‘कौन जाए जौक, दिल्ली की गलियां छोड़कर’
Kaun jaaye zauq chhod kar Dilli ki galiyan?” – Who could bear to forsake the enchantment of Delhi’s lanes?
When the great Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri penned these words, he could hardly have imagined that one day, the very lanes he celebrated would become nothing more than names on traffic signs, pointing to places where magic once lived but concrete now reigns supreme.
Picture this: You’re stuck in traffic at Dhaula Kuan, honking impatiently as the metro rumbles overhead. The name rolls off your tongue, Dhaula Kuan, but do you know you’re sitting atop the grave of a magnificent white stepwell that once sparkled like a jewel in the heart of medieval Delhi? That the very ground beneath your wheels was once a gathering place where travellers paused to quench their thirst and poets found inspiration in dancing waters?
This is the cruel irony of modern Delhi: we’ve kept the names but murdered the memories. We’ve preserved the words but obliterated the worlds they once described.
The Ghost Names of a Murdered City
Delhi today is a city of beautiful names hiding ugly truths, a linguistic graveyard where every street sign is a tombstone marking another piece of our heritage that we’ve allowed to die.
Barakhamba Road: Corporate giants in glass towers line this prestigious avenue, their LED screens flashing stock prices where once stood the magnificent Barakhamba; a 14th-century tomb of twelve pillars that was demolished around 1913-14 to make way for Lutyens’ imperial vision. The tomb that gave this road its name was sacrificed at the altar of colonial grandeur, and we’ve been worshipping at that same altar ever since.
Chandni Chowk: The name means “moonlit square,” evoking images of Jahanara Begum’s poetic vision, a canal reflecting moonlight, creating a silvery pathway through the heart of Shahjahanabad. Today, try explaining to a tourist choking on exhaust fumes and fighting through crowds that this chaos was once designed as a place where moonlight danced on water. The very idea seems like a cruel joke.
Barapulla: A modern flyover carries this ancient name, but few remember that beneath the concrete and steel once stood a magnificent 12-pier bridge, Bara Pulla :a 14th-century marvel of engineering that spanned a Yamuna tributary. The original bridge is gone, time has claimed the river, but we’ve kept the name, like keeping a dead person’s clothes.
The Water That No Longer Flows
Delhi was once a city that understood water,not just as a resource, but as a source of beauty, community, and spiritual sustenance. Medieval Delhi was dotted with stepwells, tanks, and reservoirs that served as social centers, architectural marvels, and lifelines during droughts.
The archaeological records tell a heartbreaking story of systematic destruction:
Khatri Bowli in Chhattarpur was more than a stepwell,it was a gathering place, a refuge, a work of art carved in stone. Today, it’s probably filled with rubble and forgotten, existing only in the collective unconscious of a neighborhood that has lost its memory.
Hauz-i-Shamsi in Mehrauli, once a grand reservoir with pavilions where people came not just for water but for contemplation and community, now struggles to survive amid encroachments. The Jahaz Mahal,the “ship palace”,that once seemed to float on its waters now stands marooned in a sea of urban decay.
The traditional johads and stepwells of NOIDA’s villages, Chhalera, Garhi Chaukhandi, have been filled with concrete and commercial dreams. Where once these communities had sustainable water systems that could last centuries, we’ve built shopping malls that barely last decades.
The Temples That Time Forgot
Perhaps nowhere is the loss more poignant than in the erasure of Delhi’s ancient spiritual landscape. The Archaeological Survey of India’s records speak of temples that spanned centuries, from pre-Islamic Indraprastha to medieval Hindu and Jain shrines that dotted the landscape.
The Yogmaya Temple in Mehrauli, while it survives, has lost its ancient complex, the subsidiary shrines, the sacred water bodies, the grove that once made it not just a temple but a complete spiritual ecosystem. What remains is like a lone tree in a clear-cut forest.
In NOIDA’s Sector 18 and Gurugram’s Badshahpur, medieval temples dedicated to local deities have vanished beneath IT parks and shopping complexes. Their sacred groves, where generations found solace and connection to the divine, have been paved over for parking lots.
The Tomar-era temples near Surajkund, built by Rajput kings in the 8th-10th centuries, survive only in archaeological fragments,stone memories of a time when faith and art were inseparable, when temples were not just places of worship but statements of cosmic order translated into earthly beauty.
The Fortresses of Forgotten Glory
Delhi’s gates and walls once told stories of power, protection, and pride. They were more than military installations, they were symbols of identity, gathering places, and architectural statements that said: “Here stands a civilization that builds to last.”
Delhi Gate endures, but stripped of the formidable walls that once made travellers gasp in wonder. The walls that British observers described as marvels of engineering were demolished to widen roads, because in our calculus, a few extra lanes of traffic matter more than centuries of heritage.
Kabuli Gate, which once welcomed caravans from Afghanistan and Central Asia, was razed in the 19th century. Now it’s just a locality name, a geographic reference point for pizza delivery apps, emptied of all the human drama it once witnessed.
