Mukul Kesavan: Growing up in Lutyens’ Delhi – an urban history in anecdotes
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I’ve lived in Delhi nearly all my life. To recall that life shared out in several very different neighbourhoods in the city is one way of examining the taken-for-granted world I inhabited. Like most people of my age and class (and caste) I’m representative of a social sliver of Delhi between 1962 and the present, so these memories might serve as anecdotal evidence for an urban history of this city’s salariat. At any rate, thinking about the localities I lived in helped me see Delhi and my connection with it more clearly than I had done before.
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I start with Kashmiri Gate, which was my first home in Delhi as a child, and then move on to the sarkari neighbourhoods where I lived out the rest of my childhood and youth till I was 18. I end with the rest of my life in Delhi south of the Ring Road in private “colonies”.
Put another way, I begin with my time as a shehri from the walled city, move on to becoming a Lutyens-wala and end with my life as a south-Delhi-type. These are stories about a comfortable life, and I’ll try to explain in passing the nature of my privilege.
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