Delhi—a city of fresh food, people and jugaad

Sophea Lerner captures the many auditory layers of our capital city, creating soundscapes as varied as Delhi itself.

“Delhi is many cities, and many ideas of what a city is, all layered over each other… a Mughal city, a colonial city, a city of villages, a globalised city, to name a few. There's a lot to think about and learn about and engage with here,” says sonic media artist and broadcaster Sophea Lerner.

The Sydney girl has been exploring these many aspects of our capital city, through sound and radio making practices as part of a research towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at University of Technology. She is in Delhi through an affiliation with the Sarai programme at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). Sarai is a platform for creative collaboration between researchers, practitioners and artists reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia.

“Urban spaces and processes are what really fascinate me… transit spaces and the sounds of movement around cities,” says Lerner. “Delhi is a city going through some big changes—not for the first time in its history. There are many cities in the world, which are undergoing dramatic changes, but the context of Sarai and a long string of coincidences led me to this one.”

The string of coincidences began when she met Monica Narula and Shuddabarata Sengupta from RAQS media collective (one of the initiators of the Sarai programme) at Alchemy—an international master class for new media artists and curators—at Brisbane Powerhouse in 2000. In 2006 Sarai invited Lerner for a two-month residency to work on project called Cybermohalla (run in collaboration with Ankur an alternative education project)

“I had a great time collaborating with people here and found Delhi a very stimulating place to be, so I wanted to do an extended period of creative research here and continue working with Sarai,” says Lerner. She went back in October 2006 to do the Sonic Arts Residency with Khoj workshop (an artist led, alternative space for experimentation) and has pretty much been there ever since.

“I work with sound and public spaces. I am interested in exploring how spaces are contested, claimed and re-imagined through sound,” says Lerner. And there is often a contest for space—in Delhi, as in other parts of India—between the government and administration, the burgeoning traffic and property development, the street-side hawkers and shanty dwellers. Lerner has captured some of these disputes in an auditory format for her projects.

Just after the Supreme Court decided to ban the cooking of food on the streets of Delhi, Snack City was a celebration of this street food. This open call-in based project was presented on a cart at the MediaWala Festival. It was the culmination of a two day workshop with local and international remote participants exploring the taste, smell, sound, culture and politics of street food.

This physical performance involved live calls, live remixes of pre-recorded calls from remote participants in Helsinki, Finland and live net calls from other places streamed live to a cart with speakers and cooking vessels which was moving around the festival venue.

“The technical set up was relatively complex, but it came together very quickly without a lot of planning because it was supported by human networks that have built up over many years through various collaborative projects and the foodradio_network,” says Lerner.

“Talking to street food vendors was the most interesting aspect for me,” recollects Lerner. “We spoke to a chaat-wala at Connaught Place who had been making chaat on that spot for 35 years and his father before him before the show—now he has disappeared.”

Besides exploring the appreciation of street food, Snack City was also a comment on the local specificity—the place that this food holds in the culture of Delhi. “In general Delhi-ites identify very strongly with the street food as an important element of the city's culture, something for which it is famous and which gives it an important part of the city’s character,” says Lerner.

Yet, like the many “Delhis”, there are many Delhi-wallas, and each has their own perception of the street food. “There is a real danger that this appreciation becomes merely nostalgic amongst middle classes. On the other hand, auto drivers we spoke to, for example, said if there was no street food, it would be hard for them to get a meal when they are out working,” says Lerner. “So it's part of a bigger picture of how street life works and who is participating in the life of the city.”

The other participants are those who live in shanty towns—commonly known as zopadpattis—often bulldozed down by the administration in the name of ‘beautification’, leaving them homeless.

Lerner’s other project, Where is Nangla Maanchi? (New Delhi, 2006-still in progress), an installation project for Khoj Sonic Arts ‘06 Residency, explores one such thriving community that disappeared under the bulldozer.
The project was undertaken as personal response to hearing the sounds at Nangla Maanchi basti on the west bank of the Yamuna both before and after the violent demolition of this community in mid 2006.

The title came from the experience of having to explain to autorickshaw drivers where I wanted them to drop me and trying to verbally put this place on the map when I was talking to people who didn't know where it was,” says Lerner.
The installation—an atmospheric set up of sounds and visuals, recreate the community that once was, and the ruins left behind today—even just looking at some visuals of the installation on a website gave me goose bumps.

