Delhi Reborn: Unveiling the City Through a Historian’s Lens

A City of Endless Rebirths

All cities and urban spaces are works in the making.  Perhaps,  some more than others. To read the history of Delhi (or the many histories of many Delhis) is to read the history of a  nation,  refracted through one of its most densely scarred terrains. As Rotem Geva, author of  Delhi Reborn  puts it, the “city’s history [can be viewed] as a cycle of massive destruction and regeneration.” While it has bestowed its people with its natural resources, with the protective heft of the Aravalli  Range,  and  the gush of the Yamuna River, it has also been plundered for  exactly  those reasons.  As historian Narayani Gupta says, “Delhi has died so many deaths.” 

As a city that has been possessed and dispossessed, it carries the markers of many empires.  It’s known commonly as “the Seven Cities”,  bearing monuments from each  era  and  different regimes.  Since the 13th Century  Delhi  Sultanate,  it has been the political center of Muslim dynasties, whose  legacies range from the Qutab Minar and Sufi shrines to the later Shahjahanabad, constructed as a utopic Islamic city.  With structures like the Red Fort and Jama Masjid and two well-known boulevards – Chandni Chowk and Faiz Bazar – the Muslim imprint on the nation’s capital is ineradicable.  However, the Islamic regimes were in decline before the city  was handed over  to the British East India Company, with the Marathas propping up the last Mughals till 1803.

Partition’s Shadow and Delhi’s Turmoil

Dwelling on how Partition and Independence remade the city, the book shines its lens on the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. And details a period marked by violence, displacement, mass migration, and interreligious clashes. A time of intense turmoil and tremulous rebirth. Of how there were tensions then, as there are now, between “a secular democracy and a religion-based partition, between civil liberties and authoritarian impulses.”

These are narratives threaded with sadness. In 1947, the city received half a million Hindu and Sikh refugees, while 350,000 Muslims fled.  Intizar Husain, an Urdu writer, as Geva puts it, describes “Delhi not simply as a woman, but specifically as a mother who welcomes new children with open arms while abandoning her own.”  Former “Dilliwalas” congregated in Lahore in 1948.  At that gathering,  Shahid Ahmad Delhvi, having visited his erstwhile city and feeling alienated, broke down in tears.  It became a gathering of mourners, of folks expressing a shared loss.

From Revolt to Ruin

Intizar Husain saw 1947 as a culmination of 1857. In the 1857 mutiny, rebels took over the city. Law and order broke down. The renegades asked Bahadur Shah Jafar to support them. But British retribution was swift and brutal. They shot all the emperor’s sons in what is known as the  Khooni Darwaza  (the Gate of Blood).  And  expelled most Delhi residents, imposing a curfew on the few  that were  allowed to linger,  which included  the 19th Century  poet,  Mirza Ghalib.  Muslim havelis  were reallocated  to Hindu and Jain bankers and merchants. Civil Lines  were established  to barricade the British.  When Delhi became the capital of the British Empire in 1911, bungalows  were built  for the elites, and  a shopping center was constructed  in Connaught Place.

There has been Muslim melancholia surrounding the 1857  uprising, and the subsequent remaking of the city. Ahmed Ali wrote the  novel, Twilight in Delhi, published in 1940, about the decline of an elite Muslim family. “1947 repeated 1857 and even went beyond it…” Ali wrote. This was the crucial difference: in 1857, the expulsions were temporary. In 1947, the expulsion was permanent.

The Birth of Communal Identities

During colonialism, Western Science, an Orientalist outlook, Christian missionaries and repressive colonial laws catalyzed reform movements among Hindus and Muslims. Which led, in turn, to communal tensions and occasional riots. Since the Congress Party was pushing for representation based on numbers and performance on exams, Muslims, who used to be in dominant positions earlier, felt threatened. The Muslim League was created in 1906. The British granted separate electorates to Muslims in local bodies. This forged the idea of “Indian Muslims” as a community.

As self-determination crept in as an idea, there was an homogenizing impulse – and the forging of categories that weren’t clearly delineated earlier: of a “majority” and a “minority.” This kind of impulse also characterized the formation of nation states in Europe. As Hannah Arendt put it, the minorities had to be “assimilated or liquidated.” Muslims from 1909 onwards, morphed from a religious group to a “communal minority.”

Historian Ayesha Jalal suggests that Jinnah did not conceive of Pakistan as a physical terrain, but rather as an “ideal moral community.” Many Indian Muslims might have assumed that Delhi would be part of Pakistan, or be a shared capital. During that period, there was much ambivalence and open-endedness about what Pakistan would be. Muslims constituted 30% of Delhi before Partition. After Partition, Muslims had to “assimilate” or face ghettoization. 

