The way we were.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

At night, a large audience is seated in rows of chairs outdoors. The men are in suits and sherwanis. Behind them rises the newly built Ghalib Academy, tall windows aglow. Alongside stands the jagged stone wall of Urs Mahal. Poet Ghalib’s marble tomb lies beyond it.

That Delhi evening survives in a cache of photographs brought to light this Wednesday afternoon at the said academy in Central Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti. Librarian Bushra Begum found thousands of black-and-white photos crammed into cardboard folders in the so-called File Room, where they had lain untouched for decades. They record the academy’s life from its opening in 1969, but their significance reaches beyond Ghalib and the institution bearing his name. The photos show Delhiwale at gatherings in the 1970s and 1980s: how they dressed, engaged socially, and responded to poetry. The photos also preserve an era of photography when clicking was the work of a skilled few.

Again and again, the photos show formally dressed poetry lovers seated in the academy’s ground-floor auditorium; poets sitting cross-legged on the stage; and tea parties in the library upstairs. In one photo, the late painter MF Husain is in a three-piece suit. Since his bare feet and loose kurta-pyjama are so much a part of his legendary persona, he is hard to recognise here. Elsewhere in the files are President Zakir Husain, who inaugurated the academy, President Giani Zail Singh, LK Advani, Sanjay Gandhi, Sunil Dutt… some dignitaries are pictured bending over Ghalib’s grave, offering flowers.

Even tea had its starched ritual. In one photo, a teapot tilts towards a china cup. Along the table are neatly arranged stacks of saucers, with more cups waiting to be filled. Today, at gatherings in most such institutions, including the Ghalib Academy, chai flows from dispensers into paper cups. Formal attire, too, is a rare sighting, apart from poet-scholar Dr Gulshan Rai Kanwal’s elegant ties and poet Mateen Amrohi’s sherwanis, which they wear even in sweltering heat in the academy’s AC-less auditorium.

Some photos preserve souvenirs of their makers. The back of one bears the blue stamp of photographer Syed Fida Ali, with his Khureji Khas address. Strips of negatives rest in plastic sleeves.

A few photos have faded; others are torn at the corners or marked with spots. One black-and-white photo shows a mushaira. A row of candles, called shamas, stands flickering in a corner of the carpeted stage. Poets are seated in a half-circle. The scene calls to mind Dehli ki Aakhri Shama—Delhi’s Last Candle—the fictional account of a mushaira in Ghalib’s Delhi. It also brings the scene into the present. At the Ghalib Academy’s mushairas, candles are still lit to open the evening. Many in the audience photograph the ceremony on their phones.