Faith on the Main Lane.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Loud music. Chattering crowds. This evening in Hauz Khas Village could be any evening here. Indeed, it is always the same scene in the fashionable south Delhi destination. The place zealously pulsates to the moment, propelled by the youthful zest of its commerce. It is also timeless, because of its 14th century monuments.

While these HKV characteristics have been noted many times over, nobody yet has taken a serious note of the village’s one more crucial aspect—the Shree Hanuman Mandir.

HKV has actually two temples. The Shiv Mandir is in a remoter back-lane, and not easily trackable. It is the recently renovated temple of Hanuman ji that gives an assertive character to the village, chiefly because it is on the Main Street, close to the monuments. Right now it is 7.30pm, and the Main Street is wallowing in the cacophony of a teenager’s pad. A mumbo-jumbo of various Punjabi pop songs are streaming out simultaneously from restaurants and cafés. But the spacious temple compound is resolutely immersed in serenity. A man in white kurta is sitting cross-legged in the mandir’s small verandah, poring upon (presumably) sacred scriptures.

Until some years ago, the temple was not so well-lit, and its tiled courtyard was earthen. During the evenings back then, the place would lie in a residuum of semi-darkness. Oftentimes a group of singers would huddle in the temple verandah, playing dholak, and chanting sacred bhajans. The moments would be dream-like, evoking a surreal atmosphere of half-oblivion and half-memory.

Shree Hanuman Mandir had come up during the 1980s, around the time when the picturesque potential of the village was being discovered by Delhi’s fashion pioneers (most notable being entrepreneur and socialite Bina Ramani). The temple was however built by the locals—so says a village landlord whose monument-facing residence is among HKV’s most coveted Airbnb facilities. In the olden times, he says, the zameen on which the temple presently stands used to be an agricultural land yielding channa in winter, and jwar and bajra in summer. Same held true for the surrounding acres. Today, the village is left with no farmer, the village’s good earth left with no farm. The only souvenir of the earlier way of life is a stone well, tucked far behind the Main Street.

Whatever, in the morning when HKV tends to lie comatose in collective hangover, only the mandir shows life. One morning, a villager was seen entering the temple compound. The first thing she did was to bow towards the courtyard’s massive peepal tree, bringing her palms together in a posture of prayer towards the trunk.

Later this noisy evening in the village, two citizens are seen strolling along the Main Street, perhaps on way to a restaurant. They stop on spotting Shree Hanuman Mandir. They take off their shoes, enter the compound, and start to pray. See photo.