As recordings of the before and after soundscape weave through each other, visitors are invited to step into the images of the site projected onto fabric drapes they can walk amongst. Bricks from the demolition site are presented alongside photographs of the spot where they fell. Torches are provided for personal examination of these material relics of a demolished locality as visitors listen to the voices of the former inhabitants and the vacated sonic panorama left behind.

Throughout the installation space, in English and Hindi, are some reflections and questions addressed to the viewer which attempt to situate the presence and absence of the locality in the memory of the city. “The people who lived there have moved on, but the city might still remember itself as it changes,” says Lerner.

“I was not in Delhi during the demolition—only some months before and some months after,” says Lerner, guiding us to nangla.freeflux.net, for documentation and discussion on the stories of Nangla and the demolition itself.
“The last time I went there before the demolition, when we did the street recordings, I had 20-30 kids crowding round me to take turns listening to the sounds of their own locality on my headphones.”

She describes her experiences upon return to find Nangla Maanchi demolished. “It provokes strong feeling when you go to a place and meet people and have a great time and then you come back and the place isn't there any more. It looks like a war zone with a sea of rubble. People’s personal things—notebooks, soft toys, a shoe—are sticking out of the wreckage.”

“All the houses, built up over 30 years that you passed before, where people were working and laughing, have been broken open so the blues and greens of the interiors you didn't see before are scattered with the sea of bricks. It is a very violent contrast. Going back to record felt like walking on a grave,” Lerner recollects.

Nangla Maanchi is of course among the many such communities that are often demolished, with little concern for the dwellers, their history, or even their future. “Some people see narrow streets, small houses, urban agriculture and food animals and it all goes into one basket in their head,” says Lerner.
For instance, just next door to Nangla Maanchi, Lerner tells us, is a small village called Nangla Gaon where people have lived for generations, moving from farming to dairy farming after their lands were submerged when the river moved in its plain. . “They have paperwork going back more than 150 years,” Lerner says.

“In November 2006, a few months after the dust had settled from the adjacent demolitions, their village was bulldozed following a handwritten, unsigned notice stuck to their mandir giving them a week to get out. They went to the court but the bulldozers came while a hearing was pending.”

Typical of Indian resilience, everyone was still living in their houses, Lerner found—but the houses had no walls or roofs any more. “They offered us hospitality and told us their story. We wrote a press release for them and were able to put them in touch with some journalists.”

Lerner hopes to show the installation not in a pristine gallery, but in the context of what is going to be built at the site next. “If I do get to make something at the site later, then that will simply be about acknowledging what was there before—that this community existed.”

Even with this very apparent humanist and activist streak in her, Lerner says she is not interested in making a general statement about the politics of slum clearance. “I wanted to make a work that addressed my personal experience of returning to a specific place after this very brutal series of events,” says Lerner. “I didn't set out to do something political and then go off to research the issues. The work I do here is a response to what is going on around me, to the place where I am. Is that political?”

“At this very moment I can hear several houses nearby being demolished or rebuilt - this is a direct result of changes in planning laws which allow an extra two floors in residential areas.” In fact, the house she currently lives in—a barsati—is slated for demolition as soon as the landlord saves up enough to rebuild. “Right now this is one of the last barsatis left in the colony. These changes in the planning laws are related to the same debates around the Delhi 'master plan' that led to the sealing drives and demolition drives.”

“These are not remote abstract political concepts - these are the day to day realities of a city being forcibly globalised in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games,” she says. “A few people are making a lot of money, a lot of people are losing livelihoods and/or homes, some things which work well in the city are being devalued and replaced by things which have already failed elsewhere. Some people call this progress.”

Besides, street vendors and slum dwellers, there is another victim of this progress—River Yamuna. Lerner collaborated with photographer and environmentalist, Ravi Agarwal on a piece for the international radio network La Radia through Free103.9 in New York when they ran with the theme, contamination.

Lerner did a live radio mix based on a recording she made with Agarwal by the river, combining his words with field recordings and sounds of dripping taps from her bathroom - which is of course connected to the river directly. There was also a live feed from her roof to situate the broadcast in time and place alongside other contributions from around the world.

