New ways.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Although it was mashoor for sohan halwa, the sweetshop’s boondi laddu would reach closest to perfection. Each round piece topped with a single melon seed, the little laddu would dissolve the instant it was tossed into the mouth.

Old Delhi’s Ghantewala Confectioners had been a Chandni Chowk landmark since 1790. It closed its shutters in 2015. The space wasn’t orphaned. It changed into a cloth shop. A few years later, the cloth shop too closed. The space shuffled back into a sweetshop—reverting into… the same Ghantewala!

The sustained presence of a culinary landmark, its eventual closure, followed by its re-emergence, is a tribute to old Chandni Chowk. But like it or not, this old area is more new than old. The Mughal-era promenade continues to be crammed with vintage mansions and monuments, but it is no museum to bhoole-bhisre mumbo jumbo. With all its chaos and crowds, Chandni Chowk is furiously raw, throbbing wildly to the moment.

A sense of that pulsating present is felt, albeit slightly, at the aforementioned sweetshop, whose eighth generation descendent is chatting with a customer in fluent angrezi. The energy is more intense in other Chandni Chowk businesses. All you have to do is to browse through the market hoardings. It is revealing to trace the connections the English language legends on the shop banners strike with whatever awareness we might have of Chandni Chowk’s fabled past.

Let’s start with England’s Jane Austen. All her drawing room romances end with a dulha-dulhan. If Austen novels were set in Delhi, her heroines and heroes would certainly have relied on Chandni Chowk for their wedding trousseau. The place is full of shops with names like “Grooms Collection.” One shop specialises in “Bridal Lehenga” and—hear, hear!—“Girlish Lehenga.” But Chandni Chowk refuses to be boxed into the cliché of a shadi walla market. Sample this unusual bazar banner—an “arms and ammunition shop.”

Or, consider a market corridor next-door to the historic Sikh shrine of Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib. This seemingly ordinary corridor displays a stone slab. The inscription on it describes the site as “Shahi Sunheri Masjid.” This centuries-old mosque is perched directly atop the corridor, and is the fateful place from where invader Nadir Shah supervised the massacre of thousands of Delhiwale in the year 1739. But this evening, the stone slab has strayed too far from that ghastly history—at least visually. It is partially hidden over by a clothing brand’s invasive neon hoarding.

And so it goes. Other banners, other combos, such as “Polite Garments” hanging too close to “Lovebird Lingerie.”

Similarly colourful is the rest of Chandni Chowk’s signage jungle. While these entrepreneurial banners speak in varied voices, together they sing in a chorus, illustrating how forcefully the new ways have taken over the old courtliness of the place. Indeed, one shop banner goes literal about the point—see photo.