From Delhi with (Co)Creativity: Literary Text as Material Evidence of Urban Memories and Experiences

Seat of governmental authorities, cultural pole, and economic center, Delhi has always attracted different sorts of migrants and expats both from the surrounding regions and the whole world. Throughout its long history, the city has often been the scene of demolitions of several kinds of informal settlements, including bastis. One of the most serious demolition waves experienced by the city in recent times happened in the 90s and early 2000s, coinciding with the organization of massive sport events such as the Asian Games (2006) and the Commonwealth Games (2010). In the same period, children, teenagers, and young adults residing in Delhi’s bastis and resettlement colonies, many of them experienced demolition and relocation, start engaging in practices of co-creative writing, photography, and video-making in multimedia Labs established in their neighborhoods by the Cybermohalla Project. This paper looks at some of the literary outcomes of this project as archives that preserve the memory of demolished bastis and scattered communities, representing at the same time a bridge between the pre and post demolition experiences of some areas of the city by the authors of the texts. Hamsaphar (Cybermohalla Broadsheet Editorial Team, 2005), Rūkāvaṭ ke lie khed nahīṃ (Anand et al. 2011), and Bahurūpiyā śahar (Tabassum et al., 2007), as well as the process of co-creative writing from which they originate, represent both a way to cope with the trauma of demolition and forced relocation and material evidence of places and experiences now existing exclusively in memory of their authors. Far from being a mere mourning of past times, this literary production and the whole project stretch towards the future, spreading voices, desires, and plans of the young writers.