No voices from the city

It is disappointing that a book on Delhi does not include the people's perceptions of the city, says RANJANA SENGUPTA.

FOR a volume that challenges much orthodoxy about this city, Delhi Urban Space and Human Destinies begins on a wholly predictable note. The preface, dolefully titled ``The Alchemy of an Unloved City'', is followed shortly - and tautologically - by the subhead ``The City that Nobody Loves''. With immense confidence, the authors aver that apart from ``... a few chasers of djinns, the writer, Khushwant Singh, some descendants of long established Delhi families and a smatterings of others (including some of the collaborators in this book) - hardly anyone is ready to declare a passion for Delhi.''

In fact, most commentaries on Delhi routinely fall into one of two approaches: the apocalypse now school or the irrevocably lost glories genre - William Dalrymple (he of Djinns fame) being the high priest of the latter. It is surprising, however, to find such sentiments in a volume, which, at no point, directly addresses the question of people's perceptions of the city. Moreover, many of the papers belie such gloomy prognostications.

One of these is Veronique Dupont's well-argued paper, which explores the lives of pavement dwellers in Old Delhi. She finds that these young, male migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa do not constitute the poorest of the urban poor and are not ``pawns pushed and pulled by macro-economic forces'' but ``dynamic agents capable of implementing their own economic strategies.'' They live on the pavement partly because employment as loaders, handcart pullers and waiters is seasonal, partly to be close to their workplace and also because they do not ``perceive accommodation as a need''. The migrants' mobility also, according to Dupont, leads to attendant flows of money, goods, information and ideas between village and city.

If Dupont offers a new insight into rural-urban migration, Christophe Jaffrelot's study of Hindu nationalism in Delhi questions the widely held assumption that the rise of the Jana Sangh in Delhi was due to its being the chosen party of the refugees, who blamed the Congress for Partition. Jaffrelot argues that sections among the refugees were Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supporters before their move to Delhi. Second, large numbers were long established Congress supporters and they stayed that way. Third, the Jana Sangh historically had the support of local (i.e. non-refugee) merchant castes, both because of their RSS inclinations and because they responded to the party's advocacy for small enterprises and its stand against assertive Backward castes. Thus, Jaffrelot's point is that it was not so much the traumas of Partition as the Jana Sangh's social profile which appealed to both locals and refugees and led to the growth of Hindu nationalism in Delhi.

Historical events impact more directly on Emma Tarlo's account of the development of the resettlement colony of Welcome. Established as a result of slum demolition during the Emergency, Tarlo describes how in some blocks, ``Sterilisation had in fact become a form of currency and there were some who used the sterilisation drive as a means of purchasing land they could otherwise ill afford". Others ``used the threat to their advantage by motivating the maximum number of people''. Welcome colony can be read as a ``map'' of Delhi politics - the Emergency, the periodic slum removal schemes and the 1984 riots.

A.G. Krishna Menon's elegantly written paper on the history of post-1947 Delhi architecture ruefully admits: ``the power of the politician and/or bureaucrat to mediate building activity and the complicity of the architect in this process'' resulted in the profession's failure to come to terms with India's urbanism. Menon also contextualises (though not excuses) the middle class's desire for meringue-type whorls and Corinthian capitals on the faades of their ``chalets'' and ``villas''. This urge to ornament is a ``reaction to the ascetic ideals of Nehruvian socialism'' which inadvertently reinforced the ``allure of foreignness in architectural design''. In the same section, Narayani Gupta traces the history of the conservation movement in Delhi, describing how it took three decades of Independence before an awareness of their heritage penetrated the middle class consciousness: ``When frontiers end, conservation begins,'' she writes memorably. Even so, conservation has sometimes taken strange routes in Delhi. It is often subverted (or hijacked) by interests as diverse as commercial developers, gentrification, vandalism, exotica/nostalgia peddlers and, as in Shahjahanabad, the central issue of whether conservation works for or against the interests of the local people.

Lack of space does not allow a discussion of all the articles in this volume, but V.B. Singh's analysis of the core voting profiles of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress(I) and Satish Sharma's evocative photographs of the city, are valuable insights into Delhi's life. This volume is a selection of the papers read at the seminar, ``Delhi Games'' held in April 1998, which was itself the culmination of a four-year Indo-French project on Delhi sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Developing Studies and the Centre for Science Humaines. The reader is left with a frustrating sense of a few intensely spotlit areas, surrounded by great swathes of darkness - hopefully to be dispelled in subsequent volumes. My main critique is that apart from Saraswati Haider's piece on women of the squatter settlement of Rajpur, there are no real ``voices'' from the city.

The insights are thought provoking, the analyses are rigorous, but a sense of this ferocious, infinitely varied city is absent.

Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, edited by Veronique Dupont, Emma Tarlo and Denis Vidal, Manohar Publishers, New Delhi, 2000, p.261, Rs. 475.

Ranjana Sengupta is writing a book on Delhi.

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