Loitering through Chandni Chowk

Reading Mazhar Ali Khan’s Painting

I loiter through a city I am a stranger to. It mumbles to me, maybe speaks in a foreign language. I move closer, and it holds me captive. I hear the mumbling again, and it speaks my language better than me. There is also a whiff of sweetness carried to me through the stalls that are lined across either side of these lanes. They call it Chandni Chowk, so I have heard. But as I traverse through the overcrowded, congested lane after lane, I land back on the chowk with no moonlight in attendance.

When I first came to Delhi, I was enamoured by the idea of seeing Jama Masjid and Chandni Chowk. I had read of a place where you could never feel alone, for the crowd would be your companion. But with so much vulnerability that lingers in the air, and the noise that numbs you to it, I could not stand a chance. So now that I get a chance to look at the painting of Chandni Chowk, painted in 1846 by Mazhar Ali Khan, as far as the eye can see, nothing resembles the place I have known. The colours in the painting appear brighter than the red-stoned streets and wired skies. The green of the trees that so generously litter the canvas breathes new life into me. The chowk (square) lives up to the history of being a social hub, for the place is not devoid of people, too many of them scattered and indulging in the mundane happenings of everyday life. The mundane, so full of life, yet a bit distant.

Chandni Chowk, detail from the 'The Delhi Panorama', by Mazhar Ali Khan, 1846.

The street, the overall topography of the region, has been visualised through the painting, but as I try to feel a sense of belonging, I cannot. The chowk depicted is not the one I know. The only aspect of the painting I could relate to was the people walking the streets with the same urgency or leisure as I would. However, their faceless, minuscule figures adorn the canvas. Here the city is the protagonist, and the people are just its inhabitants. This makes one think: do the people make up the street or is it the other way around? The common people have had no voice in most of the history that has been known to us, and the dwarfing of the human figures renders even their physical existence into obscurity.

A stream/canal of water passes through the centre and reveals the reality behind the name Chandni Chowk. Chandni Chowk (Moonlight Square) was designed by Shah Jahan’s daughter, Jahanara Begum, in 1650, with the idea of the water canal at the centre reflecting the moonlight and showing the grandeur of the new capital city of Shahjahanabad. What is left now is only the name and the memory of what it was meant to depict before the British filled up the canal. The canal in the painting is like an anchor that pulls one back towards it. This particular detail shows the mind behind the logic of placing a water stream at the centre of a bustling bazaar. The stream, like the Nahr-i-Bihisht (Stream of Paradise), tries to imitate, with whatever capacity the human mind possesses, the paradise stream described in the Quran, which also served as the inspiration behind the Nahr-i-Bihisht. Maybe because the bazaars were more than just a place for trade and commerce, a space that would be pleasant to look at for anyone passing through it. A light that would help traverse it at night. A structure that goes beyond any monetary agendas sits at the centre to illuminate the moonlight, and with it, what a city owes to its dwellers. 

The painting holds a density that has grown overbearing today. Without the cramped-up lanes and wires enveloping the skies, the density still exists in the conjoined buildings that are laid across the sides of the square. But an order seems to persist here, one that is quite prominently missing in today’s Chandni Chowk. The painting acts more as a time capsule of a world we will never know. It speaks of Old Delhi, young in its beauty and maturity. Jahanara Begum also designed the ‘Sarai’ and ‘Begum ka Baag,’ a roadside inn and garden complex towards the end of Chandni Chowk. In doing so, she designed the commercial and social heart of the new capital, one that was not devoid of character, without any social barriers or any sense of stratification as to who can or cannot occupy the space. The space was built for strangers; the sarai would house merchants, travellers, and people in motion. 

What was lost, one may ask, in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857? The hospitable urban landscape that had become the city's gesture of welcome.

The painting by Mazhar Ali Khan goes on and on. Even the monuments that cannot be seen in the painting still exist, some of them now only in memory. A glaring piece of evidence of the beauty that poets talked about, the painting presents a soul of the city, still alive through the memory of people who left behind relics, materialising its existence.

---

Reeba Khan is a Political Science student at Maitreyi College, University of Delhi, writing at the intersections of politics, identity, and everyday life, tracing how culture and conflict shape lived experience.