Dreams of Distant Lands

Geva delves into individual stories to evoke the warp and weft of those stormy times. Like that of Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, a member of the Muslim elite, affluent, suave, educated, and dedicated to the idea of Pakistan. After the 1857 war, when the last Mughal emperor had been humiliated and banished from the city, Muslims in the terrain had fallen into a kind of stupor. Which was awakened only after World War I, during the Khilafat movement. Which helped them to dream of some distant Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, rather than on their lost glory in their own region. But when that movement died down, Muslims fell into a kind of “coma” till Jinnah and Muslim Leaguers coined the idea of Pakistan. Jinnah spoke about “yet another distant land: a land that was not even there, that existed only in their dreams, hence was more real.”

This awakening took place during WWII, when the colonial state also came under increasing threat. This was, as historian Indivar Kamtekar suggests, a time of crisis. When the old no longer worked, but the new had not yet been forged. When “politics go out of the negotiating chamber into the street, or (looking at it the other way around), the politics of the street burst into the negotiating chamber.”

Delhi was increasingly being seen as the national capital. Most negotiations were being held there, corridors of power wound through the city. There was a growing clamor for Pakistan among Delhi’s Muslim Leaguers, but the geographical contours of this Pakistan were vague.

The Shiver of 1942 and the Dawn of Partition

Why was this crisis precipitated? Wars needed resources. Colonies weren’t as willing to make sacrifices as the colonizers were, or even accede to colonizer definitions of Good (Allies) versus Bad (Axis). 

Meanwhile, Britain was being defeated in Southeast Asia. Its prestige was eroding. A desperate Britain was forced to negotiate with its colonial population. The Cripps Mission (1942) – though deemed a failure – offered “complete independence” for the first time. Muslim Leaguers demanded self-determination. The word “Partition” started popping up.

Britain had been caught napping. Focused on preventing Russia from invading India, they hadn’t paid sufficient attention to the rise of Japan. They were taken by surprise when Singapore was seized – a capture in which 45,000 Indian soldiers were also taken in by the Japanese as POWs. This really angered the Indians. Besides, India too was vulnerable to an attack by Japan. The fear of Japan and the growing distrust and disrespect for the British Empire was the “shiver of 1942.”

Which led to the distribution of pamphlets among Hindus and Muslims, asking their men to protect their women from dirty, philandering white men. Folks also started covertly tuning into Axis radio stations. Besides, people in Delhi started favoring American soldiers over British ones. Americans were friendlier, more generous and less hung up about their own superiority or imperial power. General Chiang Kai Shek from China had also come to Delhi at that time. Queen’s Gardens became a space of national agitation. Nehru and Azad gave rousing speeches there. 

Unforeseen Chaos and Class Violence

This book emphasizes how despite the impending dissolution of the British empire in the late 1930s, Partition was not an inevitable outcome. And also sheds light on how the early advocates of Pakistan were unaware of the immense violence that would unfold post-Independence. Later sections chronicle the escalating violence aimed at displacing Muslim communities in Delhi, particularly tenants, to accommodate refugees from Punjab. 

The chapter on class dynamics highlights how brutality and forced evictions were exacerbated following a series of riots, with threats of physical harm and death looming over illicit financial dealings. While some affluent Muslims could negotiate their way out of dispossession, less privileged members of the community suffered disproportionately. The chapter focusing on the Urdu press poignantly illustrates the division along patriotic lines in a language shared by both refugees and local Muslims in Delhi. The final chapter anticipates the emergence of a carceral state and the use of preventive detention during the period of 1947–50, offering insights into the structured yet arbitrary violence reminiscent of the Emergency era. 

About the Author

Rotem Geva is a historian specializing in South Asia, particularly twentieth-century India. Her academic journey includes a PhD from Princeton University’s Department of History and an M.A. in anthropology from the New School for Social Research. Delhi Reborn, a brilliant work that shepherds us through physical, cultural and emotional terrains, was a finalist for the 2023 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize, supported by the New India Foundation. Drawing from a mélange of journalistic pieces, memories, novels, archival materials and the accounts of ordinary people, it throws new light on the past. Painstakingly researched and elegantly crafted, it achieves that elusive balance between the scholarly and pleasurable.

References

Rotem Geva, Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital, Speaking Tiger, 2024 (First Published by Stanford University Press, 2022).