This is the second post in our theme series, \u201cSelling the City.<\/a>\u201c<\/em><\/p>\n By Meenakshi Nair<\/p>\n Tucked into the packet of informational brochures handed out at the Delhi Tourism I-Centre in Baba Kharak Singh Marg is a souvenir postcard of Delhi titled \u201cDekho Meri Dilli,\u201d or \u201cSee My Delhi.\u201d It is one element of a sprawling suite of texts that frames and narrates the city as a tourist destination. Below this title is a mosaic of nine tiles, images of the tourist attractions that dot the city. The tiles are labeled with the names of the attractions they represent, while the central tile is also emblazoned with the Delhi Tourism Logo. As a visual object meant to represent the city to tourists, this postcard is both curiously withholding and<\/em> blatantly revealing.<\/p>\n I parse this postcard\u2019s dually withholding and revealing nature below, taking my cue from Dean MacCannell who considers tourism to be \u201can ideological framing of history, nature and tradition; a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needs.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Focusing on the postcard\u2019s use of language, its selection of attractions, and how it frames these attractions, I show how the postcard breaks significantly from conventional representations of Delhi by tourism materials. I suggest that the postcard reframes Delhi, forcing it into a narrow mold and discarding what it finds excessive.<\/p>\n What\u2019s in a name?<\/strong><\/p>\n This postcard highlights what it wants viewers to believe are Delhi\u2019s main attractions: Bharat Mandapam, Akshardham, Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, Dilli Haat INA, Yashobhoomi, the National War Memorial, Bharat Darshan Park, New Parliament Building, and Vasudev Ghat. This list includes a park, the new parliament building, and a war memorial.The other names are Sanskritized and not immediately communicative about the attraction; here the labels do not help parse the images.<\/p>\n These highly Sanskritized names do not readily signal the role or function of each attraction in the life and history of the city, other than the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya whose name does indicate that the building houses the Prime Ministers\u2019 Museum. Meanwhile, Bharat Mandapam is \u201cIndia Ceremonial Platform\u201d and Yashobhoomi is \u201cGlorious Land.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Despite their grandiose names, these structures serve as unexceptional exhibition halls and convention spaces. The Sanskritized names do not communicate these roles either. Although the names don\u2019t communicate this, the other attractions are a temple complex (Akshardham), an open-air crafts bazaar (Dilli Haat), a newly developed riverfront religious destination (Vasudev Ghat), and an amusement park (Bharat Darshan Park).<\/p>\n On the surface, this may seem like a rejection of English, the former colonizer\u2019s tongue. However, it is necessary to note that Sanskrit is a classical language that, in modern life, is reserved for Hindu religious ritual, and signals caste privilege. The choice of language, then, is less about rejecting English and more about asserting Sanskrit and thus a Hindu identity. Embracing Sanskrit is also a departure from the sonic and visual linguistic landscape of Delhi in which English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi (along with many more Indian languages) intermingle.<\/p>\n These Sanskritized names function in two ways based on the imagined viewer. On the one hand, for an international tourist, the names of the attractions (other than the war memorial and parliament building) obscure all meaning and imbue the attractions with exoticism, an essential Indianness. Whereas on the other hand, for a domestic tourist or even a citizen of Delhi, the Sanskritized names are coded Hindu. In the next section, I examine how the use of Sanskrit and the inclusion and exclusion of certain tourist sites contributes to the manufacture of an overtly Hindu Delhi.<\/p>\n Selection<\/strong><\/p>\n I want to turn my attention now to the attractions included in and excluded from the central mosaic. The attractions included reflect only a very short period of Delhi\u2019s recent history: about 30 years. The oldest of these attractions, Dilli Haat, was established in 1994 while Akshardham Temple was consecrated in 2005. All the others were constructed and inaugurated between 2019 and 2024. This is a strange and telling choice.