A Khan Market icon. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi; the black & white photos belong to Bahrsions Booksellers] Born to a bank manager in Malakwal in today’s Pakistan, Balraj Bahri Malhotra received his college education in Rawalpindi. He arrived in Delhi in 1947 as a 19-year-old partition refugee and met his future wife, Saubhagya, at the Kingsway camp in north Delhi. In 1953 he opened a bookstore in one of the city's new bazaars. He arranged the initial investment of 800 rupees by selling his mother’s single gold bangle. Today, Bahrisons Booksellers is one of the oldest surviving landmarks of the fast-changing Khan Market and its courteous founder-owner a representative of the market's early years. Due to his advancing age, Mr

The last great living qawwal. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] In his eighties, Meraj Ahmed Nizami, the patriarch of Nizami Khusro Bandhu family, is one of the few classical qawwals left in India. He is one of Delhi's great living landmarks. “Meraj renders Persian Sufi verses most fluently in the old tarz, or melodies,” says Farida Ali, director of the Dargah of Hazrat Inayat Khan, which is in the same neighbourhood as Hazrat Nizamuddin’s shrine. Meraj’s family, who daily performs in Hazrat Nizamuddin’s dargah, has been performing qawwali, Islam’s sacred music, every Friday in Inayat Khan’s shrine for 40 years. “I have witnessed him creating a dynamic spiritual atmosphere of mystical haal (ecstasy),” Ms Ali says. The man who is considered a

The definitive directory of famous Delhiites. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] At 72, the maker of Hindustani classical music lost interest in the world. Poet Amir Khusro, the 14th century courtier to seven kings, was in mourning after the death of his spiritual mentor, Delhi’s sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Khusro gave away his wealth, retired to Hazrat Nizamuddin’s tomb, died six months later, and was buried in the shrine’s courtyard. Perhaps it is all a legend. How could one person singularly invent the tabla and sitar, produce the first raga and create the sufi music of qawwali? Most likely Hindustani classical music came out of a civilization, but Khusro’s poetic genius gave that civilization its Hindustani-ness. Folksy and immediate, his

The definitive directory of famous Delhiites. [Text by Mayank Austen Soofi; pictures given by Asia Society and British Library] He was born in Fatehpur Sikri, a former Mughal capital. Crowned at the age of 17 by the scheming Sayyid brothers, Muhammad Shah later got rid of them, and brought a sense of stability to the empire. He died at 46. It was during his reign that Delhi, the seat of the Mughals, witnessed an extraordinary cultural life. New York’s Park Avenue was briefly home to the gilded age of Muhammad Shah and 12 other Mughal emperors, most of them largely forgotten. “The later Mughal period after Aurangzeb is a blank to most people, including scholars,” William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal, told

The definitive directory of famous Delhiites. [Text by Mayank Austen Soofi; pictures shared by Alkazi Collection of Photography] Like most of today’s generation, you must have been introduced to her photographs in history textbooks. Homai Vyarawalla, 97, originally a Bombay photographer, captured some of Delhi’s greatest 20th century moments. She worked for journals, such as Current, Onlooker, Bombay Chronicle, The Illustrated Weekly of India and Time Life. The Parsi photographer produced her most memoreable work when she was living in Connaught Place (CP), Delhi’s central business district, during the 1940s and the later decades. The residences used to be on the first floors of the Inner Circle corridors. She called the circular colonnade a “pearl necklace”. In a photograph of the Inner

The immortal love of a Persian scholar. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] An heir of Old Delhi nobility, he speaks classical Persian as his first language. Dr Yunus Jaffery, a Persian scholar, was described as an “archetypal Delhi-wallah” in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Dalrymple wrote, “He wore white Mughal pyjamas whose trouser-bottoms, wide and slightly flared, were cut in the style once favoured by eighteenth-century Delhi gallants. On his head he sported a thin white mosque-cap. Heavy black glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, but the effect was not severe. Something in Dr Jaffery’s big bare feet and the awkward way he held himself gave the impression of a slightly shambolic, absent-minded individual.” Dalrymple’s book came out in 1993.

The builder of Steinabad. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla is walking down Joseph Stein Lane, the only road in Delhi named after an architect. This is the heart of “Steinabad”, the nickname given to Lodhi Estate in central Delhi. The area has a series of buildings designed by the late Joseph Allen Stein​, who transformed a small part of the Capital with his vision. The tree-lined lane cuts through two buildings designed by him: the Ford Foundation headquarters and the India International Centre (IIC). The only sound is of the cascading fountains at the Ford Foundation complex. The lane ends at Lodhi Garden, whose ruins mark a significant architectural era well before Mr Stein’s. “His buildings represent the best

The sufi princess. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Razia Sultan, Nur Jahan, Princess Diana. The most famous women in history are usually caricatured as saints or sluts, or both. Their lives are reduced to tragedies or travesties. Jahanara Begum (1614-1681) defies such stereotypes. The eldest child of Mughal emperor Shahjahan and Mumtaz Mahal, Princess Jahanara composed poetry, commissioned mosques, laid out gardens, and wrote biographies. She designed Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi’s signature street. She never married and had several affairs. No known likeness of her exists in paintings. Born in Ajmer, raised in Agra, Jahanara died in Delhi, aged 67. A power broker in the court of two emperors, she found her calling in Islamic mysticism. Her tomb lies in the

Delhi's mountain man. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The world is, according to a saying, only the size of each man’s head. Deodar trees, misty hills, night trains, haunted spirits, leaping langurs, mountain air, unhappy women and lonely children make the world of Ruskin Bond. And for more than 60 years, millions of readers have shared this world. Mr Bond have lived in Delhi twice. First, as a child in a bungalow in Atul Grove Road, near Connaught Place, where he lived with his father, a Royal Air Force man. The second time was for a few years when he was a young man. He lived alone in the west Delhi neighbourhoods of Karol Bagh and Rajouri Garden. Mr Bond

Delhi’s last eccentric. [Text by Mayank Austen Soofi; pictures given by Christie’s; Simon Digby's photograph is courtesy of Robert Skelton] Born in Jabalpur to a colonial-era judge and a vagabond painter, British scholar Simon Everard Digby was a part-time Delhiwalla with a deeper understanding of Delhi’s history than most Delhi historians. He lived off-and-on in the subcontinent, traveled extensively in the region, and spent months reading on art and history in the museums and libraries of Bombay and Calcutta. He photographed monuments, picked old coins, collected manuscripts, purchased artifacts, and bought books. His library was one of the world’s largest and finest private collections on Indian history. Mr Digby was a polyglot who spoke English, Hindi, Urdu and Persian. He wrote articles