ABSTRACT
With Independence, India inherited Delhi, a capital city shaped by pasts incongruous with the ideals of Independent India. Residential neighborhoods starkly reflected the dominance of Indo-Islamic culture and the severity of colonial era wealth disparity. Post-Independence, the government sought to transform city spaces to better accommodate a modernizing, upwardly mobile, Hindu-dominant populous; many of whom were newly arrived refugees without homes. This process involved the reuse of colonial government employee and soldier housing and the redistribution of ‘evacuee properties’ (buildings vacated by fleeing Muslims). Such actions expediently provided refugees with needed shelter, but failed to significantly reform the inequity built into Delhi’s pre-Partition housing landscapes. In the process, many Muslims who remained in India were dispossessed and internally displaced, an outcome that has forever impacted dominant understanding of who belongs in both the city and nation. This chapter considers the material and spatial patterns associated with these post-Partition transformations of the pre-Partition city.
