Delhi made Capital gains from Partition
On August 15, 1947, when India awoke to life and freedom, its capital had already made its tryst with destiny. The British partitioned India and the tremors of one of the largest migration in human history that displaced 15 million people were felt across the subcontinent. The mass churning also changed Delhi like never before.
Partition was announced on June 3, 1947. One-third of Delhi’s population — 329,000 of 900,000 — left for Pakistan. But another 495,000 Hindus and Sikhs from Western Punjab, Sindh and Northwest Frontier poured in almost simultaneously.
The city had a long history of suffering invasions. But this time it wasn’t about fighting foreign raiders. Delhi, now the capital of Independent India, had half a million of its own people at its doorstep. The challenge was to find homes and jobs for the newly arrived and assimilate their culture, language and beliefs.
But the indomitable Punjabi spirit refused to become a burden or even wait for acceptance. In no time, the new residents of Delhi had stamped their cultural and political dominance on the city. They became, as Ranjana Sengupta, the author of Delhi Metropolitan, puts it, “the last conquerors of Delhi.”
The bulk of these newcomers — 470,386 of the total 495,391 — were urban refugees from West Pakistan who chose Delhi for better job prospects. But the walled city was already too crowded to accommodate so many. The Imperial New Delhi, then merely 10 years old, could barely house the city’s government staff.
“Nowhere to go, we broke the lock of an empty house on Panchkuian Road and moved in. Later, we shifted to a place in Nizamuddin bought for ₹6000,” said BJP politician Vijay Kumar Malhotra.
The refugees found shelter in camps, gurdwaras, temples, schools, even military barracks. The less fortunate settled for parks and pavements. Many built wooden shacks adjacent to Red Fort. “We called them the Gatta (cardboard) colonies,” recalled 88-year-old philanthropist OP Jain, who as an 18-year-old supplied food to the refugee camps.
To accommodate the influx, 36 permanent rehabilitation colonies named after freedom fighters — Lajpat Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Patel Nagar, Tilak Nagar, Malviya Nagar — came up on farmland and ridge forests. “An allottee paid ₹12.30 per month for 10 years for a house built on a 60-80 square yard plot,” recalled former DDA commissioner AK Jain.
From 198 sq km in 1951, Delhi’s urban area grew to 323 sq km in 1961. “But Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru confessed in Parliament that this was an ad-hoc measure and cities had to be planned better. The Delhi Development and Municipal Acts were legislated in 1957 with the idea that the DDA would be the apex planner and developer and the MCD would service the city,” said Jain.
Private property developers such as DLF were brought in to establish Model Town, Rajouri Garden, East of Kailash and Greater Kailash.
Shelter secured, the refugees had to find a livelihood. Those who had some capital tried to set up businesses they used to run in Pakistan. Those who didn’t, tried whatever menial jobs came their way.
A spice trader from Sialkot, Dharam Pal Gulati (now 94) bought a horse cart from Chandni Chowk for ₹650 and ferried passengers. Within a year, he saved ₹9,700 and re-launched the family brand — Mahashiya Di Hatti (MDH) — from a kiosk in Karol Bagh.
“The refugees never said no to any opportunity. They sold their goods at virtually no profit but earned from the margin on baardana (cardboard), jute sacks and wooden cartons used in packaging,” said OP Jain.
Bhim Sen Puri, 95, the owner of Central News Agency, recalled how the hallowed arcades of Connaught Place had turned into squatter zones. “They sold anything they could lay their hands on. Even eggs, which were not seen in Delhi shops before,” he said.
Since it was difficult to get into established trades, the refugees would make parts and supply to big industries. Providing ancillary services and goods — from tailoring outside garment shops to machine parts and sub-assemblies — became a Punjabi enterprise.
Before 1947, retailers from neighbouring districts picked up goods from the old city and carried them back in camel carts. From a regional trading centre, Delhi was soon to become an industrialised city. The 1964 Industrial Survey showed that between 1945 and 1951, the number of registered factories grew from 227 to 431. Before 1945, there were three bicycle-manufacturing factories. By 1951, there were seven.
