NEW DELHI: Introducing herself to backpackers in an Amsterdam hostel, the gauche young heroine in the film Queen says simply: "Myself Rani, from Rajouri, India."
Till not very long ago, you didn't claim your Rajouriness in Delhi with this cheerful self-assuredness . Not when confronted with the unquestioned superiority of south Delhi or the old-world snobbery of Purani Dilli or Civil Lines. That the buzzing heart of west Delhi can now claim a place on the global map is a sign of how far it has come on the city mindscape.
Back in the '80s you were consigned to instant and irreversible behenji-dom if you were a Rani from Rajouri. Waiting for a Tilak Nagar, Janak Puri, Subhash Nagar, Rajouri Garden or Hari Nagar Uspecial at Patel Chest Institute in a salwar kameez and dupatta automatically put you several rungs down the social ladder. The Saket special folks would ask, genuinely baffled but willing to learn: "So where did you say you live? Exactly where is that?" And you mumbled apologetically : "Well you know the Ring Road? It comes to a point called Raja Garden and then you turn left..."
A lot has changed since then — Rajouri Garden has transformed with the metro and swanky multiplexes. The young women there walk with the sass and swing of young women from any other part of Delhi, backpack, jeans, kurti, earphones firmly plugged to the ear and smartphone active in perpetuity.
Says Ranjana Sengupta, author of Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City: "There are no behenjis anymore — the category has fortunately and happily died and looking back I see how terribly insulting the whole thing must have been. West Delhi has lost its image as a hub of displaced people, it is now a bustling affluent area with a lot of drive. I grew up in Delhi's government colonies and west Delhi simply didn't figure in our social landscape. That social map doesn't exist anymore."
Seema Sharma, a 43-year-old gynaecologist who practices in Rajouri Garden, says she recalls being the much-reviled behenji. "There was a hierarchy within west Delhi too — Punjabi Bagh was up there, Rajouri not as good, but still better than Tilak Nagar or Uttam Nagar. My patients from the area even today don't approve of women who drink or go to discotheques and clubs but there is comfort in the sense of community here. I have travelled the world and lived abroad but I came back because the sense of neighbourhood lives on here," she says.
This changing west Delhi has figured, warts and all, centre stage in Bollywood movies for some time now. Strangely enough for a quarter of town stuck with a rather shabby profile, it is probably one of the more familiar areas to the rest of India — other than Old Delhi — thanks mostly to the works of auteurs like Dibakar Banerjee and Maneesh Sharma. Banerjee, in fact, put it high up on the cinematic map with Khosla ka Ghosla and then Oye Lucky Lucky Oye. Sharma followed with the riotous Band Baaja Baarat, featuring a Janak Puri spitfire played by Anushka Sharma.
Suddenly the tawdriness of the drawing rooms covered in chenille and faux lace, the women in nightie-dupatta ensembles, the grasping ambition of small traders and operators and the Punjabi-Hindi Delhi brogue acquired riveting dimensions. No one in the '80s Delhi would have considered Rajouri Garden a potential setting for an avant garde movie.
TV journalist Vinod Dua, who often made the west Delhi behenji the butt of his superb, if politically incorrect, comic sketches on the much-loved Yuv Manch on Doordarshan, says the city was far more class conscious than it is today. "I lived in various university hostels for eight years and watched different kinds of people from the city — middle class mohallas, upper crust folks and we drew clear distinctions between them. Who comes to Miranda House and who to Daulat Ram College? For the latter, we created an imaginary school background — the 'Arya Kanya Putri Pathshala' ," he says looking back on the Delhi of mid- '70s.
Today, an Arya Kanya Putri Pathshala product who used to famously say in his spoof "uski ungliyan mujhse taach ho gayi to meri toh death hi ho gayi", is a rare figure in DU. This Delhi, has been flattened out, he says, by some great levellers . Satellite TV and the internet have made it impossible to deny information and knowledge to any section of the city. "Denial of knowledge is the strength of the elite and that isn't possible anymore ," he says.
Queen and its unabashed celebration of Rajouri Garden, says novelist Anuja Chauhan, is bang on. "There are no behenjis in west Delhi today, she is the girl from anywhere. There are only bhaiyyas there like the film's hero — the regressive guys whose mindset hasn't kept pace with the progressive worldview of the women ," says Chauhan, who grew up at the cusp of west and central Delhi, Karol Bagh, and thought she lived in a rocking place till she went to university and found that it wasn't 'cool' .
There are those who say the change is strictly superficial. "I am afraid the west Delhi cliche is not entirely a cliche . There is a lot of money, upward mobility and consumerism but no great emphasis, for instance, on education or careers for women. And no, I would not go alone to a movie in a Rajouri mall or even dream of nursing a drink alone in a club there," says a media professional who lives in Vikas Puri.
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