City Life – Delhi Photos, H.A. Mirza & Sons Photo Studio Life by The Delhi Walla - May 16, 20250 Clicking Delhi, pre-instagram. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] 150 years ago, in 1875, Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid was snapped by German photographer John Edward Sache. On the photos, the 17th century monument looks completely empty. So do its surroundings. Today, the same spaces are always packed with people, so much so that the landscape captured in the photos look utterly unrecognisable. Like any living place, Delhi has recast its character many times over. The old photos of the city show what has changed and what hasn’t. The best of these images came out of a Walled City establishment that no longer exists. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the photo studio of H.A. Mirza & Sons in Chandni Chowk’s
City Monument – Graves of Last Mughal’s Wives, Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti Monuments by The Delhi Walla - May 15, 2025May 15, 20250 Rest in peace. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Delhi is a megapolis of graves. Entire neighbourhoods (including certain super-fancy hotels!) are raised on graveyards. In parts of the city, even ordinary houses are built around graves. Only a minuscule number of these centuries-old graves are privileged with elaborate tombs, belonging to saints and emperors. Most other graves lie in anonymity, their identities lost to time. Exceptions exist, and a few of such lonesome graves belong to figures with notable status. Like the handful of graves that lie in the forgettable passage separating the all-marble Chausath Khamba monument from poet Ghalib’s marble tomb, in central Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti. Heritage walking tours step out from the former, and step into the latter,
City Season – Landmark Trees, Gurugram Landmarks Life Nature by The Delhi Walla - May 15, 20250 Heatwave arbour. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Millennium City of Gurugram has rightfully earned its status as a land of high-rises. The same land may also be noted for its more traditional high-rises—the trees. Take the Amaltas tree standing on a traffic island in Sukhrali village. It is currently in a luscious summertime bloom. But there is a world beyond the eye-catching Amaltas. Here are three landmark trees of Old Gurugram, remarkable not for their beauty or blossoms, but for the relationship they have built over the years with us citizens. Like a nakhlistan in registan, the peepal in the otherwise bleak and dusty Masjid Udyan makes its consoling presence felt as intensely as any desert oasis. The most generous
City Library – IIC Library, India International Centre Library by The Delhi Walla - May 13, 20250 Home to precious editions. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Every spot and corner is awash with utmost silence. The library at the India International Centre is so quiet that the awareness of one’s own breathing feels intrusive. Even so, the chief librarian’s disapproving notice, stuck close to the Air Quality Index Meter, observes that ‘we have been receiving number of complaints from users of the library that level of noise has increased considerably in the premises...” This afternoon, the IIC’s members-only library is half-full. Everyone is motionless, while the book-less world outside the library’s glass wall is looking other-worldly. With her back to those exteriors, a white-haired woman is absorbed in a slim novel, a slight smile lighting up her face.
Mission Delhi – Kanchan “Mathura Vasi,” South Delhi Mission Delhi by The Delhi Walla - May 12, 2025June 25, 20250 One of the one percent in 13 million. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] It rained an hour ago—the sky is still cloudy. Like any Saturday afternoon, the shops are open in this south Delhi market plaza. The glass-walled cafe is milling with posh people, as always. The scene looks ordinary, yet something feels different; it was captured just a few hours before the ceasefire between India and Pakistan was announced. For the past few days, following the terror attack last month on tourists in Pahalgam, many of us have been glued to our mobile phone screen, tracking updates on the evolving situation, our minds claimed by concern for the country and fears about the stability of our own life.
City Walk – Gali Than Singh, Old Delhi Life Walks by The Delhi Walla - May 11, 20250 The Walled City encyclopaedia. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Old Delhi’s Gali Than Singh stays unseen in Bazar Seeta Ram. Steeped in serenity and quietude, no crowd intrudes into its solitary akelapan. Occasionally, a labourer surfaces, breathing hoarsely, carrying hefty cartons on his head. Nobody encountered on Gali Than Singh this evening has anything specific on long-ago citizen Than Singh, except for assuming that he must have been important enough to have the gali named after him. With no disrespect to the forgotten figure, the street ought to have been instead named after a super-special landmark here. Truly rare in the entire Walled City, it is a little workshop hidden behind a blue door, in a darkened courtyard. Inside the workshop, the
City Landmark – Hanuman Mandir Plaza, Central Delhi Faith Landmarks by The Delhi Walla - May 9, 20250 The world of Hanuman ji. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] One monkey is swinging from a tree branch. One is scooping out the fleshy remains of a discarded melon. One is clinging tightly to her little baby. Peaceful and amiable, these monkeys loiter all day long in the plaza outside the Hanuman Mandir of Connaught Place, on Baba Kharak Singh Marg. Dotted with peepal trees, the plaza teems with men, women, children (and monkeys!) throughout the day, late into the night. The tiled ground is also dotted with stalls offering henna services, palm reading, or selling pakori and kachori. The temple to Hanuman ji stands in a corner. The plaza is so strongly identified with this temple that even the underground
City Life – Lectures on Jane Austen, St Stephen’s College Life by The Delhi Walla - May 7, 20250 On the writer's 250th birth anniversary year. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] This year the world is celebrating her 250th birth anniversary. But Jane Austen was from cold, wet England. What is this writer to us in hot, dry Delhi? This afternoon, in Delhi University’s St Stephen’s College, the gracious Dr. Karen Gabriel, head of the Department of English, condescends(!) to give us gyan on Jane Austen. (The classroom in the photo bears a framed portrait of H.W.. Padley, the principal who founded the college’s Shakespeare Society) According to you, Jane Austen is…? … a safe writer. She walks the balance between conserving the orthodoxy and pushing boundaries very well. Her six novels are about young women manoeuvring the links between marriage
City Food – Old-Fashioned Shikanji, Around Town Food by The Delhi Walla - May 7, 20250 Mukesh's inheritance. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] So omnipresent on Delhi’s summertime roadsides, the refrigerated cold water trolley doesn’t trade only in refrigerated cold water. The cart vendor also keeps dozens of yellow-green lemons, which he employs to spike up the flavour of his bottled banta drink. That said, some vendors do condescend to serve simple shikanji on request, squeezing lemon into a glass of cold water, stirring in with a pinch of black salt. Delhi’s traditional shikanji cart however is an altogether different apparatus, in which the ice of the shikanji is prepared manually. This demands strenuous physical labour. Such an old-fashioned “shikanji machine” is made of a cylindrical vessel usually wrapped in a red cloth (the red is to
City Life – Book Inscriptions, Sunday Book Bazar Library by The Delhi Walla - May 5, 20250 Sealed with a love. [Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi] Let us sing in praise of inscriptions. The ones encountered on the opening pages of used books, scrawled by hands perhaps long dead. Indeed, in Delhi’s legendary Sunday Book Bazar, secondhand books on sale often bear such personalised words—sometimes written by the book’s owner, sometimes as dedications jotted by the person gifting the book to a friend or relative. Reading these lines, composed in confidence by a person unknown to us, spawns multiple feelings. Is the person who wrote them still alive? What circumstances made this book homeless? Here are some of the many inscriptions encountered over the years at Sunday Book Bazar. No single jotting tells a complete story, but