How 1947 Changed Delhi: The Evolution Of City Post Partition

Historian Mridula Mukherjee was born in a Kamla Nagar apartment three years after Partition. Her parents, professors from Lahore, made Delhi their new home and started teaching.

- Snehil Sinha

The initial years were difficult as both the city and the refugees were still coming to terms with the changes and challenges that the mass migration brought.

Her father started teaching at Camp College, set up near Mandir Marg, that gave degrees affiliated to Panjab University. It held evening classes as it was mainly for refugees who were from Lahore University. "All of these people had left everything behind and had to work jobs during the day, and could only attend classes in the evening. My mother became a schoolteacher at a municipal school near Gole Market as it was the only thing she could find during all the turmoil," said 73-year-old Mukherjee, a chronicler of modern India.

The sociolinguistic composition of Delhi changed radically and quickly over that initial decade, she remembers. The city expanded far beyond the existing Shahjahanabad area of Old Delhi, and the still-young enclave for the British in New Delhi to the area south of Lodhi Garden that had been farmland and forest till then.

Influx of refugees

Between 1941 and 1951, Delhi's population shot up by 90%, an increase that was never seen before or after those years in the national capital. These were the years when refugees from Pakistan came to India, most of them to Delhi. Many of them built the Delhi we know today.

Settling and integrating these people into the city and the country was not an easy task, especially considering the numbers. As per census numbers, following the promotion of Delhi as the capital of the British Indian Empire in 1911, the population grew from 238,000 in 1911 to 696,000 in 1947. The census has an official record of 459,391 "displaced people" who moved to Delhi in 1947, almost doubling the population of the city.