Unfolding hidden realities through pictures

An Exhibition of photographs titled ‘Buland Masjid- No Grass in the Ghetto’ by Chitvan Gill will be organised by India International Centre in the national Capital from March 11-17.

Buland Masjid, among the more than 1,639 unauthorised colonies of Delhi, and the bowl of land – the putrefying remains of a landfill – that abuts it, is also the home to thousands of migrants who pour into India’s capital city in search of life, of survival. 

It is a ramshackle, cobbling together of disparate tenements huddled together – the homes of men, women and children, living, loving and dying in the city. These are the entrails of India’s Capital, where people have created, out of a bleak wasteland, a place they call home. Bare hands have fashioned the sad leavings of the river, pummeled the peat and bog of the marshland into dwellings that literally grew out of the land. In deewaron mein abhi tak Yamuna ki reit hai, said Allama Maqsud, an old resident.

This is, on first sight, a world of slums and squalor, where pigeonhole dwellings hold dark secrets close to their hearts. Yet, what one encounters is a world of Almadovarian excess. Life, laughter and madness spill out into the maze of streets and gallis. There is tragedy here, and there is triumph.

Crowded around the edge of a field of refuse beyond, are more precarious hutments; the raw, crude beginnings of the urban dream. This has been the callous, knee-jerk pattern on which India’s urban fabric has been woven. Instead of order and inclusion, administrations have perpetuated chaos and ghettoisation.