Time capsule from a Delhi colony.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

It is not every day that a bound directory, printed on dull white paper and meant for hyperlocal consumption, acquires the aura of an archival treasure. Take this slim book, titled Portrait of a Colony. It was rescued last week from a pile of roadside litter. This was a publication destined for a Delhi locality in the early 1980s, but, forty years later, it has mutated into a time capsule from a less guarded city. The book is a rare record of a middle-class Delhi neighbourhood finding its groove, documenting the place with unintended frankness.

Published in 1982 by the Jangpura Extension Welfare Association, the directory is essentially a listing of the area’s residents. The opening pages are thick with ads from local businesses. Some have vanished—Kurly Top Beauty Parlour, for instance—while others, such as Hotel Kabli, endure. One can almost picture the proprietors who paid for those small boxed announcements, hopeful that Jangpura Extension dwellers leafing through would take note and, ideally, walk in.

What follows are lists of office-bearers and committee members of various colony associations. Back then, these names must have carried the quiet authority of order—eminences entrusted for leaky water pipes and car parking disputes, those two pillars of civic life. Then comes what is unthinkable by contemporary standards: page after page of residents’ names, full addresses, telephone numbers, and occupations. In an age before data-protection protocols and OTP scams, such transparency was presumably unremarkable, even neighbourly perhaps. Most interesting is the column on residents’ professions. Mrs Krishna Chopra is listed as “Housewife.” Sukumar Chatterjee appears as “Journalist, Artist” with Hindustan Times. S. Sarrowe is a “Musician, Taj Hotel”; Mrs Moley Fernandes is a “Crooner.” B.P.L. Bedi is described grandly as “Spiritual Leader,” G.K. Bhanwano as “Retired Person,” and K. Hanazumi as… “Japanese.” (One suspects the form allowed little room for nuance.)

There are additional pages devoted to long-winded literary prose that must have seemed mundane at the time—mere filler between the useful bits. Today, those very details form the meat of the book; in fact, they are its best part. Take the short poem by a celebrity lawyer (now departed), or the account of the colony’s origins… but, reader, be patient. These remarkable descriptions require another column of this length. Wait until next week.

For now, suffice to note that book owners often preserve leaves or flowers inside their books. This directory contained cut-outs of female models, pressed carefully within and still intact.

PS: Photo shows a page torn from the directory, displaying group portrait of the “office bearers & members of Jangpura Extension Welfare Association,” circa 1982