I have walked the road opposite the Red Fort in Chandni Chowk many times, usually with a camera in my hand. I have stopped here for photographs, sometimes because the light was interesting, sometimes because I wanted to remember a face, and sometimes because an ordinary moment suddenly looked like a photograph. The Red Fort is always there, imposing and familiar, its red sandstone walls carrying the weight of history. Yet I often find myself looking away from the fort. The road holds my attention.
The road is noisy, crowded and gloriously untidy. Rickshaws squeeze through impossible gaps, scooters appear from behind carts, people stand outside shops, watching the world go by. The air carries the smells of food, exhaust, incense and dust. People arrive and leave, cross the road and disappear into narrow lanes. Woven into all this movement are places of worship: a temple, a mosque, a gurudwara. They do not announce themselves as a lesson in secularism. They are simply part of the neighbourhood, as natural to the old city as its shops, lanes and traffic. A temple bell may ring while the azaan rises above the noise. A few metres away, the gurudwara prepares for prayers. No one has arranged this harmony. The sounds simply belong to the street.
The Red Fort represents history in stone. This road represents history in another form: history still being lived. The emperors are gone. The British are gone. Governments have changed, and Delhi has expanded far beyond Shahjahanabad. Yet the old city continues its daily business. People open their shops, make their journeys, stop to pray, eat, bargain and hurry home. I doubt many of them think about the layers of history beneath their feet. They have customers to serve, prayers to attend and errands to finish. Perhaps that is what makes the road so compelling to me. History here is not preserved behind glass or enclosed within monuments. It is mixed into everyday life.
A photograph is always an act of selection. You point the camera at one thing and leave a hundred others outside the frame. Chandni Chowk constantly reminds me of everything I have missed. Sometimes the camera catches what I was not looking for: a saffron flag fluttering above a lane, the quiet entrance of a mosque, a Sikh man walking towards the gurudwara, someone carrying flowers, another person hurrying past in a prayer cap. These details appear almost casually, but together they tell a larger story.
The Red Fort may hold Delhi’s grand history. But on the road outside, history keeps walking past.
Text and photographs by Prerna Jain.
