Shahjahanabad

From ancient cities of Delhi with various names up to the making of New Delhi and now with various satellite towns, the city is the lifeline of new cultures. It has evolved continuously for four thousand years or so. Historians widely acknowledge that the city we know today as Delhi is at least seven—most say more—cities rolled into one. Due to its strategic location, Delhi, the capital of kings and emperors from the ancient past, has inhabited many avatars, from Indraprastha to Qila Rai Pithora, Lal Kot, Firozabad, Tughlaqabad, Shahjanabad, Dilli, Dehli, Delhi and New Delhi. A significant corpus of the remarkable history of this phenomenal city was written in Urdu, the predominant language of north India before the partition.

Shahjahanabad is the most extended surviving city or the city’s name in continuation of the civilisation and cultures from what we now call Delhi. 1803 was the watershed movement in the city’s history when the victory of the British over Marathas at Patparganj ensured that the crumbling Mughal empire’s end was near, which came to an absolute end in 1857. 1857 is the story of the destruction of the city; pollution in the great Indian civilisation, which evolved over thousands of years and in no way Muslim or Hindu civilisation; divide between the most influential language of shared cultural heritage, namely Hindi, which due to the policy to use language as a weapon to divide Hindus and Muslims, became Modern or Aadhunik Hindi and patronised by the British as the language of Hindus; actual Hindi became Urdu and patronised by the British as the language of Muslims. There was no language by the name of Urdu until the end of the eighteenth century, and the word Urdu as a language name was first used in 1775 and could not get currency until 1857. Even after that, Hindi was used by most Urdu poets, including Ghalib; until the second decade of the 20th century, Iqbal used the word Hindi for what we now term Urdu.

The establishment of Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation by the government of Delhi is proof of the relevance of the cultural vitality of the socio-cultural elements and architectural uniqueness of Shahjahabad’s ethos.

The festival will deal with all these themes central to Indian culture and an integral part of Indian culture in various ways through literature, music, performing arts, popular culture, cinema and overall history as a tool to correct us when we change the path for whatever reasons.