Ekta Chauhan’s Sheher Mein Gaon shows how Delhi’s urban villages shape the city’s identity

Most people who have lived in Delhi for a long time would be familiar with neighbourhoods where narrow lanes, irregular building layouts, Sufi shrines, temples, gurdwaras and monuments coexist with stylish boutiques, restaurants, cafés and guesthouses, shopping centres, design studios, art galleries and even digital start-ups. These areas were once located on the city’s outskirts. After Independence, large tracts of farmland were acquired to accommodate Delhi’s rapidly expanding population. Planned colonies and commercial centres replaced fields and orchards. Yet, in many ways, several of these areas retained elements of their rural character.

To describe this story of continuity and change simply as a paradox would be reductive. Sheher Mein Gaon — literally “a village within a city” — is instead an account of how communities reinvented themselves and gradually wove their identities into Delhi’s fabric. The process, however, has not always been seamless. As Chauhan writes, “One has to visit any urban village in Delhi and speak with members of the older communities to see how they struggle with urban integration even after seven decades of land acquisition.” Her account is at once a social history, an urban ethnography and a tribute to the milieu in which she grew up.

Chauhan spent her childhood in Khirki village and the book is rich with recollections of communal spaces, where children once played, and festivals that brought residents together. Courtyards functioned as extensions of the household and the rhythms of everyday life unfolded within these shared spaces. The lal dora — literally the “red circle” used to demarcate rural settlements on Delhi’s maps — had an ambiguous relationship with the unauthorised colony that grew around it. Khirki Extension emerged on village commons and on land disputed with the Delhi Development Authority. “For someone like me, whose movement was regulated by the unspoken rules of the community, Khirki village was my entire world, with only the occasional trip to Khirki Extension,” Chauhan writes.

In many contemporary accounts, Khirki is described as a melting pot — a neighbourhood animated by interactions among people from different parts of India and even from abroad, including Afghans and migrants from Eastern European and African countries. Chauhan, however, complicates this narrative by examining the power relations within this multicultural setting. “Even though the new arrivals in Khirki Extension outnumber the old landlord community in Khirki village, the land — and the political power that flows from it — remains firmly in the hands of male patriarchs and landlords. The lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are clearly drawn,” she writes. Afghans are often targeted because of their religion, while Africans carry what she calls the “burden of
racial prejudice”.

Is there, then, a social glue that binds these disparate communities together? Chauhan points to possibilities: the reverence for the Khirki mosque, the vibrant art ecosystem that has grown out of the area’s cultural diversity and the stories that circulate among its residents. “For all of us, these stories are more than just memories — they are lessons in resilience, in adapting to the relentless pace of change and holding on to the essence of who we are, even as the world around us shifts,” she writes.

In neighbourhoods such as Hauz Khas and Shahpur Jat, Chauhan finds examples of urban villages evolving into centres of creative entrepreneurship. At the same time, this transformation raises difficult questions about sustainability. Soaring property values have brought affluence to some families while pushing others to the margins, intensifying debates over heritage, commercialisation and the gradual erosion of community life.

Sheher Mein Gaon is ultimately a meditation on a lived reality of Delhi that hasn’t received its due — either in accounts that celebrate its historic monuments or in narratives that portray the capital primarily as a modern metropolis. It invites readers to reconsider how a city
is defined.