Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the nature of the evolving and contingent local with reference to a gali (by-lane) in Old Delhi, Gali Batashan by juxtaposing two historical moments and accounts: one a literary account from the early 20th century and the other a contemporary view from my recent field visit.

Paper long abstract:

Located on the western flank of the Fatehpuri area in Old Delhi, Gali Batashan is named after its preponderant sugar candy shops. This paper will explore the nature of the evolving and contingent local with reference to this gali (by-lane), by juxtaposing two moments and accounts focused on visits to the house of the well-known 19th century Urdu writer, Nazir Ahmad, located in this gali. The first of these is a personal memoir by the Urdu humourist Mirza Farhatullah Beg, translated into English as Nazir Ahmad in his Own Words and Mine first published in 1927, recounting the period c. 1905. This account, I argue, narrates the personality of its biographical subject through the specifics of location within the walled city. The second account emerges from my own field visit to the same house in Gali Batashan, by then occupied for more than a century by the descendants of Nazir Ahmad. This visit took place in 2014 shortly before the national general elections in India which in the event ushered in an unprecedented electoral victory for a right wing Hindu party. Based on my interviews and supplemented by a photographic archive, the paper probes the family's changing relationship with their habitat, including their plan to sell the property to neighbourhood commercial interests, and opens up questions about the economic and communal transformations of that local, positing the little known story of this changing by-lane against the largely static and monumentalized images of Old Delhi as a quintessentially Muslim locality.