The pandemic has refused to back down – the capital is experiencing its third wave. But life and economy are striving to return. Amidst fear and chaos, the heritage walks of Delhi are coming back, taking to the streets, reaching out once more, to centuries of the city’s heritage and bringing it to us in the present time.
Sohail Hashmi, an academician and historian who has been conducting extensive heritage walks in the capital every year for the past 16 years, resumed once again on the 31st of October. True to his passion, he follows the chronological movement of Delhi’s history through the initiation and collapse of its seven cities, conducting a total of 23 walks over six months. He also conducts a series of walks for school children that have emphases more appealing to kids.This time, however, things looked different with the ASI’s limitations on numbers; Hashmi ji’s vibrant groups of forty came down to twenty. Men and women in masks carrying sanitisers and water bottles showed up, and meal breaks and snacks had to be put an end to.
Delhi Karavan, for another instance, is an initiative that has been bringing together history and heritage with literature and the arts for over ten years now, and has chapters in other cities too. Its founder, Asif Khan Dehlvi, finds his heart sinking when travellers and enthusiasts have to be denied participation in adherence to the pandemic norms on the size of groups allowed to move together. “The warmth that manifests between the storyteller and the travelers, we can tell that it is absent. To be together yet distanced feels abnormal and weird”, he says. We tell ourselves that it will take time for things to get back to normal, yet how much time we cannot understand.
As the liveliness of city life gets restored, the streets, monuments, museums and marketplaces of Delhi help us go back to an era where sickness had not turned off the lights on the world. Walks around the city – be it heritage lessons in physical spaces or evenings dedicated to poetry and music in the vicinity of centuries old cities – are an important means of connecting ourselves with the world, to acknowledge that the outside is a part of us and vice versa. When we roam the city and breathe its air, we open the gates to our souls that have long been in the dark, and God knows we need that now more than ever.
