjee-Guha (2009) notes, the “essential objective” of this new political discourse was “to make [India’s] cities sufficiently investment friendly, acceptable to the credit rating agencies and help them emerge as geostrategic points to further neoliberalism in the Global South” (96). Consequently, the current Indian government has been quick to assimilate the neo-liberal urban planning vocabulary of the Global North in promoting investment hubs, cyber-cities and so-called “smart cities”: urban regeneration programmes which include initiatives such as “Skill India” and “Digital India” designed to make cities “Engines of Growth”. In Delhi’s recent history, this entrepreneurial vision of the city has driven the development of commercial satellite towns like Gurgaon, and peripheral New Economic Zones such as the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA). It has also generated concerns over the appearance and infrastructural provision of the city, expressed most evidently in the clearance of informal settlements in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and the construction of Delhi Metro. Mapped very broadly then, developmental and national-governmental discourses about urban India could be said to have shifted from an ambivalent postcolonial “modernizing” vision of the city, focused largely on public, nationalized infrastructure projects and the “common” citizen (Mukherjee 2015), to a conceptual investment in the city as a space of globally projected identity, and public–private partnerships, with the corporate or entrepreneurial worker as its focus.

Contemporary scholarship (Mehta 2004; Chattopadhyay 2006; Chandavarkar 2009; Sanyal and Desai 2011; Prakash 2011) and cross-disciplinary work (Huyssen 2008; Verma 2012) on subcontinental cities, which coincided with an “Urban Turn” in the social sciences from the late 1990s, add complexity and depth to such generalizations. In India, the new urbanism has been reflected in the emergence of influential research groups such as South Asia Resource Access on the Internet (SARAI) at Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and the renewed scholarly interest in the city, especially marginal forms of urban political society (Chatterjee 2004) and informal settlement (Anand 2017). As Gyan Prakash notes in the 2002 issue of SARAI:

In India [ … ] the surge in the attention paid to the city [… ] is the product of two interlinked processes – the erosion in the authority of the historicist narrative of Indian modernity and the emergence of a new politics of urban space [that has transformed the city into a] space for the assertion of plebeian identities and politics. (Prakash 2002)

In these terms, then, the city is central to understanding a new kind of popular politics unlinked from an established paternalistic form of democracy, and predicated on identity, vote-blocks and popular sentiment. Alongside this refocusing on the city as a political forum, the new writing on the megacity also bears the trace of some long-established positions in urban theory. These include Georg Simmel’s ([1903] 1972) work on mental life in the metropolis, Lewis Mumford’s (1973) research on civic association and disassociation, Richard Sennett’s (2003) thinking on active citizenship versus self-preservation, and the positioning of the city at the conjunction of the material and the imaginary (Mcleod 2004). The trace of Walter Benjamin’s readings of Baudelaire’s flâneur in continental theory and the Situationist tenor of Michel de Certeau’s “pedestrian rhetorics” ([1980] 2011) is also immediately apparent in the juxtaposition of the rational planned city of official discourse and the crucibles of power negotiated and traversed in the migration, mobility and civic instability of the city dweller. At the same time, some articles in this issue usefully interrogate a celebratory idea of urban mobility, represented by the self-defining walker in the city, and raise the issue of the gendered, classed and normatively bodied projection of the flâneur or flâneuse.

A more recent genealogy must also be traced for the new writings on the megacity in this issue: one that shadows and responds to discussions of the city of the Global South in geography, sociology and the connected emergent discipline of “urbanism”. In a break from the older sociological and planning approaches that have located the city as static or formed by bounded communities, or traversed by hyper-resistant citizen-pedestrians, researchers have increasingly turned to models of the urban that are connected, dynamic and “relative” (Amin and Thrift 2017, 17), drawing variously on concepts of the global and local, World Systems Theory (Wallerstein 2004) and Actor Network Theory (Farias and Bender 2010). Increasingly, as well, the politics of urban life has been gauged against the integration of military or defensive technologies and forms of “splintering” neo-liberal exclusion within cities and across urban populations and in relation to forms of variable citizenship (Ong 1999; Graham 2001; Davis 2006) and “spectral” subjectivity (Herbert 2012). Additionally, the issue of how urban agency depends on, and is imbricated in, improvised responses to infrastructure (Simone 2010; Boehmer and Davies 2015) and incorporates forms of urban “pirate modernity” (Sundaram, 2011) also promises to recalibrate critical understandings of the city as a space of political and social possibility.

