Forging Communal Space: Negotiating Streets and Practices in Delhi, 1922–65

Abstract

This paper examines space-making in the Jangpura-Bhogal locality of Delhi by documenting communal conflicts in the late 1920s and 1950s. First, it addresses the production of a Hindu religious space by disavowing Muslim ritual practices under a colonial regime seeking to control religious conflict. Second, it unpacks the diverse mechanisms used to produce a Sikh political space during a nascent postcolonial state’s management of linguistic subnationalisms. Grounded in power relations and cohesions around multiple social registers, these variegated spatial claims were made through political and religious processions, petitions and physical violence. These communal geographies highlight the importance of neighbourhood histories.

Keywords:

• Communal space
• Delhi
• Hindu-Muslim
• Hindu-Sikh
• Punjabi Suba neighbourhood
• urban

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Srirupa Roy, Stephen Legg, Anish Vanaik, Catharina Haensel and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This article draws on material from my thesis, ‘City on the Move: Migration, Public Culture, and Urban Identity in Delhi, c. 1911–Present’ (PhD thesis, University of Goettingen, 2023), https://doi.org/10.53846/goediss-9943.

Notes

1. Jim Masselos, ‘Appropriating Urban Space: Social Constructs of Bombay in the Time of the Raj’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1991): 33–63.

2. Stephen Legg, ‘A Pre-Partitioned City? Anti-Colonial and Communal Mohallas in Inter-War Delhi’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 1 (2019): 170–87; Nazima Parveen, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2021).

3. Rukmini Barua, In the Shadow of the Mill: Transformation of Workers’ Neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, 1920s to 2000s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Anish Vanaik, ‘Business as Usual? Bazars and Communalism in Colonial Delhi, 1913–32’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 47, no. 1 (2024).

4. Charu Gupta and Stephen Legg, ‘Communal Geographies: An Introduction’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 47, no. 1 (2024).

5. For a discussion on the methodological challenges and negotiations with such an archive, see Jim Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Moholla”, 1904–15: An Initial Exploration into the World of the Indian Urban Muslim’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (1976): 75–95; Legg, ‘A Pre-Partitioned City?’; Diya Mehra, ‘Jangpura Triptych: Striated Settlements, Neighbourhood Activism, and Delhi’s Residential Modernity’, Economic & Political Weekly 55, no. 51 (2020): 57–67; Saeed Ahmad, ‘Muslim Pasts and Presents: Displacement and City-Making in a Delhi Neighbourhood’, Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 6 (2022): 1872–1900.

6. Jim Masselos, ‘Change and Custom in the Format of the Bombay Mohurrum during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (1982): 47–67; Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Deepasri Baul, ‘The Improbability of a Temple: Hindu Mobilization and Urban Space in the Delhi Shiv Mandir Agitation of 1938’, Studies in History 36, no. 2 (2021): 230–50.

7. Masselos, ‘Appropriating Urban Space’, 42; Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005).

8. Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988): 224–54; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993): 314–37; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India: A History for the Present’, Economic & Political Weekly 30, no. 52 (1995): 3373–80; Charu Gupta, ‘Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective’, Economic & Political Weekly 39, no. 39 (2004): 4302–04.

9. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (1999): 608–29; Srirupa Roy, ‘Temple and Dam, Fez and Hat: The Secular Roots of Religious Politics in India and Turkey’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 48, no. 2 (2010): 148–72.

10. ‘Constitution of Raisina Estate’, DSA, CC, Education (henceforth, Edu), 4/1926; DSA, CC, Edu, 35(B)/1927.

11. Ahmad, ‘Muslim Pasts and Presents’; Mehra, ‘Jangpura Triptych’.

12. Many of the Jatavs, working as raj mistris or stone masons in colonial infrastructure projects, were most likely employed at the quarry: Saeed Ahmad, ‘City on the Move: Migration, Public Culture, and Urban Identity in Delhi, c. 1911–present’ (PhD thesis, University of Goettingen, 2023): 145.

13. The refugee allotments in Jangpura-Bhogal had a population of 8,500 people in an area of 156 acres: A. Bopegamage, Delhi: A Study in Urban Sociology (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1957): 82. For a discussion on the rehabilitation policies, see Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007): 84–120.

14. Ahmad, ‘City on the Move’.

15. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford Univeresity Press, 1997); Radhika Singha, ‘Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India’, Studies in History 16, no. 2 (2000): 151–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/025764300001600201; Salah Punathil, ‘Archival Ethnography and Ethnography of Archiving: Towards an Anthropology of Riot Inquiry Commission Reports in Postcolonial India’, History and Anthropology 32, no. 3 (2021): 312–30, 10.1080/02757206.2020.1854750; Javed Iqbal Wani, ‘Regulating Hooligans and Mawaalis: Collective Action and the Politics of Public Order in Late Colonial India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 45, no. 1 (2022): 19–35, 10.1080/00856401.2022.1986928.

16. Khan Ahmad Hasan Khan, Census of India 1931, Vol. XVI, Delhi: Report and Tables, Government of India (Lahore: Civil & Military Gazette Press, 1933): 14; Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007): 125–26.

