ABSTRACT
Gokul came to work in our house in Delhi in the late 1970s. His story is a poignant one and typical of migrants to the city. For over thirty years, Gokul, who hailed from a village in North India, was part of our lives with his cheerful manner and village songs. He and his family of wife, two girls and one boy, lived in a squatter settlement inside the Northern Ridge, a protected forest of West Delhi. The Ridge was walking distance from our house and the other houses where he and his wife worked; I went to see his house too. For years, the government turned a blind eye to the squatters in the protected environmental habitat, even as the settlement grew in size. Perhaps this was because, nearby, a huge ‘illegal’ Gurudwara (temple for the Sikhs) was being built slowly, and the middle-classes benefited from the squatters who worked in their homes. We heard daily from Gokul how the dalal or local mafia lord demanded ever-increasing rents and we helped him in every way we could, even though our own circumstances were extremely modest. The rape and murder of a rich schoolgirl and her brother in the Ridge changed the status quo for the squatters, even though it was committed by a runaway criminal, not by the community. All squatter settlements were removed from the Ridge (the pressure from various environmental groups was also an influence) but not the Sikh temple as it became a very sensitive issue, especially after the assassination of the Prime Minister of India by her Sikh bodyguards and the massacre of Sikh people that followed. So Gokul and his family moved elsewhere in West Delhi, still nearby. But then he was moved again – because the land turned out to be government owned, illegally leased out by the dalals. So he moved Jamna-par (literally, across the Yamuna) to the less desirable land across the river Yamuna, where
the middle classes did not go (snob values) in those days. Even Gokul complained about the ignominy of living Jamna-par. For years, he continued to commute to West Delhi, along with many of his friends. His timings became increasingly erratic – a sign of the increasing congestion across the single bridge that connected Delhi that time to its East. Sometimes he could not come at all but at no point did my family consider using anyone else – he was part of our family. As years went by he fell out with his children who had married, gone to live in better parts of Delhi and refused to support him. His wife died too and he could not afford to commute anymore but would turn up for visits and tea (chai), talking about returning to his village. He always wore a traditional dhoti and shirt – never the Western attire of trousers. We heard that he died two years ago in his village – a lonely and defeated man. This year, I noted that the new squatters are back in the Ridge. My father is an economic migrant from a tiny village from one of the most backward districts of India in West Bengal, still without piped water or electricity and roads. Although he is infirm and in his eighties now, he dreams of going back to the village. My mother was Delhi-born in British India and does not feel the same. However, I have lived from time to time and worked in my village for more than half of my life and I feel the same drawing to my village as my father, even though I now live in London. My Uncle, whose grandfather was a judge in British India, was one of the people who remembers New Delhi being built and going to the ‘inauguration’ of the new city. His family lived six months in the summer capital of British India, Shimla, and the rest of the year in Delhi – this constant movement so much a part of his childhood that he hates travelling even now. Our house in Delhi was built by Sikh refugees from the divided Punjab in 1947, who then moved elsewhere. This feeling of being ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ even when choosing to migrate to the city or beyond, is deeply personal as these personal stories show. As the book Arrival City by Doug Saunders shows, migration is changing the face of the world.2 The history of the city is always the story of movement and growth.
