Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City
Ranjana Sengupta
Penguin, Rs 250

If you stand on the high parapet of Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi and look west, the image you see is of a green, unstructured, monumentality: cupolas and domes rising out of low shrubbery, rubble walls, the ruins of dynasties, and in the shimmering blur, the great flank of Imperialism’s last stand, the Viceroy’s House and secretariat. A gaze in the other direction brings you closer to another city: on the riverbed below, the dim outline of makeshift tenements, smoke rising from dung fires, a screeching highway in perpetual motion, and on the far horizon, a cubical mass of geometric blocks receding in an endless smudge. Seen from above, the city is a charged theatrical spectacle, amid the smoke and smouldering remains, a stage set of incomplete structures, as if the day’s battle is over and people have retreated to their temporary encampments.

Removed from the gloss and lustre of history, and the idea of Delhi as a double spread of picture-book ruins, Delhi Metropolitan is about the city of makeshift encampments. Though historical and imperial conquests do find their way into the text, as does present-day business culture, Ranjana Sengupta’s heart lies in sociology — in the struggle of ordinary people seeking to make Delhi their home. At its very core, the book engages through compassionate insight rather than architectural contemplation. In doing so, it explores the strata of ordinary life: old men baking biscuits in the ovens of south Delhi, refugees in small sewing shops at Khanna Market, small-time traders at Daryaganj, the seething mass of people and products that move within the routes of an ordinary day — a refugee culture which, ironically, is both a qualifier of disparate and conflicting communities, and the most potent denial of the homogeneity essential to healthy urbanity.

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