The Women's Auxiliary Corps (WAC) at the Red Fort during WW2

Here is a photograph of a group of service women from the WAC (Women’s Auxiliary Corps) in 1940s Delhi. As you can see, they’re posing on a sightseeing tour of the ‘Red Fort’. Perhaps a good photo op. showcasing the benefits of working in/with the WAC. 

As I mentioned previously, Delhi was a key location in the India-Burma Theatre during the war. Since men were sent to the front, women took up roles that were vacant and became clerks, cooks, wireless operators (or whichever non-combatant roles that were there). The WAC was actually an Indian formation composed of Indian and European women. As you can imagine, their numbers were never great owing to caste and religious considerations amongst Indians or the fact that there wasn’t a sizable number of European women living in India in the first place. 

 

Nevertheless, the presence of such service women (and also American GIs) changed the character of Delhi. You can see that the women in the picture were on a tour of some kind. Indeed, guides on the city written at this time reveal how Delhi transformed itself to adjust to a war economy. They begin to mention what one could do in terms of entertainment, food and sightseeing in the city, explicitly geared towards such people. Therefore, coffee shops, bars and restaurants, hotels, guided tours and shopping areas are all highlighted for the benefit of the newcomers and war personnel. I’m going to write more about this in the coming weeks, starting with one of the guides that was issued to servicemen. 

 

See you next Friday. 

The Purana Qila in 1928

 

This is a wonderful little photograph of the ‘Old Fort’ (Purana Qila) of Delhi circa 1928. It was taken by a German traveller to Delhi at the time. If you look closely, you can see the faint outline of Humayun’s Tomb in the background. Today the area draws throngs of visitors interested in Mughal monuments (incidentally, the Sunder Nursery heritage complex lies in the middle of the tomb and the Purana Qila and is well worth a visit in case you are planning to see the other two).

 

What we can also see in the foreground of the picture is habitation. Cast your eyes at the thatched roof huts in the centre. This indicates that people lived inside the area of the Fort. Of course, you won’t find that today and this is often missed out in the lionisation of ‘monuments’ (conversely, it comes up as a story of their ‘encroachment’). It is likely that the Archaeological Survey of India carried out clearances around this time in the late 1920s-30s with the inauguration of ‘New’ Delhi. The other example is Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens which were created by clearing villages during Lord Willingdon’s tenure in the 1930s. This was done so that visitors could view old buildings and ruins in a garden setting. All this was the culmination of a long process of ‘monument making’ that began in the 19^th century under colonial rule. 

 

Now, the rationale that underpinned this process of eviction and monument-making changed over time. For a while I had been interested in of the men who initiated this, someone called Sir Thomas Metcalfe. Metcalfe was the Resident at Delhi under the East India Company in the early 19^th century and was very dismissive of Indian practices of building use e.g. the whitewashing of old mosques/tombs. However, Metcalf is hard to pin down as a stereotypical official for several reasons. He commissioned the ‘Delhie Book’ which contained paintings of different sites within and around the city. He set up what was the first archaeological society in the Delhi in the 1840s and finally, (and quite bizarrely) converted a 17^th century tomb into his weekend retreat (!) So, clearly a lot to unpack with Metcalfe and his monument-making intentions at that time. 

 

I hope to deal with Metcalfe’s archaeological society in next Friday’s entry. See you then.

 

 

 

Dogs in colonial Delhi

 

I’ve put myself up to this so I will indeed be writing about dogs and policing in Delhi, as I mentioned last week. In the absence of a historic picture of either dogs, or Mohalla (neighbourhood) gates in Delhi, I’ve put up an unrelated but well-known picture of a Delhi ‘street-scene’, common in postcards, pictures and advertisements from the 1880s (note, the Clock Tower in the picture was destroyed in the 1960s). 

 

So, back to dogs in Delhi. I came across colonial debates on the destruction of street dogs from the 1860s and was intrigued by the resistance this prompted. The killings were justified by the authorities on the grounds that the dogs could potentially spread rabies. However, this is where it gets interesting. I have an abstract from a Delhi newspaper called the Nur-ul-Akhbar. This was a vernacular newspaper which was monitored by the authorities after the Rebellion of 1857 for seditious news. In the 1873 its editor demanded the killings stop because the dogs were a necessity for policing. It says that unlike Europeans who kept dogs in houses, in Delhi, dogs (one to two) were kept out of houses in the streets of the Mohallas. Religious reasons meant that bringing a dog inside was impure but outside, the dogs had a purpose as the ‘watchmen’ of the Mohalla. All the inhabitants of the Mohalla were aware of this and supported the practice contributing to the welfare of the dogs. 

 

This form of security then formed was part of a multi-layered system of urban policing which also included the locking up of kuchas (lanes) at night (kuchabandi). The latter ended with the Rebellion  and once the human-animal nexus was broken through the killing of ‘stray’ dogs, it marked a change in the way a) safety was perceived and b) how security was maintained in cities like Delhi. 

 

More on related topics next Friday. See you later. 

Yamuna Bridge (ca . 1911)

I was reminded of the expression ‘steel frame of empire’ when I found this image on the internet. The term was used for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) under the Raj but it seems quite appropriate in this case. 

 

As you can see, this is a picture of the Yamuna Bridge which was constructed by a company called Patent Shaft and Axletree in Wednesbury, England. Yes, this is indeed the same ‘Lohe ka Pul’ (‘iron bridge’ as it is colloquially referred to in Delhi) from 1911. The bridge was originally built under the auspices of the East Indian Railway company between 1863-6. This picture from 1911 is the creation of a larger structure – as I understand- a double track bridge which was erected at Wednesbury and then shipped to Delhi. It therefore links the fortunes of a working-class industrial town from the Midlands in England with Delhi. It also reveals how support infrastructure such as bridges weren’t being built in India but instead, imported from Britain at a high cost to Indians. 

 

With the decline of manufacturing in Britain, Patent Shaft and Axletree closed its operations in the 1970s. Interestingly, a ‘new’ Yamuna bridge is being erected parallel to the old ‘Lohe Ka Pul’ by Indian authorities.

 

I’m planning to write about dogs and policing in colonial Delhi next Friday, see you then.