Writing the city

Cultural production is a vital part of imagining the city and has the potential to influence the understanding of urban reality and reveal cities’ complex structures, hierarchies of power, racialized and classed cartographies and exclusive zoning. As noted already, a historicist narrative of Delhi’s modernity has always had to reconcile itself to multiple versions of this palimpsest city. (New) Delhi, with its suggestive prefix, has never been singular and its inhabitants have always journeyed across different historical layers in their daily traversing of the city (Deb 2011, 220). Delhi has a complex relationship with the nation, serving metonymically as India’s political centre, but also existing, like many capital cities, as a space that disrupts and supplements the idea of the nation as homogenous cultural community (Ashcroft 2011). Writing on the megacity reflects on how contemporary patterns of violence are embedded within stories of the past, and how narrative complicates official histories of city and nation, but also how the city emblematizes distinctive conditions of contemporary life, where the divided nation can become defined by heterogeneity.

Literary writing tends to approach the city in terms of the relationship between individual and mass, and between city and citizen. The city is a setting but also a chronotope; a palimpsest or troubled marker of modernity; a site of memory and memorialization. Delhi, with its history of multiple cities, is therefore particularly rich in literary-urban narrative traditions. These versions of the city include the Mughal lament for the city,² refined in the poetry of Mirza Ghalib and in collections like Tafazzul Husain Kaukab’s 1863 Fughan-I-Dilhi (The lament for Delhi), and incorporate an urban-historical consciousness of Delhi as a city shaped by extreme, often cataclysmic transformations: the sacking of the city in 1398 by Timur and again in 1739 by the Persian leader Nadir Shah, and conflict in the city during the rebellion of 1857–58. Effectively inaugurating yet another version of the city in 1911, when the colonial capital was moved from Calcutta, Edward Luytens’s and Herbert Baker’s monumental rose-coloured palaces of colonial government and administration in New Delhi displaced and marginalized the “old” Mughal city of Shahjahanabad. The form of this particular urban imaginary is discernible in the first major English novel of Delhi, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi ([1940] 1994). The novel recalls the influence lost by the Muslim gentry when they ceded power to the British; it depicts how the life of the Muslim feudal class was coming to an end in the first half of the 20th century, defeated by forces of modernity. It maps the city through the portrait of the life of Muslim aristocratic families in the traditional mohallas (residential areas) of Delhi. The city’s new status was such that after the First World War, as Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes (2003) observe, “Bombay [now had] none of the imperium of Delhi” (xi). On its completion in 1931, power was firmly established in New Delhi, although with the rising demand for independence this power was to be short-lived.

After 1947, Delhi’s population increased dramatically. The modern city was reconstituted by immigration from the Punjab following Partition, and is in some ways a civic product of Partition. These historical traces are evident in some of the later canonical Indian-English novels of the city, including Anita Desai’s (1980) Clear Light of Day, which transposes memory and modernist aesthetics in a vision of Delhi overshadowed by its past: the ancient city of temples and tombs, mosques and monuments, fortresses and gardens loved by poets (evoked again in her later novel In Custody [1984] 2013). Delhi was also the setting of fictional political critiques of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us ([1985] 1988), and was given a more ribald trans-historical treatment in Khushwant Singh’s (1990) paean to the many-layered city in Delhi: A Novel. Contemporary subcontinental urban fictions paint a vivid panorama of the fast-developing city stretched to the limit, in terms of living space and resources, by those displaced from other cities and rural areas. At the same time, popular fictions by authors like Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan imagine new spaces of middle-class urban consciousness in the city’s IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) colleges, call centres and elite residential enclaves. Conversely, the environmental consequences of Delhi’s accelerated growth – with its countless flyovers, underpasses and subways and road widening, and its surging levels of pollution – are captured in Arundhati Roy’s (2017) novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in which the city is depicted as a space of stratified, often brutalizing human experience: a place in which the city’s birds have been poisoned by agricultural pharmaceuticals and the metropolis features as a “crumbling amphitheatre where stories of love and madness, stupidity, delight and unspeakable cruelty have been played out for centuries” (96).

