The picture above is a postcard of Connaught Circus that I found online. It sets the stage well for Amita Malik's 1957 article on Delhi. Malik, a fiercely opinionated journalist and radio broadcaster, earned the moniker the “First Lady of Indian Media.” Interestingly, her piece Oh to be in Delhi in the Times of India evokes a new nostalgia—one shared by the urban middle classes and literati who made the city their home after 1947. This wasn’t a longing for the pre-1857 Delhi or the Shahr-i-Ashoob (“ruined city”) lamentation we associate with earlier nostalgic writings about the capital. The tone is also different from S.C. Kala's article in the same newspaper a year earlier where he was critical of how class and power had reshaped Delhi in the 1950s (see my earlier piece on the 11th of April).
While Malik was jaded by the “welter of traffic” and the new bureaucratic culture (something shared by her and Kala) that had come to define the city, she also offers glimpses into people and places that had become cherished and longed for—many of which have since faded from memory. For example, she writes:
"One remembers the unspoilt charm of the Punjabi schoolgirl in her shalwar-kameez and pigtails, the little old Sikh on Irwin Road (now Baba Kharak Singh Marg) who never forgets to throw in that extra bunch of hara dhania with the week’s vegetables, the shop assistant who writes poetry in Connaught Circus."
These are fragments from a past that now feels distant, but in the 1950s, they resonated with a sense of belonging and familiarity.
A short post from me today. See you next week.
Reference: Malik, Amita 'Of, To be in Delhi', Times of India, May 27, 1957.
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