Nihari and shabdegh were not cooked at home, but ordered from professional cooks. We ate nihari every winter Sunday morning with great fanfare. The utensils were sent to the shop the previous night. All members of the family were expected to come at eight o’clock to have brunch on the sun-soaked veranda where the dastarkhwan was laid out. Each plateful was topped with a bhagar of asli ghee and crisp brown onions. Khamiri rotis were warmed on a coal stove kept nearby and food was served piping hot. To neutralize the effect of the hot spices, we ate gajarbhata, a porridge made with grated carrots and malai, and plenty of oranges. When Abba died fifteen years ago, so did this family tradition.
The array of breads was also dazzling. Festive occasions were never complete without baqarkhani and qulchas rotis. The baquerkhani was patented by its creator, Baquerkhan, who lived during the days of Bahadur Shah Zafar. Cooks needed to get a licence from the fort to be allowed to duplicate it. Both these breads are made with wheat kneaded in milk and ghee with sugar. Qulchas also contain egg, which is why they cannot be kept too long, but the baquerkhani can be kept for many days.
Warqi (layered) paranthas, ghee ki rotis and chapatis were for daily consumption. What we knew as chapatis are now called roomali rotis, a name recently given by immigrant Punjabis, because the rotis are as thin as handkerchiefs. Dilliwalas find this name rather obscene as roomali is the term used for the small piece of cloth cut in a diamond shape, used in the crotch area to attach the seams of the two legs of pajamas and shalwars—a unique innovation by Muslim tailors which allows free movement.
Each season brought with it new colours and aromas that filled our homes. In early summer, a small onion would be strung around every child’s neck to protect us from the loo, the searing winds of summer. Chutneys made from raw mango were forced upon us for the same reason. Sherbets from bel and falsa, known for their cooling effect, were distributed to all the family members.
In late summer, the mango season, heaps of mangoes would be put in a tub with ice for a few hours before being brought to the dastarkhwan. The preferred varieties were ratol and chausas, the other kinds were looked down upon. The delicious fruit was devoured by the kilo and bets were laid as to who could eat the most. Doodhaam, mango shake, was made with saroli mangoes to neutralize its garam taseer. Another favourite was a chutney made from the pulp of saroli mangoes, which was eaten with besani rotis.
With the first rains, every family would head for picnics to the Mehrauli grounds. We would carry ropes and wooden planks to put up swings on the mango trees. Along with food for the day, carrying a gramophone and records was an absolute must. Monsoons meant daal bhari rotis, to be eaten with mince cooked with green chillies. Pakoras and gul gule, made of wheat and sugar, were fried at the picnic spot.
For every festive occasion sweets had to be distributed to friends and relatives. Many old Delhi confectionary shops, which were founded in the early nineteenth century, like Ghantewala, are still to be found in Chandni Chowk. Favourite sweets included qalaqands, imartis, balushahis, jalebis, gulabjamuns, barfis and halwasohan. Halwasohan was of two kinds, one dark brown and shaped like a tennis ball, and the other flat and golden in colour. Revdis and gajak, made of jaggery and sesame seeds, were available in winter. Sweets like shahi tukda, kheer, firni, sivaiyyan and shir khurmas were made at home. Nursing mothers and bridegrooms were fed nourishing sweets like panjjiri and satora, made from dry fruits, asli ghee and semolina, to build up their strength.
Food was an integral part of social ritual. Women were housebound and for them housekeeping was not merely cooking and feeding but was all about hospitality, a refined lifestyle and keeping the extended family together. Girls were taught culinary skills before marriage and were told that this was an important criterion in their assessment by potential in-laws. When new brides arrived in the house, they had to first cook kheer. It was assumed that the husbands of women who could not cook would go astray. Robust looking girls were considered attractive, as thin girls were thought to be suffering from tuberculosis or poorly fed due to penury. (I remember hearing hushed whispers that Muslim courtesans had an edge in their profession as the food they ate made them more passionate lovers than their Hindu counterparts.)
