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[avinash kumar]

Friends,
This is my third posting on my research topic ‘Des-pardes ka Dvandva aur Dilli’. Plee..ase comment and do tell me more of these sources.

Looking at the diverse nature of the sources which I have been getting of late, I needed to re-orient myself to broaden things a bit under a larger rubric called Urdu-Hindi literary experiences around the city called ‘Delhi’. But the nomenclature itself is problematic, as what I get in my sources is not ‘Delhi’ but either ‘Dehali’ or ‘Dilli’ and this perhaps most significantly demarcates the ‘native’ perceptions of the city. Now after this axiomatic statement (with an element of truth, no doubt), let me get back to a statement about the problems of beginning to perceive an enclosed, demarcated space, ‘What is it to describe a world? How would we reduce our own surroundings to writing, if we felt the urge and had the energy? Would we begin with a bird’s eye-view and then narrow the focus as we descended to a key intersection, the local version of Main and Vine? Or would we enter the city like a stranger, passing from countryside to suburbs to some imposing cluster of buildings at the heart of the urban space—a town hall or church or department store? Perhaps we would organise our description sociologically, beginning with the municipal power elite or working upward from the workers. We could even strike a spiritual note,
The possibilities seem infinite, or at least extensive enough to be paralysing. For how can one put “the true idea of a city” on paper, especially if one cares about the city and the supply of paper is endless?’ (Robert Darnton, ‘A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: The City As a Text’ in The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, Penguin, London, 1984, p.108) Well, in my case the supply definitely is not endless, at least in terms of kilobytes, so I make my departure from one set of metonymic representations of the city as witnessed in the writings of the early twentieth century, viz., Delhi as the city of crime and sleaze, in a way announcing the coming of age of the city as a modern metropole, a city at the centre of a crisscross by the other dotted cities like Calcutta and Benares in the east, Lahore in the north-west, commercial towns like Amritsar and Ludhiana in the north and Bombay in the west. At least this is what one witnesses in a popular Urdu novel (later translated into Hindi) titled ‘Dehali ka Thug’: a story documented in detail (with the help of newspaper cuttings) with various crimes of the nature of petty cheating to large-scale thugee prevalent in the city. Hence a person doing a sari business from Benares or the one with shoe business from Ludhiana or the one in the publishing from Lahore find a common platform to do their business with Delhi and get looted in the process. In the melee of all this, places like Chawri Bazar, Chandni Chowk, Civil Lines, Jamuna Par, Mehrauli etc. emerge as if to authenticate these happening within these identified locales. But then the documentary part (more than a half of it is recounted in the form of summarized FIRs) changes and the heroes come and villains too with their vamps next to them appear in a most fantastic manner, the chase scenes a la Hunterwali variety begin. The story ends in a very hurried manner as if the writer suddenly lost interest after documenting the variety of crimes committed in the city. Interestingly, the novel, written by one Nadeem Sahabai, was translated and published  in Hindi (1933) and immediately the stark change becomes apparent. Hence, all the characters become automatically Hindus, eg. Miyanji becomes Upadhyayji, and the novel begins to acquire a larger identity, i.e. an identity based not on the grounds of being the habitants of the same city but on the basis of religion. In other Hindi texts like ‘Dilli ka Vyabhichar’ (1928), even while the locations again appear as quite rooted, eg. Chawri bazaar, Mehrauli, Thandhi Sadak etc., the novel grows out of this local identity (while terming the city as the most corrupt one) by raising the question of crimes committed by the Muslim men on Hindu women as well as addressing a literary problem current in the Hindi debates at that time, i.e. whether or not to follow the principle of ‘stark realism’ in literary pursuits. Some of the other ones again create fantastic ‘fables’ as it were to raise problems of the larger variety like that of Hindu widows and in the process once again vilify the Muslims e.g. in titles like ‘Dilli ka Khunkhwar Maula’ (early 1920s, my source sixth edition 1931) and ‘Dilli ki Gundeshahi’ (1930). 
Evidently, the number of sources found of this variety is still little to draw larger conclusions, but at least some trends could be discerned as outlined above.
Now let’s again move to 1950s (since my work does involve a major sweep temporally as well as thematically even if the ‘nomenclature’ apparently is the same). Hence a sketch of the city by Mohan Rakesh ‘Dilli: Raat ki Bahon Mein’, appears where as if taking a cue form the above mentioned quote from Robert Darnton, the writer sketches one night of the city in a reflective mood with a bird’s eye view, a moving taxi with fighting lovers, a girl knocking the doors of her hostel and calling the chowkidar, people unsuccessfully trying to sleep outside the narrow by lanes of what is now emerging as ‘old Delhi’etc. In surveying all this, the writer envelopes these sketches with his own loneliness, almost wrapping them with his melancholic mood and eventually producing an utterly romantic image of the large metropolis. It is a theme to which the writer returns in his most ambitious fictional work in the 60s ‘Andhere Band Kamre’. But by then the Nai Kahani movement centred predominantly around Delhi has taken a more concrete shape.

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