The articles collected in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing were first presented as part of the Leverhulme Trust research network (2014–16) “Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature”, led by Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) with co-investigators Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick), Alex Tickell (Open University) and Ruvani Ranasinha (King’s College London). The project explored the shifting relationship between urban planning, violence and literary representation from colonial into postcolonial times (see www.plannedviolence.org). The network’s third workshop, “Planning Modernity: Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Discontinuities”, held at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, was convened on October 24–25, 2014, with the generous help of G.J.V. Prasad and the assistance of Lakshmi Menon. We are especially pleased to be able to include in this special issue so many contributors who live and work in Delhi, whose experience of many of the concerns discussed here goes beyond the theoretical and is informed by a deep personal involvement in the city.

Bodh Prakash’s article “Writing in from the Periphery: Partition Narratives from Rurban Delhi” explores the less well-known writing on those inhabitants of Delhi’s rural peripheries who have suffered a double displacement – once during the building of the British imperial city and again as a consequence of Partition and the expansion of the city in the 1950s. His focus on Delhi’s rural peripheries is part of a growing body of urban studies and subcontinental literature that problematizes the boundaries between cities and suburban or rural space. Prakash’s work shows how the rural cannot be excluded from urban analysis when the growth of cities like Delhi involves a gradual encroachment on, and incorporation of, village spaces and communities. Focusing on writing by the Hindi novelist Jagdish Chandra, Prakash traces representations of the urban village in two of Chandra’s novels first published in the late 1970s: Muthi Bhar Kaankar and Ghas Godam. Set in the early 1950s, Chandra’s novels are a fascinating representation of the predicament of Delhi’s “rurban” villagers who are displaced by state land-acquisition policies and whose lives change forever with the expansion of the capital.

In “No Home for the Disabled: The Disabling Metropolis of Delhi”, Someshwar Sati reads the city as a uniquely disabling space for those who encounter it from a non-normative subject position. Using Shivani Gupta’s autobiography, No Looking Back: A True Story, which relates the author’s attempts to negotiate India’s national capital as an orthopedically disabled person, Sati shows how disabled people are still systematically excluded from the metropolis. He also reads the sanctioned ignorance of their experience of the metropolis by architects and urban planners who have created a form of “infrastructural apartheid”. Sati shows how Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernization “helps us to understand how the processes of industrialization resulted in the framing of disability as a deviant form of corporeality that disrupted the functional productivity of a capitalist economic order”. Within this sphere, narratives like Gupta’s autobiography, argues Sati, challenge discourses of dependency and charity through which disability is perceived.

Stuti Khanna’s article, “Desire and Disappearance in Delhi”, charts the impact of the expanding megacity on literary form and concentrates on three very different genres: Uday Prakash’s novellas in The Walls of Delhi (translated by Jason Grunebaum, 2012); Aman Sethi’s biographical-ethnographic-journalistic account of Mohammed Ashraf, a day labourer in old Delhi, titled A Free Man (2011), which is also discussed by Lisa Lau in this issue; and Ravish Kumar’s Ishq mein Shaher Hona (2015), the first of the three short volumes in Hindi under the Laghu Prem Katha (Short love stories) imprint. In her careful parallel readings of these texts, Khanna shows how the representational demands of the megacity, in its proliferation of overlapping cityscapes – including the technoscapes of social media, the transport infrastructures of the “kinetic city” (Mehrotra 2011) and the structural precarity of the city’s informal labour markets – all demand new representational strategies.

C.S. Bhagya and G.J.V. Prasad’s article, “‘Capital’ Consciousness: Reading Rana Dasgupta”, discusses the changes in the city documented in Rana Dasgupta’s 2012 influential work, Capital. Bhagya and Prasad show how Dasgupta’s writing traces the emergence of neo-liberal discourses of mobility, especially those relating to real-estate development in the city at the turn of millennium. They ask how Dasgupta’s experiments with non-fictional forms, including his use of narrative reportage and interviews with Delhi residents, trace new, widening fractures in the urban terrain of Delhi’s capital and register the public discourse of entrepreneurial individualism in the metropolis. Dasgupta, argue Bhagya and Prasad, presents his city biography as an account of Delhi’s recent past, and its current transformation into a “global city”, but also writes a report from the perspective of the global future in his sensitivity to the emergency formations of the urban, and urban community. As they state in their conclusion,

Dasgupta asserts that the city of Delhi is globally interesting “not because it is an example of a city which is on its way to maturity. It is interesting because it is already mature, and its maturity looks nothing like what we are led to expect, in times past, that mature global cities looked like”. (2014, 439)

