This picture is of the Delhi Junction Railway Station (now referred to as the ‘Old Delhi Railway Station’) as it was in the 1940s. I came across this image on the internet but as with the other photographs I’ve written about, it would have likely been part of a series of images, in an album perhaps.
In some ways, the beginning of the railways in Delhi was an act of ‘creative destruction’ as the Geographer David Harvey would suggest. Old Mughal mohallas and katras were knocked out after 1857 and in came new grids of iron and transport with the hopes of financial profitability and commerce. However, railway station in Delhi was also instituted as an act of punishment for the city. Since Delhi was a flashpoint during Rebellion of 1857, the railways cut through the heart of the city and divided it into two. The elite and predominantly white area of ‘Civil Lines’ to the north of Delhi was protected by railway lines and the station became a defensive frontier to mobilise troops in case of a threat from the south.
Yet, by the 1890s the railways would feature in the administrative imagination as a way of reshaping the city for the future. In my book I examine a plan laid out by a British official called Robert Clarke to manage flows and traffic in Delhi because he anticipated that the city was on the cusp of becoming a great railway centre and mercantile hub. He strategically drafted a faux Mughal burj (tower) in his plans – a ruin in a garden setting- to redirect traffic heading to the railway station by redesigning the Queens Gardens (today the area is known as the Mahatma Gandhi Park and Azad Park, respectively). This was his pièce de resistance (see my rendition of his plan below) and worked to draw in pedestrian traffic whilst keeping out who he felt were undesirables. The gardens became compact ensuring better policing and were locked at night from ‘thieves and disreputable characters’. Such were the plans in the 1890s.
More on Delhi’s railway modernity in due course.
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