Concrete Murmurs

"THE Lodhi era tomb comes first into view. Wedged between scooters, overhead wires and a paying guest house entrance in Katwaria Sarai, it feels like the people are now the ones out of place, not the centuries old monument.

- S KEERTHIVAS

This village was once surrounded by fields. Today, those fields are gone and the city presses in from all sides. "We are a village from the inside and a city from the outside," a longtime resident told student researchers from Ambedkar University. Another put it more bluntly: "The buildings changed faster than the people." That tension, rooted yet constantly reshaped, is what the university's Department of Urban Studies set out to document through months of fieldwork in Katwaria Sarai.

The findings were showcased at the recently held exhibition, Delhi Dehat: Tracing Memory, Space and Transition in Delhi's Urban Villages at the university's Karampura campus.

Katwaria Sarai's identity has been sculpted by paying guesthouses and coaching centres. Waves of land acquisition for institutions like IIT Delhi and government housing after the partition, tightened the space between ancestral homes; it turned the village into a corridor of rentals and commercial storefronts that cater to a constantly shifting student population.

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