Viewing Delhi's past through a human lens

DAG's 'Sair-e-Dilli', looks at the lived experiences of Delhi's inhabitants between the 19th and 20th centuries

- Avantika Bhuyan

Is there any one “Delhi”? It is a question that Sair-e-Dilli, a new publication by DAG, seeks to answer. Through diverse visual representations of the city in the form of maps, paintings, photographs and illustrations spanning 19-20th centuries, the book looks at how cities shifted shape as empires rose and fell, and centres of power moved to newer locations, thus expanding the breadth and scale of Delhi.

“The many historic cities of Delhi were not built on top of the other—like those of Rome or Istanbul—but laid out side by side on Delhi’s more expansive plain; and as each fell into decay, they created a sort of open-air archaeological park,” writes Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG, in a note in the book, which was published as a companion to the recently concluded exhibition of the same name in the Capital.

Sair-e-Dilli, edited by historian Swapna Liddle, features essays by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of history at Ashoka University, Haryana, and A.G. Krishna Menon, an architect, urban planner and conservation consultant. For Liddle, it was important that the publication looked beyond a Western construct of Delhi’s history, which focused more on the chronology of its historic "seven cities" and their architecture, rather than on the sociocultural milieu at the time.