Life in a migrants' Eden

In his 2004 article titled "Cities: An Anthropological Perspective" for the journal Anthropology Matters, Andrew Irving, professor of anthropology at the University of Manchester, notes that a "city does not exist in an individual's mind or "out there" as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people's emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of 'flesh and stone'."These qualities are precisely what Chitvan Gill documents and investigates in her book Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid.

- SAURABH SHARMA

Ms Gill is a Delhi-based writer, filmmaker and documentary photographer. In this book, she meticulously—and often poetically—offers her readers an oral history of Buland Masjid (one of 1,797 unauthorised colonies in Delhi) in nine brief chapters together with arresting pictures from the area. She also offers insights into the personal histories of people migrating for livelihood.

Alongside, she depicts the cartography of the hate that's engulfing the country and tells the untold story of how people who were made to feel unwelcome still end up giving back to the city. She writes, "Expulsion and reinvention... these themes suffuse the human narrative, right from the earliest epics." The book is peppered with these struggles.

"Each dripping fetid mass is a new city, an Eden built by those who have endured migrations through hell. They redefine and reshape paradise on earth to a modern incarnation. In one such Eden, Buland Masjid, we hear the story of the men who walked all the way to this bleak and hostile piece of land, to create a place they could eventually call home," writes Ms Gill in the Prologue before introducing Buland Masjid's principal architect, Allama Maqsood.