There were dishes associated with each occasion. At family weddings, qormas, biryani, baquerkhanis and kheer would always be served. On occasions of mourning it was always aloo gosht, a curry of meat and potatoes, which was served with khamiri roti. In the last decade aloo gosht seems to have gained acceptability and is now sometimes served at weddings, whereas in the past the baraat would have taken immediate offence and turned back. There were also different ways of serving food depending on the nature of the gathering. At the tukda todna, where you break bread with the grieved ones, it was customary to bring the bread to the table first, whereas on festive occasions, food would be served first.
We lived in a joint family and there were always festivities accompanying some ceremony or another. When a baby was born, he was fed honey by the paternal aunt and given the breast only after the aunt was endowed with gifts. Then on the seventh day was aqeeqa, where the child’s head was shaved. Goats had to be slaughtered as the barber placed the razor on the child’s head, two goats for a boy, one for a girl. Some of the meat was distributed to the poor and the rest cooked and a feast organized. There were also festivities for the doodh bharai, when the baby was weaned, the khatna or circumcision ceremony, the khir chatai when the baby was first given solid food, and the bismillah ceremony, when the child was first taught to read, generally at about four years of age.
We were a god-fearing family and almost everyone fasted at Ramzan. Those who did not pretended to and ate behind closed doors. Almost every Ramzan there was a roza kushai ceremony for some cousin or the other who had reached the age of ten or eleven and was fasting for the first time. Fasting was accompanied with a distinctive kind of feasting, where friends and relatives would be invited to break the fast with us. A few days before Ramzan, the kitchen would be stocked with ingredients. Sehri, the pre-dawn meal which was supposed to sustain us through the day, consisted of heavy paranthas, qeema, and khajla and pheniyaan—kinds of vermicilli—and thick unsweetened jalebis soaked overnight in milk. At Iftar, the fast was traditionally broken with dates. Our dastarkhwans in Ramzan were more lavish than on any other occasion, filled with varieties of sweets and snacks in addition to the main meals. Eid ul fitr, marking the end of Ramzan, is the meethi eid, when sweets like sivaiyyan, musafar and sheer khurma were a must. The core of the three-day festivities for Id ul zuha was feasting on the meat of the sacrificed goats. The first dish to be prepared was always kaleji (liver) which cooks rapidly; eating this is a tradition begun by the Prophet Mohammad. Every religious congregation would be accompanied by a langar where biryani and zarda, sweet rice cooked with saffron, sugar and dry fruits, would be distributed.
On joyous occasions, hissas or gifts of food were sent to relatives and friends. A long interval between the engagement and the wedding was the norm, and during this period hissas were regularly exchanged between the two families, especially samaal or seasonal fruit. Although this was supposedly sent for the bride to taste, the samaal came in tonnes. If Eid ul zuha fell during this period, the sacrificial goat for the bride was sent from the groom’s family. My mother told me that the goat sent for her was worth over a thousand rupees. This was during the early 1950s when a goat usually cost five or six rupees. The animal was draped in cloth with gold and silver threads and adorned with white metal jewellery. The obese goat could hardly stand and came with the instructions that it was to be seated on a charpoy and fed only jalebis made with asli ghee.
It was imporant that hissas were of the right kind. There were a few engagements broken off in our family because the hissas were sub-standard, for example a cousin whose wedding was cancelled because the samaal consisted of water chestnuts. Her family compared the chestnuts to the thorns of hell and took offence at such a commonplace samaal.
Today, Dilliwa
las are a minority in their own city, and butter chicken and dal makhani are the ‘delicacies’ associated with Delhi. It breaks my heart to see my son relishing burgers, for he will never know the glorious traditions of food which are now memories of the past.
A Village in Delhi: Shahpur Jat
KAROKI LEWIS
Delhi’s landscape forms a dense pattern of the old and the new—a maze of streets and dwellings where historic ruins rub shoulders with modern-day complexes and where the expanding city encroaches relentlessly on village settlements which date back centuries.
This uneasy embrace of tradition and modernity has been illuminatingly captured in the book Delhi’s Historic Villages by Charles Lewis and Karoki Lewis. Six villages have been singled out for the historic interest of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century monuments in their midst. The photographs by Karoki Lewis and the supporting text by Charles Lewis combine to paint a fascinating portrait of these villages, illuminating their history and present situation.
The following photographs have been taken from the chapter dealing with the village of Shahpur Jat, which lies past the Asiad Village and adjoins the ruins of Siri Fort.
