Delhiwale: The ballad of Jangpura

A 1982 booklet reveals Jangpura's history, showcasing its transformation from a refugee settlement to an upscale neighborhood in Delhi.

An archive is not always a grand building in the capital’s heart, stocked with musty documents. It can be a photographer’s lifework, an anthropologist’s Instagram handle, or even a neighbourhood directory of peoples and businesses. Take Portrait of a Colony, a booklet pulled from a garbage heap some weeks ago. Intended for residents of a Delhi locality, the 1982 publication is a rare record of a city neighbourhood. One aspect of the booklet was covered here in the story titled “Krishna Chopra, a “housewife”; Moley Fernandes, a “crooner.” This is the concluding part.

Labelled the “Directory of Residents of Jangpura Extension, Link Road and Birbal Road,” the booklet presents the place as a kissa-kahani of memory, displacement, and community camaderie.

Labelled the “Directory of Residents of Jangpura Extension, Link Road and Birbal Road,” the booklet presents the place as a kissa-kahani of memory, displacement, and community camaderie. It opens with a “dream-walk over Jangpura’s vast past,” a land once trodden by passing armies and wandering holy men en route to the ancient city of Indraprastha and, later, to Delhi’s medieval centres.

The account quickly shifts to recent past. In 1911, the capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi. In the process, more than a hundred villages were uprooted and resettled. Per the booklet, modern Jangpura originated in 1922 as a village called Bhodal—a local term for mica, excavated from a nearby mound (Bhodal later became Bhogal). Anyhow, plots in the largely vacant land were leased to displaced residents from nearby settlements such as Arab ki Sarai, Garhi Saini, Aliganj, Jor Bagh, Purana Qila, Kusak, and Gaokhana, at the rate of “12 annas per annum per 100 square yards.” The new locality was initially named “Youngpura,” after S. M. Young, Delhi’s then deputy commissioner, who apparently declined the honour.

Then came 1947, when Jangpura Extension was created next to Jangpura to rehabilitate Partition refugees.* At the time, houses had no running water, power, and sanitation. The area too had no street lights, and was serviced by a single bus route—No. 18. It was truly a “sulky suburb,” cut off and dependent. Its residents, the “refugees,” would “hover around the rooms of now-extinct P Block on Raisina Road, Jamnagar House, and other places where the Union Rehabilitation Ministry had set up offices to deal with their requirements and problems.”

Now comes the booklet’s most satisfying section, a decade-by-decade telling of the colony’s progress into its present upscale status. The 1950s brought metalled roads, schools, medical dispensaries, milk booths, and also culture stuff like “musical concerts and poetic symposiums.” The climax was the birthing of Jangpura Extension Welfare Association in the 1960s, marking for its dwellers a decisive shift from simple survival to active civic participation.

On turning the last page, a question lingers in the reader’s mind. If every Delhi neighbourhood had a similar booklet, could the megapolis have assembled a truly exhaustive, hyperlocal archive of itself?

*Decades later, Jangpura would shelter another wave of refugees; this time from war-torn Afghanistan.