Rotem Geva's new book traces Delhi's journey through Partition and beyond

Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital

Author:  Rotem Geva

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 349

Price: Rs 599

Early in the book, the author successfully involves the reader in granular and gritty histories that are often overlooked in the search for the “big picture” on a subject that holds considerable poignancy and has had a far-reaching impact on independent India’s future. In the third of this five-chapter book (plus an Introduction and a short Epilogue), for instance, we are introduced to Madhusudan, a young aspiring Hindi writer and journalist who arrived in the capital in the early 1950s. He lives with a Hindu friend in a locality called Kasabpura, once a Muslim-majority neighbourhood in Delhi’s Sadar Bazar, in the part of the city that immediately became “old” once “New” Delhi was inaugurated in 1931, even though there are several parts of the city of more ancient antiquity.

The young man trudged around looking for work every day from morning till night. But the job that he was seeking remained elusive and he eventually lumbered back to seek refuge from depression and exhaustion. This came in the form of the sitar-playing Ibadat Ali, who strummed the instrument in his small room on the rooftop, lost in his own music. This man, descendant of a family of sitar players to the Mughal court, once owned this building and lived in its main part with Muslim tenants taking up other sections. During the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the city in September 1947, an act that prompted Mahatma Gandhi to return to the city in the hope of restoring peace, this building emptied out as tenants left for newly created Pakistan. Eventually Ali too, left with his young daughter but unable to make his “home” there, returned in three months. He, however, discovered that his house was formally termed Evacuee Property and occupied by Hindu refugees from West Punjab and other provinces now in Pakistan. Petitions failed to restore anything but the terrace room where he strummed for solace unwittingly helping Madhusudan to find his own peace.

The author turns the spotlight on another character who moved to Delhi from Lahore. This man, Pandit Girdharilal Datta, had a large house from which he erased the previous Muslim owner’s name and painted his own. The previous owner, in a swap deal, had similarly settled in Datta’s home. Those who have studied or even casually read accounts of Partition in any genre would find these stories plausible. In reality, these characters are drawn from iconic works of Hindi literature that the author uses as a tool to layer fact and fiction, history and literature to create a subaltern portrait of the city in the early days of independence. Ali the sitarist is a character peripheral to Madhusudan, the protagonist in Mohan Rakesh’s poignant novel Andhere Band Kamre (Dark Closed Rooms), a novel set in Delhi of the 1950s. But, Ali battering his weather beaten instrument all by himself, yet still providing his neighbour in a lower storied tenement of what was once his own home, could well have been a tragic character during the Partition years. Likewise, Datta could well have been an actual person spotted by a newspaper reporter with the zest for discovering “human interest” stories much before this became a genre of journalism. Instead, he was a character from probably the most noted Hindi Partition novel, Jhoota Sach,  by Yashpal.

At every turn in the narrative, the reader cannot but grasp the truth that India in those critical years was a battlefield between authoritarian and communal instincts on the one hand and democracy and inclusiveness on the other. Lucid yet profound, touching yet realistic, the book relentlessly narrates the trauma of Delhi from the time before the Partition and how it was remade. The book uses the events of 1857 as a frame of reference to examine and understand 1947. Instead of taking a “national” view of what precipitated Partition, the author emphasised how the city was impacted and how its culture changed from one that was rooted in the Mughal court to the one that came from across the “line” drawn on a map by British officials who knew nothing about the land and people they dissected.

The book traces how the city’s growth and “birth” of New Delhi triggered the decline of the Muslim aristocracy, which began with British takeover after 1857. But the book does not limit itself to bemoaning the marginalisation of a community and also examines new conflicts in India.

Importantly, the book devotes attention to a controversial interfaith marriage of the 1950s. This one in 1952, between a Muslim politician, a member of the Socialist wing of the Congress and personal secretary to Delhi’s first Chief Minister, Chaudhary Brahm Prakash, and the daughter of a Hindu refugee family, which triggered an unprecedented storm. The marriage took place after the bride’s father secured a temporary court injunction and the backing of Hindu right-wing organisations, including the nascent Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The political storm saw even Jawaharlal Nehru stating that communal forces, following their electoral defeat, had raked up issues related to marriage and Kashmir. The pages devoted to this episode quotes from editorials in leading “refugee” newspapers and they appear verbatim extracts of Hindu right-wing spokespersons venting on “Love Jihad”.

It is one of the ironies of history that this Muslim politician, after several decades in the Congress and other centrist parties, joined the BJP at its inception, and later held important positions in the party and government. This “nationalist” Muslim was Sikander Bakht. He died in 2004 while still Governor of Kerala. His story is not the only past in the book that is still present, in one form or the other.

The writer is a Delhi-based writer and journalist.@NilanjanUdwin.