The Lahori Gate of the Red Fort lost its outer barbican to British revenge after 1857. What remains is architecturally incomplete, like reading a book with half its pages torn out.
NOIDA and Gurugram: The Amnesia Capitals
If Delhi is a city that has forgotten its past, then NOIDA and Gurugram are its amnesiac children, born from that forgetting, raised on the principle that the future requires the complete obliteration of history.
NOIDA’s Sector 18, now a sterile commercial hub of malls and multiplexes, was once dotted with medieval villages that had their own mosques, temples, commons, and water systems. These weren’t just buildings, they were complete ecosystems of community life that had evolved over centuries. We erased them in decades.
Gurugram’s transformation is even more startling. Farrukh Nagar, with its fort and Sheesh Mahal, clings to existence like a drowning man clutching driftwood, while all around it, the medieval town’s serais and stepwells have drowned in a sea of glass and steel.
In Jharsa and Badshahpur, entire historical landscapes: medieval mosques, tombs, water bodies, temples,have been buried beneath housing societies with names like “DLF Garden City” and “Vatika India Next.” The irony is suffocating: we’ve named our developments after the very things we destroyed to build them.
The Bitter Poetry of Survival
What makes this loss particularly cruel is how the names have survived to mock us. Every day, millions of Delhiites navigate a city whose street names are a constant reminder of what we’ve lost:
- Dhaula Kuan Metro Station announces itself to passengers who’ll never see the white stepwell that gave it its name
- Barakhamba Road corporate addresses appear on business cards of companies that profit in the shadows of a destroyed tomb
- Khooni Darwaza stands isolated in traffic chaos, its “bloody gate” moniker reduced to a GPS coordinate
These names are like ghost stories we tell ourselves, except we’ve forgotten they’re about real ghosts.
The Scale of Our Amnesia
The Archaeological Survey of India’s list of “disappeared monuments” in Delhi runs to dozens of officially recorded losses. But this represents only the tip of an iceberg of cultural destruction. For every monument the ASI documented, how many smaller temples, community wells, neighborhood mosques, and local shrines vanished without record?
In NOIDA and Gurugram, the development happened so fast that we didn’t even bother to document what we were destroying. Entire medieval landscapes were bulldozed before anyone thought to ask: “What are we losing here?”
A Future That Cannot Remember Its Past
Imagine Delhi in 2050. Imagine trying to explain to a child born in that city that:
- Chandni Chowk was designed as a moonlit paradise, not a traffic nightmare
- Lodhi Colony was once actually studded with Lodhi-era tombs, not just named after them
- Mehrauli’s ridge was a spiritual landscape of temples, tombs, and stepwells, not scattered historical sites fighting for survival amid urban sprawl
- Gurugram and NOIDA were once countryside dotted with medieval towns, sacred groves, and sustainable water systems
That child will look at you the way we might look at someone claiming that Manhattan was once a forest—not disbelieving, exactly, but unable to truly comprehend what has been lost.
The Emergency of Memory
This isn’t just about nostalgia or romantic attachment to the past. This is about identity, sustainability, and wisdom.
The stepwells and johads we’ve destroyed were not just beautiful,they were functional. They represented centuries of accumulated knowledge about how to live sustainably in Delhi’s climate. When we destroyed them for “modern” infrastructure, we lost both beauty and brain.
The temples and mosques we’ve erased weren’t just places of worship, they were community centers, schools, libraries, and social service organizations all rolled into one. When we replaced them with malls and office complexes, we traded institutions that had served communities for centuries for structures that serve primarily corporate profits.
The gates and walls we’ve demolished weren’t just military installations, they were symbols of belonging, markers of home, sources of civic pride. When we removed them for traffic efficiency, we made our city more navigable for cars but less knowable for souls.
The Last Call
Every name in Delhi: every Dhaula Kuan, every Barakhamba, every Barapulla,is now a question: Will we let it remain just a name, or will we find ways to honor the memory it carries?
Some heritage can never be recovered. The stepwell beneath Dhaula Kuan is gone forever. The twelve pillars of Barakhamba are dust. The moonlit pool of Chandni Chowk exists now only in poetry.
But some heritage still hangs in the balance. Every day, decisions are made about what gets preserved and what gets “developed.” Every day, we choose between being a city with a past and a city that has only a present.
As Firaq Gorakhpuri asked: “Kaun jaaye zauq chhod kar Dilli ki galiyan?”; Who could bear to forsake the enchantment of Delhi’s lanes?
The real question now is: Who will bear to let that enchantment die completely?
The names are all that’s left. But names, if we listen to them carefully, can still teach us to remember. And memory, if we’re brave enough to honour it, can still teach us to build a future worthy of our past. Delhi’s soul isn’t buried yet. But it’s getting harder to breathe under all that concrete.
About The Author
When z becomes j . When Dilli becomes Delhi , it will be forgotten.