In a few days, I will have lived in Delhi60 years. When I came to live here on March 8, 1946, the past dwarfed thepresent. The modern city consisted of little more than what is now calledLutyens’ Delhi. It began at Minto Bridge and ended at Sujan Singh Park. Northof Minto Bridge one meandered down a narrow road through sparse jungle tillconfronted by the forbidding silhouette of Khooni Darwaza—the Mughal executiongate. A few hundred metres beyond it stood Delhi Gate. The ramparts ofShahjaha-nabad stretched unbroken on both sides of it. Asaf Ali Road was noteven a glimmer in a greedy developer’s eye.
Beyond Daryaganj, the Red Fort towered out of a plain that swept up unbroken toJama Masjid. All the power of the Mughal imagination was still there to savourin that vista. Kashmiri Gate was still intact and we passed daily through it,never dreaming that one day it would become a DDA storage site for uncut stone.The walls on both sides were intact and pockmarked by the cannonballs of theBritish as they attempted to retake the city in 1858.
We lived in Sujan Singh Park at the southern limit of the new city. The jungleof keekar and babul began just beyond the Humayun Road T-junction and stretchedalmost unbroken till Mathura. Purana Qila, the Lodhi tombs and Humayun’s Tombreared out of this jungle. To me, they were both sentinels of the past and dimlyunderstood, and therefore frightening—reminders of the transience of humanlife.
The Delhi of the ’40s was beautiful, but it was also lifeless. Everyone inthis tiny Imperial town knew everyone else and gossip was the main form ofentertainment. There was literally nothing to do. New Delhi had one shoppingcentre—Connaught Place—and four cinema halls—Regal, Rivoli, Plaza andOdeon. The typical evening’s outing was a stroll on the lawns of India Gatefollowed by a visit to Bengali Market to eat golgappas and chaat.
Delhi grew exponentially after Independence but its character did not change.The past continued to dwarf the present till well into the ’70s, and the cityremained lifeless. The bureaucracy continued to rule. Every fad it could thinkof was tried out first in Delhi, be it rationing or prohibition. Liquor wastaboo except in homes and, later, at five-star hotels. Even the import ofHollywood films was banned. There was an all-pervasive suppression of privateenterprise—even middle income housing became a public sector monopoly.
That is why, despite its huge and teeming population, its mad traffic, itsimpossibly aggressive drivers and the smog of perennial construction that hangsover the city, in the evening years of my life I have grown to love Delhi. Forthe future has finally freed itself from the shackles of the past.
New restaurants, bars, discotheques, and boutiques, entertainment plazas,multiplex cinema halls and delicatessens are springing up every day. Behind allof these is a new generation of confident young people in their 20s and 30s whoare not afraid to take risks, to borrow money and to look all over the world fornew ideas. The intellectual life of the city has acquired a vigour not to befound even inside the Washington beltway (or so a Chicago professor told me).Delhi, in short, makes me wish I could live my life over, once again.
This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, January 31,2006
