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Delhi 360: Urban Dehat invites students, researchers, artists, and storytellers to contribute to our blog—an open platform to reflect on the rich and layered life of Delhi’s (urban) villages. We welcome short articles, commentaries, photo essays, graphic articles, comics, and other creative formats that explore themes such as everyday life, history, memory, culture, spatial transformations, heritage, and the politics of development.
Your writeup should be of 500 words only with a maximum of 5 images.
Email your writeup at delhiurbandehat@gmail.com
Delhi beyond Emperors, Monuments and Colonial Architecture
Dr. Shekhar Tokas, Assistant Professor, Urban Studies, AUD
Dominant historical narratives of Delhi have long been framed through the idea of successive imperial capitals, the “Seven Cities of Delhi” and the monumental legacies of Islamic and colonial rulers. The focus on dynastic power, monumental architecture, and imperial urban design has rendered invisible the people who cultivated Delhi’s land, the agrarian and pastoral communities who formed the city’s original social and ecological base.
This exclusion reflects the politics of historical knowledge production, the idea that history is never neutral but shaped by those who write it. Similarly, history is not merely about remembering the past, but about deciding whose past is remembered and how it is told. In Delhi’s case, the dominant narrative privileges the rulers who built palaces and forts, while silencing the communities who sustained those empires. The native inhabitants of Delhi, the cultivators, pastoralists, and village communities are largely absent from the story of the city’s making.
Yet Delhi’s rural landscape is well documented across centuries. Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century travel accounts during the Tughlaq dynasty describe a region surrounded by fertile villages, forests, and agricultural settlements that fed and supported the walled city. Two centuries later, the Ain-i-Akbari (16th century), compiled under Emperor Akbar, recorded Delhi’s sarkar and its numerous villages such as Palam, detailing land revenue, caste compositions, and patterns of cultivation. These accounts affirm that Delhi was not an empty imperial stage, but a densely inhabited agrarian landscape dominated by Jats, Gujars, and Chauhans.
Under British rule, administrative reports such as the Gazetteer of the Delhi District (1883–84) systematically documented around 350 villages, describing landholdings, crop patterns, and demographic structures. These sources demonstrate a continuity of rural habitation that predated and outlasted successive empires. However, when Delhi was declared the new capital of British India in 1911, the colonial state acquired land from nearly 150 villages under the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, displacing long-standing communities. The Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) itself stands on the lands of Raisina and Malcha villages, symbols of how imperial urbanism effaced the rural.
Post-Independence urban expansion continued this erasure. Partition refugees, development projects, and the state’s modernization agenda transformed farmlands into residential and institutional areas like Hauz Khas and R.K. Puram, all built on village lands of Hauz Khas and Munirka Village. The state’s maps redrew Delhi, but its memory of villages persisted through place names, kinship ties, and surviving lal dora settlements.
To foreground Delhi’s villages is to challenge the city’s elitist historiography and reclaim the agency of those who made and remade Delhi across centuries. Rewriting Delhi’s history from the perspective of its villages restores the voices of its first inhabitants and exposes how history has too often served the powerful rather than the people.
Zail-wise distribution of villages with dominant castes in Delhi (288 Villages) and Ballabgarh (41 Chirag Delhi, 19 Mehrauli) Tehsil. Source: Gazetteer of Delhi District (1883-84)
Source: Mhara Munirka: Story of an Urban Village of Delhi and University of Tokyo Survey of Islamic Monuments of India
Tracing Roots in Devli: Memory, Land and Loss
Puneet Singh Singhal
My village, Devli, is said to have been established in 1050 by Shri Meharchand Singhal. I am the 43rd generation in his lineage. Elders say that our ancestors migrated from Sikar, Rajasthan.
After the development of two contrasting neighbourhoods—Sangam Vihar and Sainik Farms—Devli village now finds itself sandwiched between these two parallel realities of Delhi: one that provided economic migrants a place to call home in the city, and the other inhabited by the elite—business tycoons, politicians, retired civil servants, and defence officers.
Yet, they share one thing in common: both these localities are unauthorised. This contrast becomes strikingly visible as one travels from Neb Sarai Police Station toward the village. The surroundings are green, clean, and posh—and then suddenly, a pile of garbage appears. That’s where Sangam Vihar begins. The difference is immediate: the road becomes uneven, the air carries the smell of trash and animal waste, and street vendors line the sides.
The physical boundary that separates Sangam Vihar and Devli is the baandh (embankment). My mother often recalls how high it used to be when she first came to the village after her marriage. Back then, the area was quiet, full of keekar and desi babool trees. The baandh was where villagers kept their goats, cows, and buffaloes.
According to my mother, people occasionally claimed to have seen golden jackals roaming in the fields that are now part of Sangam Vihar. For me, it was difficult to imagine. By the time I grew up, all I heard was that Sangam Vihar was the largest unauthorised colony in Asia—though no one could ever cite the source of that claim. Devli, on the other hand, became infamous for its narrow lanes, lack of open spaces, and chronic issues—water shortages in summer and waterlogging during the monsoon.
Elders also say that until the 1980s, they had to cross the agricultural fields of Khanpur village to reach Devli. Even today, there are four routes to the village—one through Sainik Farms, and the other three through Khanpur-Devli Road, Tigri, and Sangam Vihar. All these routes pass through other localities, which makes our connectivity vulnerable.
Powerful and well-connected residents of Sainik Farms often try to restrict our access, arguing that the roads are on private land and should be used exclusively by them.
It is equally fascinating to trace how Sangam Vihar developed in the late 1980s. Villagers who once cultivated this land—mainly growing jowar—began receiving land acquisition notices. Around the same time, neighbouring villages such as Khanpur and Tughlakabad started warning them about how their land was being taken for mere pennies. They advised the farmers to resist and collaborate with political leaders to make more money by selling plots directly to economic migrants—often at affordable prices and even on monthly instalments.
Another reason for the farmers’ anxiety was the loss of their ridge land. Until independence in 1947, villagers had paid lagaan (land tax), and the paharis (ridges) were used communally—for grazing cattle, collecting firewood, and accessing water. Some elders say that the original settlement of the village was located on the ridge, and later, people shifted to the plains.
The first legal case against the acquisition of our land was filed in 1965. Several more followed until 2009. Over 51 years, three different sessions courts—and even the High Court—gave judgments in favour of the villagers. Yet, suspiciously, the villagers were unable to prove the extent of their landownership or titles. My grandfather’s cousin often blamed our lawyer and corrupt government officials who demanded bribes. The court orders were vague and left the final decision to the discretion of Land Acquisition Officers, Tehsildars, and the District Magistrate.
I became deeply interested in this case in 2018, driven by anger and frustration when forest guards at the Devli pahari stopped us from entering the premises of our kuldevi, Mahamai, where we organize a feast every year during Diwali.
Transforming Spatial Practices: From Cattle Grounds to Parking Lots
The photo features the village’s Mata, a revered deity. Visiting the deity during auspicious occasions was a cultural tradition, symbolizing the village’s spiritual essence
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