The Forgotten Partition History Behind Delhi’s Most Famous Markets

A market that had been the last resort of those who had lost everything became an asset for people who had a lot.

Khan Market is now one of the most expensive retail streets in the world, and it is rarely remembered that a government built it as relief.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Every August, Delhi rehearses a story about arrival. Half a million refugees came off the trains from West Punjab, Sindh, and the North West Frontier, and rebuilt a broken city.

The story is true, but like most accounts of Partition, it has been edited. It says little about who left, what was taken from them, or what the city has since done to the people it set out to rescue, and those omissions are easiest to see not in a monument but in an ordinary place, the market.

Khan Market is now one of the most expensive retail streets in the world, and it is rarely remembered that a government built it as relief. In 1951 the Rehabilitation Ministry put up a plain block of shops with flats above and allotted them to refugees, many from the North West Frontier, who had reached Delhi with nothing. Meherchand and Khanna markets, both named after Mehr Chand Khanna, the minister for rehabilitation, were created the same way; Meherchand was earlier still, in 1948, when 240 makeshift shops were handed to new arrivals.

These were not shopping districts but an instrument of policy: an attempt to let a displaced population earn a living again in a city that had itself been torn apart.

To understand why a government builds a market, it is necessary to remember what it had just presided over. In 1941, roughly a third of Delhi’s population was Muslim; by 1951 the proportion had fallen to about five per cent. Gyanendra Pandey has described this as a substitution rather than a simple loss: the city was emptied of one population, through killing and flight, and filled again by another within a few years.

Old Delhi and the Memory of What Was Lost

Studies by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar and Rotem Geva have shown how the new state put its energies into resettling Hindu and Sikh refugees, while the departure of the city’s Muslims was managed bureaucratically and written out of the story, its people reduced to categories such as “evacuees” and “intending evacuees”.

The rehabilitation market belongs to that moment: care for the people who arrived, built on ground emptied of the people who left. It was also unlike the bazaar Delhi already knew. Historians of Shahjahanabad such as Narayani Gupta and Jyoti Hosagrahar have described the older market as woven into the fabric of the city, a way of living in which people traded where they lived; the rehabilitation market borrowed the word but not the meaning, produced by the state, through allotment, as a response to an emergency.

What happened afterwards receives the least attention. Khan Market stayed modest for about forty years. It changed in the 1990s, with liberalisation, when it became clear that a plain block shops near India Gate were extremely valuable. The provision stores gave way to expensive brands, the flats built as homes became offices and boutiques, and the rents rose until they were among the highest anywhere. At Meherchand the same revaluation arrived as sealing drives and a redevelopment scheme that recast the small allotted shop as multi-storey commercial space.

To call this gentrification would be too easy. What happened was more particular: a market that had been the last resort of people who had lost everything became an asset for people who already had a great deal.

This unevenness was there from the beginning. The heritage conservationist Sohail Hashmi has pointed out that the Partition stories we hear belong to refugees who arrived from West Punjab with some means, who had anticipated the upheaval and prepared for it, while those who most came without money, property or papers. Those with capital and connections took up the allotted shops and the plots in the new colonies; those who came with nothing were housed in the arches of the Shahjahanabad wall and in settlements of scrap material.

The state sorted the displaced by what they could show an official, and the property market later sorted them again by who could afford to stay. The image of a single upward path, from refugee to prosperity, holds only if both exclusions are left out of it.

What Happens When Markets Are Made ‘Glamorous’

A few kilometres north, the old walled city offers a different case. No one built Old Delhi to rehabilitate anyone, and Partition did not fill it but hollowed it, removing most of its Muslim population and much of the shared culture that had defined it. That culture survives in fragments of testimony, such as the elderly resident who kept separate vessels so food could be cooked for Hindu neighbours and served from dishes that had never held meat.

Much of that world disappeared, and yet the lanes of Shahjahanabad absorbed their losses instead of being rebuilt around them, so that much of what stood before 1947 still stands, older and poorer than the markets to the south.

The same pressure reaches the walled city too, though in the language of cleaning up rather than cashing in. In her study of the Daryaganj Sunday book market, Kanupriya Dhingra describes how in 2019 it was moved from its roadside sprawl into a gated enclosure called Mahila Haat, a relocation the authorities presented as a sanitisation of the area. It divided the booksellers.

Some welcomed the new space and its “glamour”, a word that surfaced in her interviews with both approval and unease; others felt the move had drained the bazaar of its character and made it more photogenic and less its own. Dhingra insists the trade is above all labour, and it is thatworking life the upgrade puts at risk.

Placed side by side, these describe one history from several directions: a market created for the displaced and later taken back by the property market; another emptied by Partition and left to itself; a third tidied into a version of itself that photographs well. In each, the people who made the place are the ones asked to leave. The market, not the monument, is the more reliable witness: a monument says what a society wishes to believe about itself, while a market has to keep earning its rent, and so registers what a city actually values as the decades pass.

The rehabilitation markets were among the more decent things the new republic did with its grief, and that they are now known only as expensive places to be seen, their origins in repair forgotten, is of a piece with the habit by which the city remembers its arrivals each August and stays quiet about its departures.

(Sadaf Hussain is an author, chef, food writer, podcaster, and two-time TedX speaker, who was among the top 8 on MasterChef India in 2016. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)