Introduction: What Is Delhi?

Summary

Ik roz apni rooh se poocha, ki Dilli kya hai? Tho yun jawab mein keh gaye: yeh duniya mano jism hai, aur Dilli uski jaan —

Ghalib

One day I asked my soul, what is Dilli? It replied: Imagine the world is the body, then Dilli is its life force.

—Translation by author

Mirza Ghalib, the eternal poet laureate of Delhi, wrote these words around the time of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. The ethos of that time—of shaiyari and ghazal and kabootarbaazi—has been imaginatively explored in popular works such as William Dalrymple's City of Djinns and The Last Mughal. One hundred and fifty years later, however, Delhi evoked other emotions and names by close observers. In 2000, Denis Vidal, Emma Tarlo, and Veronique DuPont declared Delhi an “unloved city.” In 2019, Amita Baviskar named it an “uncivil city.” Other contemporary reporters such as Aman Sethi in A Free Man, Rana Dasgupta in Capital, and Aravind Adiga in The White Tiger seem to agree. Sethi writes about the city as a “giant construction site” of perpetual dislocations and hysteria; Adiga and Dasgupta see rampant inequality, corruption, greed, excess, and murderousness spreading from the city to its shiny new borderlands like Gurgaon.

When Ghalib composed his paean of love, there were about 150,000 residents in Delhi, and the city occupied more or less the same area as what is now called Shahjahanabad (Purani Dilli). When Delhi's unlovable new names began to become known in the academic world at the turn of the millennium, the population of the National Capital Territory (NCT), which now commonly thought of as the city of Delhi, was a little under 14 million. The population of the National Capital Region (NCR), which we can think of as Delhi metropolis, was about 20.5 million. In the next 10 years, by 2011, the city (the NCT) grew by 3 million and the metropolitan region (the NCR) by 6 million. At this moment of writing, the next census of 2021 is still one year away, but estimates suggest that the population of the NCT (Delhi city) is over 20 million and that of the NCR (Delhi metropolis) more than 30 million.