[Reader-list] Where the Mighty Mogul Ruled, It's Mighty Unruly (Amy Waldman)

[Harsh Kapoor]

The New York Times
September 13, 2002  


DELHI JOURNAL

Where the Mighty Mogul Ruled, It's Mighty Unruly
By AMY WALDMAN

DELHI, Sept. 11 ‹ When the Moguls laid out a broad avenue linking the 
imperious glory of the Red Fort to the Fatehpuri Mosque, they saw it 
as a sweeping public space, a sedate counterpoint to the grandeur of 
their monuments.

Little did they know what was to come. Four centuries later, Chandni 
Chowk remains one of Delhi's best known streets, but not for any 
reason the Moguls imagined. More than any other place in Delhi, and 
perhaps India, Chandni Chowk has become home to the chaos of humanity 
trying to sustain itself any way it can.

The name means Moonlight Square, reputedly because the moon cast a 
silvery glint on a pool that flowed into a canal running the length 
of the street. Forty yards wide, more than 400 yards long, it was 
once lined with banyan trees, flanked by a wide platform for sitting, 
sedately trafficked by horse-drawn carriages and palanquins.

Today, Traffic-Clogged Boulevard might be a better name, given the 
bicycle rickshaws and motor rickshaws that compete for space. It is 
the bazaar of bazaars, home to thousands of shops, some mere cubicles 
packed on top of one another, behind each other, beneath and between.

There is little that cannot be bought here in the walled city, from 
peacock feathers to hearing aids to wedding rings, and the maze of 
lanes off the main street have each developed a specialty.

People travel from all over India to shop here, often buying in bulk 
to sell back home. There are hundreds of sari stores, an 
old-fashioned printing press, air-conditioner repair and astrology. 
There are snack shops by the dozens, dishing out fried delicacies in 
banana-leaf plates, the poor man's china.

There are new arts, like digital photography, and dying arts, like 
the making of paratha, a fried disc of bread eaten with pickles and 
sometimes stuffed. Anand Prakash's store boasts of five generations 
of paratha business but it is one of only three left. "The margins 
are too low," he said.

When hand-wringing articles are written about Delhi's decline, 
Chandni Chowk, with its exposed and dangerously untethered electrical 
wiring, its treeless and crowded sidewalks, the haphazard evolution 
and degradation of its buildings, is inevitably mentioned.

Architecturally speaking, it is hard to argue. Grafted onto lovely 
havelis, the large and lovely houses of the Mogul era, is an 
unsightly, jam-packed, unordered scene. At unexpected turns, the 
Mogul period flashes unexpectedly to life, with arches now graced, or 
disgraced, with ads for phone service or sexual problems.

Chandni Chowk's evolution from urban planning wonder to crassly 
commercial center is best left to a longer exegesis. The British 
bricked over the canal and set up a tram system. A clock tower 
collapsed in 1953 and was never rebuilt.

Post-independence, commerce and construction, legal and otherwise, 
flourished unchecked by municipal overseers. Like cells cleaving, 
businesses divided and subdivided to make room for newcomers. 
"Congestion is the bane of Chandni Chowk," a newspaper headline 
proclaimed earlier this year.

But those interested in human capital might see Chandni Chowk more 
optimistically ‹ as a place that today contains more striving per 
square foot than perhaps anywhere on earth. There are men performing 
remarkable feats of labor, hoisting loads that one suspects Hercules 
would have shirked.

There are 200 watch sellers, 180 camera dealers, and 50 to 60 ear 
cleaners. There are doctors and money changers ("We accept torn 
money," the sign says). A sign on the wall of S. K. Grover's watch 
store says, "Try not to follow the crowd," but here it is hard not 
to. Mr. Grover proclaims Chandni Chowk India's biggest market of 
watches and watch accessories.

Much of the striving is off the books. Mr. Grover noted (after 
declining to discuss sales revenues), "People are not paying all the 
proper taxes." Chandni Chowk is known as the No. 2 Market, the Indian 
term for off-the-books trade.

Many of the businesses here have been passed down through 
generations. Mr. Grover's family had a watch business in Lahore in 
what is now Pakistan and migrated just before British India was 
partitioned. Some stores here still bear the proud, if parenthetical, 
boast: "(of Lahore)."

Then there is Mussabir Hussein, ear cleaner since the age of 12 or 
13. It is the family business; his father and two of his brothers 
clean ears, too. The tools: a long needle and pluckers. The cost: 
five rupees, or one cent (far cheaper than a doctor, Mr. Hussein 
pointed out).

The job has everything but dignity, Mr. Hussein said, which is why 
his own sons won't follow him. "'People scold you and insult you," he 
sniffed, his needle tucked beneath his red, rakishly cocked cap.

If family histories have played out here, so has Indian society's. 
Chandni Chowk was home to mass meetings during the struggle for 
independence from Britain. Just about every religion is represented, 
including a Baptist church, built in 1860.

Just about every opinion is represented, too, which is why Mr. Grover 
weighed in against the Moguls on the street they built. "The Mogul 
period gave us nothing, only big forts," he said.