Dilli Mera Pardes

Delhi Mera Pardes is Raghuvir Sahays diary, published in the Dharmyug magazine from 1960 to 1963 as a column titled Delhi Ki Diary. At that time, Raghuvir Sahay wrote this column under the pen name Sundarlal, which was quite popular. Through this, Raghuvir Sahays goal was to provide insights into life in Delhi, in a way that would have relevance outside of Delhi. These three years were crucial, as they were the final years of Nehrus political career. Before his death in 1964, the character of national life was undergoing a crisis. Whether the values Nehru advocated and acted for would survive his life had become a cultural issue. Delhi Ki Diary offers a clear glimpse into three of the last four years of Nehrus life. Regarding why this book is called Delhi Mera Pardes, Raghuvir Sahay himself writes, Delhi is not my country, and Delhi cannot be anyones country. It lacks its own culture. The social behavior of its inhabitants can never have the opportunity to stabilize enough to become a culture. At best, it can be a center of civilization, or rather, of its imitations. And so it is. ...I came to Delhi in the summer of 1951. Since then, some parts of this city have remained equally beautiful to me. ...The two pursuits I have pursued in lifejournalism and poetrymy best memories of both are from here. And so too are the joys and hardships of poverty. But these are not Delhis greatest gifts. The greatest gift is a foreignness: a strange kind of soft solitude into which you can go whenever you want, no matter how crowded it is, and from which you can come out for a while whenever you want, no one will see you. Delhi Mera Pardes is a book of that creative experience in prose which is not only beautiful in its style but is also easily communicative and sharp in socio-political consciousness. The excerpts included in the book, selected from about one hundred and fifty installments, are like that document without confronting whose questions one cannot understand ones present properly, nor can one look far into the future.