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Contribution short abstract

Community-led archive that reimagines Delhi’s villages as living sites of caste, land, and labour struggles, showing how urban development reproduces colonial erasures while restoring agency to those long denied authorship of their own stories.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution draws on my ongoing work with the Dilli Dehat Project, an online archive that reimagines Delhi as a living landscape of more than 300 villages. As someone born and raised in a village of delhi and engaged in community-centred activism for over seven years, I situate this work within the everyday realities of our villages.

Delhi’s villages offer a stark illustration: communities whose ancestral presence predates the modern state now find their cultural geographies buried under urbanisation, their livelihoods disrupted by exclusionary planning, and their knowledge systems made invisible in policy frameworks.

Through the Dilli Dehat archive, I document oral histories, photographs, local deities, rituals, dried johads, ridge commons, and everyday cultural practices that reveal how caste, labour, land, and nature intersect to shape lived experience. These fragments help illicit deeper questions about whose heritage is preserved, whose suffering is normalised, and whose futures are foreclosed in the name of progress.

My intervention will explore three interconnected arguments.

First, decolonisation must account for descent‑based exclusions, caste, occupational hierarchies, landlessness, and the structural neglect of rural peripheries that continue to shape the lives of millions in South Asia.

Second, urban development in Delhi has reproduced colonial logics of extraction, enclosure, and erasure, creating new internal refugees whose cultural memory is dismissed as “obsolete.”

Third, community‑led archives like the Dilli Dehat Project can contribute to reimagining development by restoring agency to the communities who have historically been denied authorship of their own stories.