The ruined walls of Siri with Bombay Palace Tower in the distance
The baradari—partly used as a cattle shelter and storage …
… and partly housing sweat shops
A typical internal courtyard in a more well-to-do family home
Lodi Colony
RANJANA SENGUPTA
Lodi Colony is at first sight an unlikely and unromantic location for literary exploration. Delhi’s government colonies have not formed part of travel writers’ lore. These identical rows of yellow houses do not lend themselves to the heartstring-twanging, nostalgia-dripping adjectives that flow so fluently when Shahjahanabad and Lutyens’ Delhi are evoked. Travel glossies and British writers in pursuit of lost imperial identities do not visit the dusty quadrangles of Ramakrishnapuram when writing about this city. What they want is irretrievably lost worlds—and it is a testament to Delhi’s hugely varied charms that they find all the medieval monuments and mutiny memorials they are in search of—but they close their eyes to everything else.
It is Delhi’s past that quickens their imagination. The here and now is usually an opportunity for some comic relief, the equivalent of the Mehmood episodes in old Bollywood films. The ungrammatical English of Sikh taxi drivers is always good for a laugh; or the convoluted, Kafkaesque ways of the city’s petty bureaucrats—those demons for all seasons. Such stereotypes exist, of course, but so much that is vital, vivid and robustly alive is elided in such narratives. And the saddest part is that Delhi’s own raconteurs, those who have lived in this city and walked its varied and wonderful streets, all too often share the same set of blinkers. The profusions of the present elude them.
Yet, somewhere between the exotic and the kitsch is real Delhi, in which the inheritances of the past coexist with inventions of the present. The film poster slapped on to a crumbling medieval wall has as much bearing on our understanding of the city as does the wall. Government Delhi—and this is, ultimately, a government city—only makes it into the matrix of coffee-table Delhi in its avatar of the perfect symmetries of Lutyens’ bungalow land, or the baroque splendour of the Raisina complex. Lodi Colony is, like all government enclaves, dismissed as humdrum, middle class and ordinary. But it has all the blood and romance, all the nostalgia, the architectural controversies and historic trappings of the standard coffee-table spots. Today government Delhi may be in retreat; but it is not in decline. It is, unlike Delhi’s more celebrated locations, still alive and kicking.
Delhi’s role as the nation’s capital informs and affects the existence—however obliquely—of all who live here. New Delhi was a space designed and created for the apparatus of empire, with its grid of carefully calibrated racial and professional spaces. Senior officials had large houses and gardens, both of which grew smaller and further from the centre as the ranks of undersecretaries, superintendents and lower division clerks were reached, until there were no gardens at all, only open verandas. In its imperial time, race was also a factor: British clerks’ quarters were bigger than Indian clerks’, and were built to a different design. After Independence racial differences disappeared, but the gradations continue even today.
After 1947, government ‘colonies’ came up to house the armies of personnel needed to turn the wheels of the new, independent government of India. The Central Public Works Department (CPWD) constructed houses with the status of the future occupants firmly in mind. There sprung up all over south Delhi self-contained groups of houses built in reinforced concrete. Most of them were double-storied and all of them were uniformly unattractive. Yet, the unlovely acres of Lodi Colony, Sarojini Nagar and Moti Bagh exude a sense of being enfolded in the arms of a mostly benevolent master who will protect the inhabitants from the vicissitudes of market forces, insecurity and social upheaval. This assuaged (somewhat) the pain of not being as affluent as counterparts in the private sector. Through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, it seemed this world would last for ever; but that complete confidence in the unchanging order is fraying.
Over the last five decades, a whole way of life came to be invented: officials of roughly the same level live in identical flats; their children play in the community park, their wives shop in the local stores. These are more than neighbourhoods—the residents’ professional links make for a surface homogeneity of existence. Like all internally coherent worlds, it has evolved its own symbols: in the 1950s and ’60s, members recognized each other by their starched, white bush shirts; today by the white ambassador car. Government Delhi is an ethos shared by everyone living in government houses, from Class IV quarters to bungalows, from peons to secretaries; but it is not a monolith. It is segmented—like the rest of Delhi—by class identities, worldviews and primordial loyalties. Its well-developed hierarchies have meant that life in the senior officials’ colonies of Pandara Park or Bapanagar is appreciably different from that at the middle official levels of Sarojini Nagar, Lodi Colony or RK Puram sector XIII; and different again in the Class IV enclaves of Aliganj or Sadiq Nagar.
