Crowds, Congestion, Conviviality: The Enduring Life of the Old City

Abstract

When I began fieldwork in Old Delhi, I was frequently disoriented. A number of visitor's guides to the area had been published, describing, for example, the Meena Bazaar. They detailed historical monuments in the vicinity, but were unhelpful in explaining much else. Though this part of Delhi was many years old, its present uses differed markedly from those at its genesis. The Meena Bazaar's seventeenth-century material surroundings, for example, were obscured by centuries of demolition and improvisation.Moreover, it was not the kind of place that easily lent itself to mapping. Like many Delhi residents, I frequently consulted a map book produced by the Eicher company, which broke down the city into manageable parts. But in its pages covering the old city, the gaze from above -the promise of clean lines and ordered spaces -was betrayed by the street, where everything blurred. Still I didn't lose hope: guidebooks and maps are, after all, for tourists and residents.Surely, trained in anthropology and armed with an inventory of native culture, I could do better. Yet here I confronted another hurdle. Anthropologists of India, whether based in rural villages or urban settings, tend to focus on a particular community. But Delhi's old city, exemplified by a space like the Meena Bazaar, was not defined by a caste, class or religious group. It was clearly a plural space, lacking a distilled set of rituals, or an all-encompassing culture.I started trying to make sense of the area, as proper scholars do, by delineating the bazaar's physical boundaries and official status. On its eastern end, bordering a major road, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Marg, street hawkers sold counterfeit Dolce and

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