Nangla's Delhi

Chiselling ones writing through ones own experience, memories and perspectives, we encountered questions. To move ahead without thinking these questions through was impossible. And so we asked ourselves:
Can every day be accounted for?
Can every moment be recalled and narrated?
Does every passing moment get absorbed in our past?

Every space is somewhat like a story. A story told over many pages. And there are those pages too, which get folded at the edges, and so, when they are turned, they either wrap and silence many pages, or open out several new pages. Time is revealed, or gets concealed in this way. And along with it, many people too.

This is the threshold at which we realised that – to write is to keep active a sense of the force of life. This sense is for the writer, for the one who is being written about, and also for the thoughts and visions that unfold when one writes.

Trickster City is an important book as it documents, in some detail, the death of a certain kind of activism and resistance – a politics of public demonstrations, mass rallies and legal notices. Disputes over land, housing and private ownership have a rich legal history in post-Independence India, where the state has wide powers to appropriate private land and resources for what it deems as the greater public good...

Trickster City’s greatest strength is its refusal to adopt the question-answer, problem-solution format beloved to activists and development workers. The writers engage with the state and its institutions as one would a wealthy, yet cantankerous, old aunt: someone who could conceivably be a source of support and assistance, and occasionally is. But most of the time, she frustrates one’s endeavours, disrupts the best laid plans and will, in all likelihood, outlive us all.

A page from an old diary feels like "a wet currency note that has been dried on a hot surface," a mini-story all by itself. A list of the dishes at a fancy wedding reception ends with: "An entire table just for glasses of water." Some of us might have picked a glass up from just such a table, but never thought of it as an entire table.

The following piece of virtuoso writing does not say a word about policemen, but ends up saying reams by describing the effect of a few policemen walking down a lane: "Young men retreated into their houses. Men covered their card games with bedsheets. Autorickshaw drivers moved their three-wheelers to the side. Everything abated." All this is not to imply that the book works only at the level of detail. There are stories here that Chekov would have been happy to write. Some of the book’s most powerful and revelatory writing is in the sections describing a colony’s eviction and resettlement: the air of dread in the days leading up to the eviction; the almost surreal experience of demolition; the all-important need to prove one’s existence through documents; the starting afresh on a desolate tract of land. These are narrated with humour, anger, irony, and empathy but never self-pity.

From the built form of LNJP Basti - where living quarters, workshops, studios, shops, meeting places, storage spaces are joined in an intricate meshwork. Rather than zoned urban settlements, why not take this route! Here's two structural propositions, from two very small sections of LNJP.

^{Neelofar's Ghera} 

^{Neelofar's Ghera (Another view)}

^{Proposition 01: From Bhoori Maiya's Lane (Top View)}

^{Bhoori Maiya's Lane (Zoomed in)}

More drawings coming soon :)

"Sleep has vanished from my nights, agonising over what will happen during our survey. We have lived here so many years, made so many things, but we can be turned homeless overnight..." The word 'homeless' runs through our lives today like a shiver down the spine. He who doesn't have a plot of land to his name doesn't exist. Listening to my father I sensed, our sense of self, our entire existence is connected deeply to this place in which we have lived many years. But only to have lived here is not enough. Today the ground has suddenly hollowed out like a bottomless pit, the walls of the house are shifting away from us. And we are trying hard to keep everything together but, I think, not too successfully.

"When we first came here, we saw it only as a place to shelter ourselves in. We saw possibilities here, which were first and foremost, and perhaps only about earning a living, finding a sustenance to live life. When the VP Singh cards began to be made, we saw our names inside official registers, and thought now we have been included in government ledgers. Slowly, as we continued to live here, we realised it is not enough to just build a house somewhere. When it presented itself as a possibility, we got our ration cards made. The ration card was something through which we could get sarkari benefits, that is rations at lower costs than in the market. That is, it made it possible for us to save some money from that which we were earning while living here. Over twenty five years, through different kinds of counting done by the government, we too began to get different numbers. Every corner of the house we turned into a corner for safe-keeping the various slips of paper we received in the process, so that they remain secure."

How long have we lived in this place? As soon as this question knocked at me, I pulled out all the documents in the house, to look at them closely, again. We have lived here for twenty five years. How are we going to prove this? Here is a small visualisation of what will happen when the surveyors come to our house: They will ask for evidence. They will say to my father, "Babuji, what can we say about mistakes that may have been made in your documents. We are here only to see what there is."