There was an explosion of retail and general merchandise shops. At Arab Ki Sarai, Japanese technicians ran training in 12 different crafts. It helped that most refugees were often better educated than the locals. A study by VKRV Rao and PB Desai showed 88% of men and 68% of women in Kingsway Camp were literate.
The newly established ‘ring towns’ such as Sonepat, Ballabgarh, Faridabad and Ghaziabad initiated the idea of the National Capital Region. Within the city limits, Okhla and Naraina Industrial Estates were set up to promote refugee enterprise, V N Dutta wrote in ‘Punjabi Refugees and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi’.
It is in these factory towns that Janaki Das Kapur, a businessman from Lahore, started Atlas Cycles. HP
Nanda and his brother, also from Lahore, founded the Escorts Group. Raunaq Singh from Daska set up Bharat Steel and Apollo Tyres, and Rawalpindi’s Bhai Mohan Singh came to manage Ranbaxy.
In the decades leading up to Partition, Hindu nationalism had gained ground both in Western Punjab and Delhi, deriving support from the Hindu business communities in both areas. PostPartition, the concentration of these business communities increased in the capital. This, rather than the scars of the Partition, boosted the fortunes of Hindu nationalist parties in Delhi, wrote Christophe Jaffrelot in ‘Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies’.
Several leaders of the Delhi Jana Sangh (a predecessor of Bharatiya Janata Party) — Balraj Madhok, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Bhai Mahaveer and Madanlal Khurana among others — were refugees.
Malhotra recalled how the political climate was ripe to create an anti-Congress front. “The RSS had been banned (following Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination)... Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee had resigned from Nehru’s cabinet. There was no one to represent the Hindu point of view in Parliament,” he said.
The Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad was formed in 1949 and Jana Sangh in 1951. In the pre-Assembly elections in 1951, BJS won five seats. In Lok Sabha, they got three. “Dr Mukherjee famously remarked that today’s minority is tomorrow’s majority,” recalled Malhotra.
The cult of Sheranwali Mata has no clear pre-partition history either in Delhi or Punjab, but it somehow got inextricably linked to the Punjabi Hindu migrants of 1947, wrote Ravinder Kaur in her book on Punjabi migrants in Delhi.
City politician Jai Prakash Aggarwal, whose family has been associated with Ramlila celebrations in Delhi for over 100 years, said the Bhagwati Jagran and Mata ki Chowki were common even before Partition. “But as the population of Hindus increased after Partition, they became more visible,” he said.
Many grieve the loss of high culture that once defined Delhi. With a large Muslim population gone, Urdu, the city’s dominant language, went into a decline and was soon substituted by Hindi and Punjabi. Mushairas (Urdu poetry recitation) became rare and were replaced by government-sponsored Kavi Sammelans.
The late Ahmed Ali, the author of ‘Twilight in Delhi’, who left for Karachi during Partition, told William Dalrymple how Delhi was dead. “All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed. Now the language has shrunk. So many words are lost,” Dalrymple quoted him saying in The New Yorker in 2015.
Despite this undercurrents of resentment, what was the most remarkable about the refugee resettlement in
Delhi, as Ravinder Kaur wrote, was the absence of any noticeable conflict. While the strife between the ethnic Sindhis and the Muhajirs (Muslim refugees from India) often turned violent, Delhi as always was more accepting, and willing to evolve.
Since those tumultuous years of Partition, the ever-expanding capital has attracted and in turn got enriched by millions of migrants from all corners of the country. Seven decades on, Delhi’s fascinating journey towards becoming a truly cosmopolitan city continues.
their motto of hearty eating and good living, the Punjabis changed the food culture of Delhi. “We were happy with our Paranthewali Gali,” said OP Jain, “but the refugees brought a whole new palate.”
“Dilli mein restaurant ka koi riwaj nahin tha,” says 93-year-old Kundan Lal Jaggi, who along with Kundan Lal Gujral and Thakur Das Mago, resurrected Peshawar’s Moti Mahal brand in Delhi’s Daryaganj.
