Delhi

Delhi has a unique place among the three big metropolises of India. Compared to Mumbai and Kolkata, Delhi’s history is much older: stretching back to the 12th century. Its growth in size, however, is much more recent. From a population of a little over a million in 1951, Delhi and its satellites—the National Capital Region (NCR)—had a population of over eighteen million in the 2011 census. In fact, Delhi’s urban history can be divided neatly at independence. Before that time, Delhi’s urban form reflected its repeated (but not continuous) status as a setting of political power. For the period of explosive urban growth after independence, scholarship about planning initiatives and their discontents abounds. There are excellent accounts of the movement from high-modernist planning to the more recent invocations of making Delhi a world-class city. Inadequate housing and repeated displacements of the poor are keynotes in this scholarship. Social movements, particularly those of the urban poor, have been an important theme from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Alongside spatial conflicts over planning, there is a rich vein of empirical work, and some theorization, of the ways in which political mobilizations around religion have shaped the city. Scholars have also dwelt on the complicated structure of urban governance in Delhi—as national capital and burgeoning metropolis, as an urban region that spans four separate provinces, as a megacity engulfing rural pockets, and as an administrative and commercial center ringed by an industrial periphery. Urban interventions aimed at improving Delhi’s environment have also been a topic of scholarly study. Thus, the expulsion of so-called polluting industries in Delhi, on the one hand, has gone together with the emergence of industrial zones in the peripheries of the NCR. Broadly speaking, the scholarship on historical urbanisms in Delhi points to the ways in which shifting structures of power generated urban forms in the Delhi landscape. Unsurprisingly, one manifestation of this long history has been in the active presence of heritage discourses. There is a particularly rich literature on the ways in which the present and the past coexist in modern Delhi, and the multiple possibilities for place-making opened up thereby. The author would like to thank Deepasri Baul and the anonymous reviewer for their suggestions.