17. Anand A. Yang, ‘Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the “Anti-Cow Killing” Riot of 1893’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 4 (1980): 576–96; Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Pandey, Construction of Communalism; Reece Jones, ‘Sacred Cows and Thumping Drums: Claiming Territory as “Zones of Tradition” in British India’, Area 39, no. 1 (2007): 55–65.

18. Parveen, Contested Homelands, 60; Kenneth Jones, ‘Organized Hinduism in Delhi and New Delhi’, in Delhi through the Ages: Selected Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society, ed. Robert E. Frykenberg (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993): 203–21.

19. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism.

20. For details, see ‘Police Arrangements’, Bakr-Id, May 27, 1927, DSA, DC, 45/1927; ‘Orders to Magistrates for Bakr-Id 1927’, June 1, 1927, ibid.

21. ‘Ramanand Sanyasi to DC’, June 13, 1927, DSA, DC, 42/1927; ‘SSP to DC’, June 15, 1927, ibid.; ‘Notes of Meeting at DC’s House’, May 12, 1928, DSA, DC, 45/1947.

22. ‘Sanyasi to DC’; ‘Note by DC’, June 14, 1927, DSA, DC, 42/1927; ‘Residents of Jangpura Village to DM’, June 29, 1927, ibid.; ‘A Silent Stranger to the DC’, March 22, 1928, ibid.; ‘Residents of Jangpura Village to DM’, April 13, 1928, ibid. Petitions, pamphlets and litigation were important strategies to mobilise support for or against cow sacrifices: see Rohit De, ‘Cows and Constitutionalism’, Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (2019): 240–77.

23. ‘Bakr Eid Riot Case: Sixteen Hindus Charged’, The Times of India, July 17, 1928: 5; ‘Report of Magistrate Hanraham’, DSA, DC, 45/1927.

24. It is difficult to determine the exact location of Maula Bux’s shed and the proposed route since the roads were unnamed.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Hindustan Times, September 20, 1928: 5. Seven people were accused and sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment: see Government of India, Report on the Administration of the Delhi Province for 1928–29, Government of India (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1930): 13.

28. For details, see Legg, Spaces of Colonialism; Legg, ‘A Pre-Partitioned City?’.

29. See DSA, DC, 46/1935; DSA, DC, 37/1939. Although street names intended to make the city more legible and easier to police, urban dwellers navigated the city through a local knowledge of districts. Therefore, colonial efforts to establish clearer systems of house and street numbering were often ineffective: Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, ‘Numbers Didn’t Count: The Streets of Colonial Bombay and Calcutta’, Urban History 39, no. 4 (2012): 639–58. For a discussion on the activation of this knowledge and contradictions of the planning-practice dialectic during communal violence, see Bandyopadhyay, Streets in Motion.

30. Masselos, ‘Power in the Bombay “Moholla”’; Masselos, ‘Appropriating Urban Space’.

31. Jones, ‘Sacred Cows’.

32. Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981): 218; Parveen, Contested Homelands, 58.

33. Ibid.; ‘Hanrahan Report’, DSA, DC, 45/1927.

34. ‘HRC to CC’, ibid.

35. The first deputation included prominent Jain, caste-Hindu, Chamar (Jatav) representatives, and Ramanand Sanyasi, president of the All-India Dalit Udhar Sabha. Later petitions included signatures of leading men of the village, although their social identities cannot be determined: DC/42/1927. However, Mange Lal, a Bhogal nonagenarian, also recounts Jatav involvement in the mobilisation: Mange Lal, interviewed by author, December 12, 2018. Perhaps, the anti-caste Ad-Dharm movement, which had already established a Ravidas temple in Jangpura by 1922, did not as yet impact claims of a united ‘Hindu’ identity: see Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ronki Ram, ‘Untouchability, Dalit Consciousness, and the Ad-Dharm Movement in Punjab’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 38, no. 3 (2004): 321–49.

36. ‘A Silent Stranger to the DC’, March 22, 1928, DSA, DC, 42/1927; ‘Residents of Jangpura Village to DM’, June 29, 1927, ibid.; ‘Note by DC’, June 14, 1927.

37. ‘SSP to DC’, June 15, 1927, ibid.; ‘Notes of Meeting’, May 12, 1928, DSA, DC, 45/1927. It was also alleged that Muslims had secretly sacrificed a cow in 1926.

38. ‘Silent Stranger’; ‘Jangpura Residents’.

39. The Times of India, September 9, 1957: 1.

40. The procession intended to pass from the Arya Samaj Mandir and Central Market in Lajpat Nagar, through the Sanatan Dharam Mandir and main thoroughfares of Jangpura Extension, and then proceed through Bhogal’s main streets like Central Road, Summan Bazar and Hospital Road, before ending at the Children’s Park in Jangpura Extension.

41. The Times of India, September 10, 1957: 8; ‘Superintendent of Police (henceforth, SP), South District, to IGP/Delhi, SP/CID (SB), and DC’, September 8, 1957, DSA, CID, 27/1957; ‘Daily Diary’, September 8, 1957, ibid.; Office of the DM Delhi, ‘Order’, ibid.; Press clippings, September 10, 1957, ibid.

