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Aamir Sahib: As far as Old Delhi culture is concerned, our Hindu-Muslim population who lived here before, they shared a Ganga-Jamni culture. This started in Delhi only. . . . Our language was not different, our way of life was not different, our cuisine was similar. Some people . . . were vegetarian. But for the most part people were not vegetarian. But when people came here from Punjab, things be¬gan to change.
K: After 1947?
Aamir Sahib: Yes. But even today, those who are from Old Delhi, even if they have left Old Delhi, when you meet them you feel like you are meeting an old relative, you are meeting your brother. It is still like that. If they come here, they always visit. It became necessary for them to leave. When their inheritance became less, they had to move away. But when they come back, they interact with us just as they used to.
On a hot afternoon in June 2013, I interviewed Aamir Sahib in his office in Bal¬limaran over tea and biscuits.1 A soft-spoken, erudite, tall, white-haired gentle¬man, Aamir Sahib was the editor of two Urdu papers in Old Delhi (see figures 0.1 and 0.2). His office was clearly the office of a writer and a reader, as it was crammed with books in English, Hindi, and Urdu. Originally from Bijnor, his family moved to Old Delhi in 1914, initially settling near Turkman Gate, where he was born. In 1947, seeking refuge from the violence that accompanied the partition of India, his family moved to Ballimaran, where they still live. Aamir Sahib was four years old. He recalls the fear he felt at that time, as those around him were afraid to leave the relative security of Ballimaran. During the partition riots, he said, the Chawri Bazar area was a “slaughterhouse.” People in his own family had been killed in their government quarters in Paharganj.
Aamir Sahib’s words and experiences resonate with those of many in the city, once called Shahjahanabad. Like many others of his generation, Aamir Sahib spoke of the Ganga-Jamni culture of Shahjahanabad, using the metaphor of the confluence of the two major rivers of North India to reference the shared worlds of Hindus and Muslims, and of Hinduism and Islam, in the city built by the Mu¬ghal emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. Now, older denizens of the city like Aamir Sahib bemoan the loss of this shared culture, precipitated by such events as the violent expulsion of Muslims from the city by the British after the revolt of 1857; the partition of India in 1947, when many of the city’s Mus¬lims migrated to Pakistan to be replaced by Hindu and Sikh refugees moving to India; and the increasing hold of a majoritarian right-wing Hindu politics in the country and the city that renders Muslims as “other,” as foreign, and as a poten¬tial threat to the national fabric.