For Lipi Biswas Sen, in her article “From Cybermohalla to Trickster City: Voices from the Margins of Delhi”, the urban subaltern experience and new digital modes of storytelling come together in the collection of vignettes, short narratives, diary entries and comments compiled in Behrupiya Shahar (2007), translated by Shveta Sarda as Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis (2010) – publications which developed out of the “Cybermohalla” project. The latter was an initiative led by SARAI in collaboration with a non-governmental organization (NGO), Ankur, that enabled residents of informal settlements to have access to mobile media labs through which they could record their experiences. This collective authoring of digital narratives – effectively a form of politicized testimonio – enabled the production of what Nancy Fraser terms “subaltern counterpublics” that reckon the human cost of the government slum clearance and resettlement schemes that accompanied Delhi’s contemporary remaking.

In her article “Resisting Re-orientalism in Representation: Aman Sethi Writes of Delhi”, Lisa Lau argues that Sethi’s narrative reportage in A Free Man voices the stories of itinerant labour, casual workers and internal migrants similarly under-represented in subcontinental anglophone fiction. Moreover, she argues that Sethi escapes the pitfalls of “re-orientalization” by his judicious use of narrative non-fictional devices. In contrast, Kanika Batra and Rachna Sethi explore gendered representations of Delhi in their diverse negotiations of the relationships between postcolonial, feminist and urban studies. Their postcolonial feminist critiques of Delhi are angled towards gendered experiences of the city in terms of freedoms, access to public spaces, transport and the political in the context of Delhi’s horrifying rape culture and the vocal activism that rose up to protest against it. (Delhi has one of the highest crime rates in the country.) Batra’s article “Transporting Metropolitanism: Road-Mapping Feminist Solutions to Sexual Violence in Delhi” compares the treatment of sexual violence in two short narratives in relation to recent official documents on the topic to suggest how the former anticipates and can be read productively against the latter. The heterogeneity of positions on sexual violence can be seen in her comparison of the reports produced by Manushi and Jagori with government-commissioned reports such as the one produced by Justice Verma. Sethi’s article, “‘Out of Place’ Women: Exploring Gendered Spatiality in Delhi”, explores the gender-coding of Delhi’s urban spaces and the representation of the figure of the “public woman” in writings by Manju Kapur and Advaita Kala. She suggests that contemporary female protestors can be traced to the early feminist reformers.

In his article “Urban Comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures and ‘the Right to the City’ in Delhi”, Dominic Davies addresses one of the newest and arguably most dissident narrative forms to document urban India in recent years: graphic novels and forms of illustrated narrative. Approaching the work of Vishwajyoti Ghosh and Sarnath Banerjee via the tradition of “comix” subcultures rather than graphic novels, Davies shows how the distinctively collaborative, networked history of comix production lends itself to a uniquely subversive mapping of urban infrastructures in their work. We hope this special issue illuminates how reading and writing the megacity Delhi today unearths a range of hidden histories, and draws upon a variety of genres from comix subcultures, to memoir to feminist fictions.

Notes on contributors

Alex Tickell is senior lecturer in English at the Open University, UK. He is a literary historian with a special interest in South Asian and South East Asian literary cultures, contemporary fiction and conjunctions of writing and politics. In 2005 he republished some of the first Indian-English fictions by the Dutt cousins in Selections from Bengaliana. He is the author of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2007) and Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947 (2012) and has recently edited South Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (2016). He is also the editor of the forthcoming tenth volume of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945. He is associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, associate editor of Wasafiri and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Ruvani Ranasinha is reader in postcolonial literature at King’s College, University of London. She is the author of Hanif Kureishi (2002) in the Writers and Their Work series; South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007); and the lead editor of South Asians Shaping the Nation, 1870–1950: A Sourcebook (2012). Her most recent monograph is Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (2016). She is associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and on the editorial board of the feminist digital humanities “Orlando” project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. India Census 2011 – Population census 2011 conducted by the Census Organization of India. India Census 2011 – Delhi – Delhi population census data 2011. World Urbanization Prospects – United Nations population estimates and projections of major Urban Agglomerations.

2. The Mughal Dynasty began in 1526 but the real shift of power to Shahjahanabad (now known as Old Delhi) began around 100 years later when Shah Jahan moved his court from Agra to Delhi. The medieval walled city served as the capital of his Empire and became increasingly built-up and prosperous.