42. Clipping from The Statesman, September 1, 1957, DSA, CID, 27/1957.

43. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘In the Name of Politics: Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Multitude in India’, Economic & Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005): 3293–301.

44. By the 1920s, the Akali Dal was a major political force through its control of the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC). The Congress was reluctant to accept the purportedly ‘communal’ demands for a Punjabi-speaking province as it would betray secular ideals of not granting political rights to any religious group. With Sikhs a minority in post-Independence Punjab, the Arya Samaj convinced Punjabi Hindus to register Hindi rather than Punjabi as a first language in the census, adding to the Akali Dal’s disillusionment with the regime: Paul R. Brass, ‘Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab: The Development of Social and Political Differentiation’, in Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1975); Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Gurharpal Singh and Girgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

45. Bhogal’s prominent Akali workers frequently attended diwans and other events across Delhi and Punjab: DSA, CID, 334/1954; DSA, CID, 122/1955; DSA, CID, 144/1955; DSA, CID, 58/1958; DSA, CID, 106/1958; DSA, CID, 117/1960; DSA, CID, 138/1960.

46. DSA, CID, 229/1954; DSA, CID, 144/1955; DSA, CID, 334/1954.

47. ‘Daily Diary’, November 23, 1958; ‘Daily Summary’, November 22 and 23, 1958; ‘Report of Deputy SP to SP Police’, November 25, 1958, DSA, CID, 75/1956.

48. ‘Daily Diary’, November 23, 1958; ‘Daily Summary’, November 22 and 23, 1958, ibid.

49. It was held at Gandhi Grounds on December 5, 1958, and attended by about 20,000 people. Prominent Akali workers from Bhogal were also present: ibid.

50. ‘Information Report of SP’, CID, SB, January 9, 1959, DSA, CID, 67/1958.

51. Press clippings, January 11 and 12, 1959; ‘Information Report of the CID’, SB, January 12, 1959, DSA, CID, 67/1958.

52. See ‘Secret Report of Telegrams received on January 11 and 12, 1959’, DSA, CID, 67/1958; Ibid.; ‘Daily Diary’, January 13, 1959; ‘Information Report’, January 12, 1959, ibid.; ‘Statement by Hindu Mahasabha’, January 12, 1959, ibid.; ‘Secretary, Action Committee, Lajpat Nagar to Home Minister, CC and DM’, January 13, 1959; Press clippings, January 13, 1959; ‘Daily Diary’, January 14, 1959; Press clippings, January 15, 1959; ‘Daily Diary’, January 15, 1959; ‘Information Report’, January 17, 1959; ‘Daily Diary’, January 16, 1959, ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. ‘Scheme for Police Arrangement in Bhogal/Jungpura Area in the Event of Communal Trouble’, DSA, CID, 127/1961.

55. ‘List of Communal Mongers in Lajpat Nagar and Nizam-ud-din Police Stations, New Delhi’, ibid.

56. The large Gurpurab processions in Bhogal in 1961 (700–800 people) and 1962 (1,000–1,200 people) were also devoid of political slogans: see DSA, CID, 106/196; DSA, Delhi Administration, Confidential, 26/1962. Prabhat pheris were also held in 1961 in support of Tara Singh’s fast: DSA, CID, 106/1961.

57. By 1962, the Akali Dal had split between the supporters of Master Tara Singh (Master Group) and Sant Fateh Singh (Sant Group). Compared to Tara Singh’s relatively communal overtones, Fateh Singh’s linguistic emphasis allowed him to keep the Sikhs at the centre of negotiations. Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, as well as Fateh Singh’s fast and threats of self-immolation, made the new administration more amenable to the idea of the Punjabi Suba. Punjab’s Hindu majority was now split between the newly created state of Haryana and the addition of other regions to Himachal Pradesh.

58. DSA, CID, 27/1961.

59. ‘SP to DM’, September 26, 1957, DSA, CID, 55/1957.

60. Ibid.

61. Two oral histories by a Hindu and a Sikh mention clashes between the Akalis and the Arya Samajists, but are unable to provide details on those involved: Mr. Bhalla, interviewed by author, January 10, 2019; Harpal Singh, interviewed by author, January 17, 2019.

62. Contestations over practices would lead to a violent skirmish and a prolonged land dispute until both parties decided to equally divide the Ravidas mandir land: Ahmad, ‘City on the Move’, 193–218.

63. Gyan Prakash, ‘Civil Society, Community, and the Nation in Colonial India’, Etnografica 6, no. 1 (2002): 27–40; Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

64. Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’; Singh and Girgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism; Ravinder Kaur, ‘Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-Colonial State in India’s Partition’, Cultural and Social History 6, no. 4 (2009): 429–46.

65. Parveen, Contested Homelands.

66. The map is not an accurate representation and is for illustrative purposes only. This spatial layout has been prepared through archival traces, oral histories, resident mental maps, and physical mapping of the neighbourhood. Hindu refugees, while present in small numbers in Bhogal, dominated in Pant Nagar. For a greater discussion, see Ahmad, ‘City on the Move’, 42–73.