‘Delhinama’ to tell city’s history during CWG

NEW DELHI - The history and evolution of Delhi from a palaeolithic age settlement to a modern metropolis will be chronicled for citizens and visitors during the Oct 3-14 Commonwealth Games in a multi-media presentation “Delhinama (Delhi’s story)”.

The exhibition will be presented by the Delhi Urban Arts Commission, the nodal organisation monitoring the capital’s built landscape. It comes four years after the DUAC presented “Imagining Delhi”, a path-breaking exhibition addressing urban development and growth under the chairmanship of noted architect Charles Correa.

Comprising a mammoth body of documents, written texts, audio-visual capsules, satellite images, newspaper photographs, old maps, artefacts and archaeological relics showcasing pre-historic, Hindu, Muslim, colonial and contemporary Delhi, the exposition has been staggered into three segments to facilitate effective display and outreach.

“The inaugural exhibition, ‘Delhinama’, will be inaugurated by Urban Development Minister S. Jaipal Reddy at the Conference Centre of Delhi University Sep 27. Vice-Chancellor Deepak Pental will be the guest of honour. The campus exhibition will be partnered by the university,” DUAC chairman K.T. Ravindran announced here Friday.

On Sep 30, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal will inaugurate the second part of “Delhinama” at the Red Fort and Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) director general Gautam Sengupta will be the guest of honour. Both the exhibitions will end Oct 30, he added.

The final leg of the exhibition will be inaugurated by Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit Oct 1 at the India Habitat Centre. It will close Oct 15.

“We want to foster an affection for the metropolis among people and expose the city on the occasion of the Commonwealth Games. The exhibition will bring the biggest pool of information on the historicity of the capital and its evolution. It will be later archived in the form of a book,” Ravindran said.

A team of 20 experts has been researching the capital’s history and sourcing material from archives (both in India and in the west), the ASI, government agencies and even from private collectors for the last 18 months.

The three exhibitions will be accompanied by panel discussions on “Who is a Dilliwallah”- probing the identity of the residents of Delhi, “Multiplicities”- a look into the plural urban-rural mosaic of Delhi and its outlying areas and a special session, “From the ridge to the river” that will study the coming together of the cultural and physical geographies in the small bowl between the Delhi ridge and the Yamuna river where civilisation has flourished with intermittent breaks since the stone stage and the Harappan eras, Ravindran said.

The sessions will be chaired by historian Nayanjot Lahiri, economist and sociologist Raj Liberhan and landscape architect Mohammad Shaheer. The sessions will be addressed by more than 50 scholars, urban and heritage theorists and crafts activists.

Shedding light on an unknown aspect of the historic evolution of Delhi as a modern city from the late Harappan age, Ravindran said his team was surprised to find that the new metropolis and the arterial links connecting the major stops were built along the old routes and networks that existed during the Harappan age.

“The GT Road that connected central Asia to Dhaka and a feeder road, the Qutab Road connecting GT Road and Mehrauli and passing along the New Delhi railway station have been in use for nearly 1,000 years. The National Highway 8 has existed since the late Harappan age while a village, Mandoli, now an e-waste disposal on the outskirts of Delhi and a settlement, has turned out to be a Harappan archaeological site,” he said.