Muslim pasts and presents: Displacement and city-making in a Delhi neighbourhood

Saeed Ahmad

doi:10.1017/s0026749x21000512

Abstract

AbstractThrough an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947–present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract ‘diverse space’ to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, ‘below the radar’, and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi ‘riots’ of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.

Highlights

By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract ‘diverse space’ to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present
This article has traced the constitutive role of displacement and city-making in a locality of Delhi: the Jangpura-Bhogal neighbourhood
I have shown how protracted processes of material displacement have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal

Summary

Introduction

Through an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of. 17 For a history of ‘model’ towns, villages, and colonies, see William Glover ‘A Colonial Spatial Imagination: British Knowledge of the City and Its Environs’, in Making Lahore Modern: Christians, and Jains, who were settled along caste and community lines in a distinct grid pattern.[18] Following this originary act of relocation which founded the locality, the big displacement event witnessed in Jangpura-Bhogal was in 1947 in the aftermath of the partition and independence of India, when many Muslim inhabitants left for Muslim-majority areas like nearby Nizamuddin or else to Pakistan. This was, once again, a moment of considerable urban transformation—there was a 90 per cent increase in Delhi’s population between 1941 and 1951. All of these diverse arrivals and departures make Jangpura-Bhogal an appropriate site to explore the thesis of ongoing displacement as a constitutive process of city-making

Material displacements

Narrative displacements

Diversity and absence

Findings

Conclusion