4 - Urbanity as an Uncanny Journey: Reflections on Delhi

Imaginaries of the city often miss the dark and the forgotten, all that is invisiblized and hidden behind the bold and bright lights illuminating urbanscapes worldwide. Delhi, the capital of India, is a city which has been  destroyed and rebuilt time and again, a city of hope if not joy, of dreams if not always fulfilled ones, a city of aspiration for a better future. Delhi resonates multiple opposite images of urbanity: the best architectural gems to slums; beautiful fountainheads on one hand while no water supply on the other; a place which never gets dark to places which never get sunlight. How do these anxieties present and represent themselves? How do they challenge the temporality and spatiality of human lives? Does presentation of the uncanny always take a shape or can it be formless? The paper will attempt to engage with some of these mysteries. It will view Delhi amidst all this not-knowingness, imaginations, disillusions, dreams, and hope. Using the auto-ethnographic method with visual imageries to give a glimpse into the urban, the paper tries to understand the urban as an uncanny journey at two levels: of an individual whose family was dislocated due to the partition of India, which is then combined with the visual images of the city of Delhi. These will be complemented with conversations which the researcher has had with various people living and surviving or prospering in Delhi across class, caste, gender, and religious divides, to foreground what they feel about Delhi’s uncanniness.