<\/p>\n Strange given that there exists archaeological evidence for at least 3000 years of settlement in the region across a range of architectural styles and cultural influences but none of it finds reflection in this postcard. Telling because the majority of the attractions included were built in a brief five-year period that coincides with the second term of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led central government. During this period, the government has proposed and executed several redevelopment plans (for instance as noted by Prem Chandravarkar3<\/a><\/sup> and Michael S. Dodson4<\/a><\/sup>) to alter Delhi\u2019s cityscape to better reflect its own narrative of the city. The postcard, then, seeks to highlight the redeveloped cityscape and elide the diversity, architectural heritage, and urban history of Delhi.<\/p>\n Break From Convention<\/strong><\/p>\n This elision is a departure from how Delhi is generally represented in tourist-facing material. For instance, a glancing survey of the most popular contemporary walking guides of Delhi yields route after route incorporating a range of attractions from across periods of history.5<\/a><\/sup> Even the colonial era Murray\u2019s Handbook to India and Ceylon<\/em><\/a> (1892) mentions a large number of attractions, making careful note of the different periods to which each belongs.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Turning to other tourist-facing visual representations of Delhi, a post-Independence photobook titled Delhi: A Portrait<\/em><\/a> (1983) commissioned by the DTTDC itself makes clear how and why each walking route is able to include so many different attractions.7<\/a><\/sup> The modern city is always sharing space with remnants of previous versions; photographs show a 16th century mausoleum<\/a> serving as the backdrop to 20th century agriculture, while a 13th century stepwell<\/a> is a 20th century water park, offering reprieve to a young capital city racing to grow in the background.<\/p>\n A canon of Delhi\u2019s tourist attractions emerges from these materials. These attractions include the Qila Rai Pithora (1060), the Qutub Minar (1199\/1220), the Red Fort (1648), the Jama Masjid (1656), Humayun\u2019s Tomb, the Dargah of Nizamuddin Awliya, India Gate (1921), and the Lotus Temple of the Baha\u2019i faith (1986), any of the nine Sikh Gurdwaras built in 1783, and Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (1983). This canon reflects the changing architecture of Delhi under the rule of the Rajputs, Mamluks, Tomars, Sayids, Lodhis, Khiljis, the Mughals, the British, and even the architecture of the capital of Independent India. The postcard rejects this canon, and instead props up a new clutch of buildings, almost all built in the 21st century.<\/p>\n Framing the City to Frame the Nation<\/strong><\/p>\n I refer deliberately to attractions excluded from the central mosaic<\/em> of the postcard and not to attractions excluded from the postcard entirely<\/em>. This is because a closer look at the postcard reveals that the mosaic is not, in fact, set against a blank cream background. Instead the cream background bears faint line drawings of abstracted details of the India Gate, the Lotus Temple, and the Qutub Minar\u2014identifiable only to those who already recognize them.<\/p>\n The established canon of attractions is largely ignored by the postcard, other than when it relegates these attractions to the background, rendering them faint and partial in contrast to the defined wholes of the central mosaic. Effectively, what this postcard does is withhold parts of Delhi\u2019s cityscape while forcing an entirely new (and<\/em> newly constructed) built environment onto the skyline.<\/p>\n Five of the nine attractions refer to or represent India without offering any glimpses into Delhi\u2019s specific urban histories or culture. Two attractions, Bharat Mandapam and Bharat Darshan Park, include the word Bharat, which is India\u2019s non-English endonym. Bharat Darshan Park is an amusement park that features reproductions of over twenty historical monuments from across India<\/em>. The National War Memorial memorializes Indian<\/em> martyrs while the New Parliament is the seat of the Indian<\/em> Parliament. The Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya is a tribute to the office of the Prime Minister of India<\/em>.<\/p>\n And in this way, Delhi is subdued by national imagery. The Delhi Tourism Website sees no problem with this: its \u201cAbout Delhi\u201d opens with a description of Delhi as \u201c[a] symbol of the country\u2019s rich past and thriving present,\u201d and<\/em> insists that \u201c[a]s a Capital city it is fittingly a window to the country.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> According to these materials, it is natural that as India\u2019s capital city, what Delhi is like should indicate what India is like.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themetropole.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/image-e7a4fba8-edited.jpeg\")
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