In 2021, Anica Mann, who works at the Archaeological Survey of India, began a project in the form of an Instagram page called @delhihouses to capture the distinct personality of the city’s homes. The idea came to her when she shifted out of her house in a north Delhi village. “When a new family moved into my childhood home, they left no trace of my past.
It revealed how fleetingly impermanent houses can really be,” she says. Anica Mann| Photo Credit:SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT This transience Anica refers to was exacerbated by the 2011 notification that made stilt parking mandatory for newer constructions. That one move, she says, slowly eroded the uniqueness of Delhi’s residential terrain, which was painstakingly built by the melting pot of communities that gathered in the city after Partition.
An aerial view of a barsati house in Kailash Parbat in Delhi| Photo Credit:SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT “It was a watershed moment for me,” says Anica. “Builders started tearing down old plots to construct four-storey houses that look like similar concrete blocks. Bungalows began disappearing.
Barsatis (single rooms on top floors) are few and far between. Single-storey houses are now unheard of,” she says, adding that while houses have a natural tendency to upgrade themselves, the quintessential character of Delhi’s homes has begun to fade away. As Anica drives through the neighbourhoods of Lutyens’ Delhi, she points out the few-odd houses that have clung to their old identity.
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