Between 26 February, when it started and 6 March, yesterday, the survey of 220 houses has been completed in LNJP. There are roughly 1000 houses left to be covered. From the groundwork done end of last week by a group young women and men residents of LNJP, documents of many have been put in order, and the encounter with the survey teams this past week was much more confident.

Till date there has been no notice put up in LNJP as to the precise requirement of the documents for the survey. This has produced a spectral power around the survey's intention and surveyors' abilities, cunning and compassion.

LNJP is an old settlement at the edge of old Delhi, opposite Turkhman Gate, beside the LNJP hospital, from which it gets its name. It began to be settled in the late '60s, and is now home to about 12000 people. With the planned changes in the city ahead of the Commonwealth Games, LNJP, one of the oldest and last surviving settlements, has also now been earmarked for eviction and demolition.

The survey that precedes demolition has begun in LNJP. A survey is conducted by representatives from the Slum Department of the Municipal Corporation, to produce knowledge about the settlement to be demolished, in order to ascertain how many of its residents are eligible for resettlement. According to a Central Government order of 2000, all those who have lived in a settlement since before 1998 are eligible for resettlement; those who have lived there since before 1990 will be allotted plots of 18 sq m, and those who settled there between 1990 and 1998 will be alloted 12.5 sq m.

How long someone has lived in a settlement is determined in the survey on the basis of documents - ration cards and election I cards, with the year in which they have been issued being the critical marker. In LNJP, the earliest stable document is from the mid-1980s: a card with an attested photograph, name and, most importantly, address of the resident, called the "VP Singh token". Here, the token is also being admitted in the survey as proof of how long a resident has lived at that address, because ration cards issued prior to this token did not state the house number in the address. Ration cards have been reissued a number of times from the 1980s to the present date. The format and the card number have changed with each re-issue.

The survey is critical for the residents of a settlement - it determines what ones life in the city will be after the demolition, depending on whether or not the survey registers if their documents prove they make it to the cut-off date of 1998. In Nangla Maanchi, a settlement of 30,000 people at the banks of Yamuna, demolished in 2006, a very large proportion of the residents eligible for resettlement in Ghevra are still fighting a court case to be resettled. The survey marked them P-98 (post 1998), even though most of them have older documents.

As the survey teams move through a settlement, which documents should be produced gets blurred for the residents. In some houses in LNJP, the team has asked for old documents, but in most houses, it asked for the latest documents. This blurring produces rumours about the nature of the survey. Simultaneously, what information is being put down in the survey ledger is not clear and not known to any resident.

The survey in LNJP began on Thursday, 26 February 2009. Approximately 120 houses are known to have been covered by the survey teams in the two days that the survey has been conducted till now. Of every 10 houses, 8 have old ration cards (early '80s), token (early '80s) and election I-cards (early '90s). But of every ten houses, only two have been asked to show their old documents by the survey teams. Considering the density of LNJP, the survey will take about one month to be completed. During this month, the fate of many will be decided - how they will live, where they will live and with what degree of uncertainty.

In the years it has been in the city, LNJP has held within itself a huge diversity of people - the old, the infirm, the familied, the single woman, the transgendered, the new migrant, and of late, those evicted from other settlements in the city. That many will lose out in this survey, depending on the documents they have, but also depending on the documents they are asked to show and what entries are made about them in the ledger by the survey teams, is clear. If there is a pressure from inside the settlement, and from outside, on how the survey is being conducted, the margin of those who lose everything may get significantly reduced.

When one dwells in a place, one also abides by the ideas that are accepted in that place as being ideal for living. We even think of our future from within the mesh of these ideas. What seems to be at stake here is a consensus, arrived at over a long duration, about what should be sustained as the basis according to which life ought to be led. When a dwelling that has existed for a long time is broken, it is not only their homes that people are evicted out of. Demolition threatens people by scraping at the very foundations they have built their entire lives on.

It was after the demolition of many homes that some people found a place to live in, in Ghevra. The demolition of ones house leaves one steeped in many difficulties. In some ways, the energy mustered by different people to take care of their daily needs after a demolition, becomes a new basis on which to start constructing life afresh in a new place.

These needs include food, water, electricity, roads, means of transport, ways of earning a living, a house, a toilet. But there are some things which have more to do with ones heart and with a search for inner peace and self confidence, which also need an externalisation and a form. Such as: a mosque to offer namaz, a gurudwara to listen to guruwani, a church to find some peace of mind, a temple to pray in. These find their own place amidst the jostle of the everyday.

And they have in Ghevra too.