In Peshawar, Jaggi worked at Moti Mahal and decided to move to Delhi when the restaurant shut down just before Partition. “I was to take a train from Sunam (near Patiala) to Peshawar. But my brother fell ill so I stayed back. Later, I heard that the passengers on that train were massacred,” he said.
Later, he met Gujral, a former colleague at Moti Mahal, and Mago, a fellow Peshawari, at a liquor shop on Delhi’s Roshanara Road. “Das got ₹4,000 to buy a shop. Gujral and I brought our experience of running a restaurant. And we started,” said Jaggi, the only surviving member of the trio that set up Moti Mahal in Daryaganj in 1947.
“People ate Aaloo poori in Delhi. But the Punjabis missed their roti and naan. We started selling breads and tea. Then we got three tandoors and began grilling chicken and
Delhi is the largest centre of publishing books in India. But until 1947, it housed only a handful of distribution centres selling mainly religious books.
It was the refugees who established the books trade in the capital. The famous ones from Lahore — Atma Ram, Gurdas Kapoor, Uttar Chand, Rajpal and Sons — reached Delhi after Partition and started out from Nai Sarak and Kashmere Gate.
Amar Varma’s family ran a bookselling business in Multan. Before leaving for Delhi, his father met someone who promised to transport their books at ₹10 a carton. “We sent 50 boxes. Much to our surprise, they got delivered,” said Varma.
Struggling to make ends meet, the Varmas wanted to sell this stock at the book market in Old Delhi’s Nai Sarak.
“But for them, this was raddi (wastepaper). They wouldn’t even pay for the binding, which they said had no value. That was a shocker. So we decided to open our own bookshop,” recalled Varma, 82. In 1948, his father set up a 10x10 sq feet shop in Dariba Kalan called the Punjabi Pustak Bhandar. fish,” said Jaggi.
‘Luck by chance’ could be the tagline for some of their biggest gastronomic inventions.
“A Bengali gentleman turned up at the restaurant and we served him tandoori chicken. When he asked for some gravy, our rather intrepid cook rustled up a curry made of tomatoes, cream and butter. That was how butter chicken came to be,” Jaggi recounted.
Another guest catalysed their dal makhani recipe. “Suchha Singh, a manager at Firestone Tyres, came to our restaurant late one night when we had already run out of food. So he prompted the cook to mix the leftover dal and rajma with butter. And that became our famous buttered dal,” said Jaggi.
While the majority of Hindus in Delhi were vegetarian, those who came from Pakistan relished their chicken. “People eating the two fares side by side and not taking offence was a new experience in Delhi,” said Jaggi’s son, Rajinder.
By the 1950s, Delhi was breaking new grounds in gastronomy. Dhabas selling tandoori roti, dal makhani and rajma chawal, and stalls selling kulche chhole mushroomed. Paneer, till then unknown to Delhi’s palate, became the city’s staple vegetarian fare.
TALE OF A CITY The mass churning triggered by the country’s division set in motion a process in which Delhi emerged a cosmopolitan city
By 1958, the Varmas had got into publishing, opening Star Publications, with low-priced paperbacks. They published Sahir Ludhianavi, Shakeel Badayuni, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Dutt Bharati, and sold the books for ₹1 each.
By the 1960s, Delhi’s book market had a global imprint. In 1962, the US Library of Congress, the biggest library in the world, had opened an office in the city. “They wanted Punjabi and Urdu books,” said Varma. In 1972, the National Book Trust launched its first World Book Fair and by the late 1970s, foreign publishers had realised that India had a big market for English books and printing was also cheap. So they set up offices in Delhi.
Many publishers and distributors slowly gravitated to Ansari Road, Daryaganj. The number of book fairs increased, new libraries opened, and universities started buying locally.
Indian publishers were participating in Frankfurt and London book fairs. With Delhi leading the way, India soon became the third largest publishing hub for English books after the US and the UK.