Chitvan Gill's Dreaming a Paradise captures lives of Delhi's migrants

Chitvan Gill explores existential questions that concern and confront each one of us through the stories of residents in an unauthorised colony in Delhi

Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid

Author: Chitvan Gill

Publisher: Seagull Books

Pages:  185

Price:  Rs 599

  In his 2004 article titled “Cities: An Anthropological Perspective” for the journal Anthropology Matters, Andrew Irving, professor of anthropology at the University of Manchester, notes that a “city does not exist in an individual’s mind or “out there” as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of ‘flesh and stone’.”

 

These qualities are precisely what Chitvan Gill documents and investigates in her book Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid.

 

Ms Gill is a Delhi-based writer, filmmaker and documentary photographer. In this book, she meticulously—and often poetically—offers her readers an oral history of Buland Masjid (one of 1,797 unauthorised colonies in Delhi) in nine brief chapters together with arresting pictures from the area. She also offers insights into the personal histories of people migrating for livelihood. Alongside, she depicts the cartography of the hate that’s engulfing the country and tells the untold story of how people who were made to feel unwelcome still end up giving back to the city. She writes, “Expulsion and reinvention … these themes suffuse the human narrative, right from the earliest epics.” The book is peppered with these struggles.

 

“Each dripping fetid mass is a new city, an Eden built by those who have endured migrations through hell. They redefine and reshape paradise on earth to a modern incarnation. In one such Eden, Buland Masjid, we hear the story of the men who walked all the way to this bleak and hostile piece of land, to create a place they could eventually call home,” writes Ms Gill in the Prologue before introducing Buland Masjid’s principal architect, Allama Maqsood.

 

Maqsood “spat in the face of destiny” and built a home for himself and others. Ms Gill notes how people in the colony continue to revere him, remembering his “sacrifice” to get basic resources for the colony. The semantics of this word often signal that a personal narrative of Maqsood’s struggles will follow. But Ms Gill’s attempts to unravel the colony’s history trigger Maqsood—a memory flashes in front of him, and he begins to tell her that what he can’t forget is the “violence of words”. Other hardships, it seems, were part of the process to build this paradise. What hurt Maqsood most was being spat upon and being asked,  “Tum Mussalman ho.”  (Are you a Muslim?), as if he were a lesser human. Despite everything, he persevered to gain legitimacy for Buland Masjid’s residents.

 

Ms Gill also shares the efforts of Haji Aneesud Din towards helping people with access that can be routed to Buland Masjid only with the help of a political party. Haji’s story from riches to rags is awe-inspiring. However, as Maqsood observes: This city is filled with stories of such people. The common thing between these people is that they were cocksure about their purpose. They wanted to survive. Most such stories, however, are that of men. Ms Gill doesn’t fail to acknowledge this. She writes, “Women are to be seen everywhere, but their stories, narratives, get overwritten in the tales of triumph and survival.” That is why she also shares the journeys of Krishna Devi, Nafisa, Shabana, and Naseeba. Their enterprising efforts and resilience in the face of adversity are compelling.

 

Then, Ms Gill reflects on how the east side of the capital, “Jamnapaar,” (trans-Yamuna) is perceived. She remembers what a police officer once said: “Most of East Delhi is full of criminals from parts of Uttar Pradesh who find refuge here. Totally criminal.” Such discriminatory viewpoints enable the othering of people; Buland Masjid is just a symbol of such othering.

 

Although there’s harmony among people of different religious groups in the Buland Masjid, Ms Gill rightly notes that within this space of equanimity, “each is ‘the other’, separated by the ripping fault lines of belief, culture, the long festering wounds of history. Here, within this secular edifice of the idea of India, you get a hint of the communal bloodlines that run across this country.” The recent incident of communal violence in Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh is one example. One other such hint is the principal of the municipal school in the Buland Masjid noting how several students “leave to study in the local madrasas” because the main medium of instruction is Hindi. This dropout in itself is a kind of migration. With the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights’ call to stop funding madrassas, one can only wonder about the destination of these students’ next migration.

 

But most of all, by telling the story of this “unauthorised” colony, Ms Gill is asking questions of the authorities: “What aspect of planning fits in with the total collapse of an agrarian economy and urban economies that have no machinery to absorb and support that phenomenal fallout? What vision of justice can reconcile with the reality and degradation of the thousands of Buland Masjids across India?”

 

For its masterly narration, eloquent prose, and engaging political discourse,  Dreaming a Paradise is one of the finest works that explores the confluence of “flesh and stone”, as Irving notes, and asks existential questions that concern and confront each one of us.

 

The reviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist. On X/Instagram: @writerly_life