70 years of delight.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Chandeliers, stained glass windows, wood-panelled walls, and stately staircases. This is Delhi’s oldest surviving cinema theater to have stayed with its original owners—a fact confirmed by author Ziya Us Salam, a scholar of the capital’s film theatres. This year the landmark on Asaf Ali Road quietly observed its 70th anniversary.

Opened in April 1954 with Raj Kapoor’s Angaray, Delite stands where a portion of Old Delhi’s historic wall stood. The balcony’s waiting lounge doubles up as a restaurant with marble-top tables, the “Gents Toilet” has a long slim settee that wouldn’t look out of place in a Defence Colony drawing-room, and electric panels display the temperature within the hall. Although it has two screens, the cinema’s original hall is so huge (980 seats) that the perception of Delite remains that of a single-screen theatre where a blockbuster sends the “public” into a collective hysteria of laughter, name calling, whistles and taaliyan—large-hall characteristics rarely replicated in the audis of multiplexes.

The other theater that opened the same year as Delite, and is a walking distance from it, is Golcha. It screened the iconic film Mughal-e-Azam when it was first released in 1960, and screened its coloured version in 2010. It shut down in 2016.

Despite its weighty past and hefty interiors, Delite sometimes doesn’t live upto its full potential—blame Bollywood! Not all movies are uniformly paisa-vasool. One dependable thing about the theater though is its samosa. Introduced in 1990, it is among the biggest samosas in the National Capital Region, and is rightly called the Maha Samosa. Inside the crisp shell lies an aloo mix so cleverly spiced that the aroma alone makes you dizzy. Those cinema hall regulars lucky to have restaurant supervisor Mukti Ram’s mobile number text him in advance to book these samosas.

Whatever, next time when you are in Delite, exploit the “interval” to walk down the Heritage Gallery (see photo). The corridor walls are decked with black-and-white stills of India’s timeless icons, photographed while visiting the cinema hall. They include both Prime Minister Nehru and film star Dilip Kumar. The most enchanting photo is of a beautiful woman in fur coat snacking with Delite’s founder Brij Mohan Lal Raizada. She is the Anarkali of Mughal-e-Azam, the great Madhubala.

PS: Photo shows cinema hall staffers Mukti Ram, Manoranjan Kumar, Ravi Bauri, Ashish Chaurasiya, Rahul Bauri, Gopal Yadav