“Delhi is a city with it's back to the river,” says Lerner. “Most inhabitants of the city have never walked close to it—never think about going there—never ever think about where their drinking water comes from or where their shit goes.”

“The river is actually very beautiful. You wouldn't want to swim in it or eat fish from it the way it is at the moment. But sitting on the bank behind Nangla Maanchi demolition site—with buffalos from neighbouring Nangla Gaon grazing next to you and looking across to the vegetables growing on the east bank—is like some kind of rural idyll tucked away in the middle of the city, complete with trees leaning over the water like some 19th century landscape painting—a surreal juxtaposition to the demolition site behind. The river is polluted but it's also beautiful.”

“There is always talk about cleaning it up but I sometimes think the main impetus there would be to make it look pretty so as to profitably redevelop the waterfront, as has happened in many cities around the world. The amount of food growing in and near the city is one of Delhi's big advantages as a place to live, it would be a real shame to see this all turned in buildings.”

Along with all the street food, it is this constant supply of fresh groceries that Lerner loves about living in Delhi. “I moved to India after working in Finland for 4-5 years, so I’d have to say that one of the big attractions here are the fresh vegetables—I now live 10 mins walk from the best vegetable market I have ever seen!”

“I also love the fact that for most little things that you need to achieve on a day to day basis you have to deal with people and not machines,” says Lerner. For instance, she much prefers the local kabariwala to the rebate machines in Helsinki.

“The kabariwala cycles past my house, and collects all my recycling and pays me for it. I don't have to carry it anywhere, and all the local kabariwalas have different cries that I enjoy hearing.” For those of us who moved to Sydney, for a better quality of life, we might find Lerner’s perspective surprising. “Things like good unprocessed food and the sociality of interacting with humans in your daily life are simple things which add a lot to quality of life.”

“I think one of my favorite things about living here is untranslatable—jugaad. It includes the idea of making do, hacking things together out of whatever is around, making objects and materials fulfil functions they were never intended for,” says Lerner. “That appeals to how I work, and every day I see things which inspire me in how someone has done something inventive with resources at hand, in order to make something work better. I think the DIY aesthetic has a strong resonance with a lot of Australian sound arts practices too, so I feel like this is a good place to make work,” says Lerner. “It also helps that there is the Lajpatrai electronics market - imagine dick smith crossed with Paddy's market and 10 times the size,” she laughs.

But there must be the worst bit about living in Delhi as well, I ask?
“I’ve found it hard to deal with the hierarchical nature of society here,” says Lerner. “Australia and Finland are both places with strong traditions of egalitarianism in how people behave towards each other. There are flaws in how those ideas work in practice but the ideas are there. Here the idea of hierarchy is very entrenched, and people in Delhi can get very hung up about status symbols. There is a pecking order and people want you to fit into it somewhere.”

“When the guy who is installing the internet connection at home makes polite conversation with the question 'Madam what caste are you?' I try to tell him that I’m not any caste, but I am unable to supply any answer that makes sense to him.”

For more information about Sophea’s work, visit http://phonebox.org/sophea

Sophea Lerner’s guide to eating in Delhi:

I asked Lerner if she had a favourite Delhi street food treat after her Snack City project—“Well that's an extremely tough question,” she said, unable to pick one, two or even just three.

Here is her personal guide to Delhi’s best street food.
There is a fried potato stall near Kashmeri Gate, which makes the best fried potatoes I have ever tasted. They have been making them for over 25 years, the secret is in their ghee.

I'm not a big fan of aloo tikkis, but there is a place on the corner of one gali which leads to the metro at Chandi Chowk that makes them perfectly crisp on the outside, perfectly soft inside and with a centre filling of spiced dal - that's pretty high on my list since I tried it recently.

The karela paratha in Parathewali Gali is an unusual combo that I really like.
But I think my favorite aloo paratha to date is from a local guy in Lila Ram market behind south extention where I stayed during the Khoj Residency.

My favorite egg rolls are from a stand in East Delhi at Madhu Vihar market. It got moved to different spots several times during the sealings but it's still there.
I don't have a great sweet tooth, but as seasonal specialities go, Daulat ki Chaat is top of the treats.