Today Lodi Colony is in the heart of the city; when it was built, it was on the very edge of New Delhi. Lodi Road was the southern boundary of the imperial suburb and open fields and scrub lay beyond, where jackals howled and black bucks roamed. Lodi Estate, Willingdon (now Safdarjang) Airport and Lodi Colony were built during the war. Huge numbers of armed services personnel came to Delhi to support the war effort; they had to be accommodated. The colony was constructed in 1942 and was designed by William Henry Medd, then Chief Architect to the Government of India, who worked with Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in the planning of the new capital. Medd designed the classical Cathedral Church of the Redemption in the President’s Estate and the twin-towered Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Gole Market.
Lodi Colony’s pre-Independence construction—it is the only government colony to have been built before 1947—saved it from the modernist matchbox look of all later government housing. Perhaps Medd, fresh from designing the vaulted interiors of churches and cathedrals, was inspired to include the high-ceilinged rooms and soaring arches in his design. The arches have a ‘keystone’ motif, one which graces many of the houses Medd’s mentor, Lutyens, designed in Britain. In Lodi Colony, the keystone is purely decorative. Originally, keystones distributed the load of the wall equally on both sides of an arch, a technique that came to India from central Asia. Its purely decorative purpose is a welcome departure from the wholly utilitarian look that the CPWD espoused after 1947. Lodi Colony’s layout possesses an airy, light-filtered spaciousness, absent in other government colonies—but then, there was a lot of space in those days. Its openness makes for a pervasive sense of security: young girls stroll confidently to the market at dusk and clothes are pegged out on washing lines that stretch across the community front garden (though the flapping petticoats and pajamas add little to the overall aesthetics). Co
ntemporary architects say that the layout and design of Lodi Colony has contributed to its strong, palpable sense of community. The courtyards run through the centre of each block. Medd so positioned the courtyard arches that there is a clear view past the small kitchen gardens, the parked motorbikes and several sleeping cows that occupy the courtyard of one block, to the courtyard of the block across the road, and through its arches, to the courtyard of the next and the next and the next—till you see the green blur of the Karbala.
These courtyards were consciously incorporated from traditional Indian designs. The government’s annual migration to Simla had ceased during the war, and Medd provided plenty of space for those who wanted to sleep out during the hot summer nights. The first occupants of Lodi Colony were servicemen, usually bachelors, and these buildings were known as chummeries, a venerable Anglo-Indian institution, made up of units comprising a bedroom and bathroom, along with a servant’s room. There was little cooking space—the occupants were expected to eat out at the club. Today the units have been knocked together into flats and despite the sometimes oddly shaped rooms, the present residents are not complaining. It’s rare to find such content—there are a few murmurs about water, fewer still about electricity. They proudly point out that the brick walls are eighteen inches thick. And this, along with the high ceilings, makes the flats incredibly cool.
There are three markets within the colony: Lodi Colony Market, Mehr Chand Market and Khanna Market. Tailoring establishments predominate. ‘They are the best for gent’s clothing,’ boasted a resident; they would have to be as the competition must be intense. But machines were whirring busily at the I-Like Tailor Shop; while the proprietor of Selection Tailors (presumably, if they make your suit you get selected at your interview—a very ‘government’ preoccupation) explained that people came from all over Delhi, so there was work for everyone. There are also a huge number of Tent Houses (‘we cater to the whole of the south’) as well as general merchants. The owner of one of them, Mr Pritviraj, grizzled but still game at eighty-one, came from Sargoda in Pakistan in 1947, along with his grandfather, his parents, and his wife and two sons. They first moved into the then empty quarters of Lodi Colony and set up a small stall selling basic goods to other refugee families camping there. His life has all the feel-good elements of the ideal refugee story: the terrible adversity, the relentless hard work and the rewards of prosperity and security in old age. In the early days the shop was just a shack and his wife had to flap a hand fan over the uncovered foodstuffs to prevent flies from settling on them. Electricity came later, as did pucca construction and the allotment of a house plot at the nearby BK Dutt colony.
City Improbable- Writings on Delhi Page 22