On the evening of August 15, the sky of Purani Dilli tells its own story. Kites dart across the fading blue as flyers battle to cut one another loose, while families watch from their terraces. As dusk settles, loud music spills from homes, firecrackers burst overhead, and Chinese lanterns begin to float above the old city.
On Saturday, DelhiByFoot Adventures sought to recreate this atmosphere through Azaadi Ki Patang Baazi, an intimate evening at the Old Delhi home of chef Sana Begum, where Dastangoi artist Fouzia Dastango’s stories of Patang Baazi came together with Mughlai food. Hosted on Begum’s rooftop, the evening brought together a handful of guests experiencing what it might have felt like to be an Old Delhite on Independence Day.
“We didn't want to make this event huge because Old Delhi’s essence is intimacy — where we can sit and chat. Today, in this digital world, we’ve stopped talking to each other. In Old Delhi, people talk. Even if you go to someone's home without notice, they welcome you. I wanted to evoke that feeling,” says the dastango.
For her, the evening was less about teaching the audience to fly a kite and more about telling the story of a Delhi that once looked very different from its rooftops. “People have reduced Old Delhi to just a place for food, clothes and taking selfies. We also need to know Old Delhi for its kite flyers and its art-loving people,” she told the gathering.
There is no historical ritual linking I-Day with kite flying; the connection is cultural. “Independence means you are flying high, you are free to fly,” notes F. Over time, kites became part of how Old Delhi marked August 15. The flag went up on rooftops, but so did kites.
A Delhi of kites
Fouzia began her Dastan with a city on the onset of Sawan when easterly winds sent children and adults scrambling to the rooftop. She recalls scenes of households coming alive around kite flying — children being warned not to venture too close to the edge of a roof; someone untangling a reel of thread; another handing a kite to a child and asking him to give it a toss; and, slowly, hundreds of kites of countless shapes and sizes appearing overhead.
“Patang Baazi was not merely a pastime,” she says. “It was part of the way people celebrated, socialised and expressed themselves.”
Her stories ranged from the origins of kite flying and how kites found their way into Asian cultures to the craft behind the tradition, including the making of manjha. She then moved to Mirza Chapati, an eccentric kite flyer and maker from Old Delhi during the reign of emperor Shah Alam, drawing on Urdu writer Ashraf Subohi’s writings, and to tales of the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and the princes of the Red Fort flying enormous tukals (a type of kite), as well as lovers using kites to exchange secret messages, attaching handwritten notes to the string and sending them across rooftops.
In another story, she spoke of the city’s famed Phool Walon Ki Sair fair where a kite flyer once attached a garland of paper flowers to a kite and, with a deft tug, sent it falling around the then President Dr S Radhakrishnan's neck. The feat drew loud applause from the crowd, which she described as “one of the last spectacular displays of a fading tradition”.
She also referred to poet Mirza Ghalib’s childhood fascination with kite flying and to other Urdu poets using the kite and its string as metaphors for love, freedom and longing. “A kite is perhaps a metaphor for life — it teaches you when to hold on, when to let go, and to understand the direction of the wind.”
What is being lost
For Begum, who has lived in her Old Delhi home for 29 years, the atmosphere remains distinctive. “You can't see this kind of celebration in the usual housing societies,” says Begum. “It's quite noisy outside right now, but that's the real charm of it.”
Around 6 pm, she says, the area becomes a spectacle. “Everyone is sitting on their rooftops, a DJ is playing everywhere, a music system is running everywhere,” she says. “But the gathering that happens today won't be there.” Her home too was part of that experience. A home chef whose culinary traditions come through her family had prepared Mughlai dishes passed down through generations — seekh kebabs, spicy tikkas, Mughlai mutton kofta and Sindhi-style mohanthal, the latter a recipe from her mother.
“Heritage is not something that should live only in books or museums,” says the dastango. “It is something you should be able to hear, taste, see, touch and participate in.”
Yet Patang Baazi is slowly declining. “Rooftops have become less accessible, neighbourhoods have become more fragmented, lifestyles have changed, and younger generations have fewer opportunities to learn these traditions from their elders,” she says. “The disappearance of Patang Baazi is not simply the disappearance of a sport. It represents the weakening of an entire cultural ecosystem.”
With it comes the loss of kite makers, specialised markets, traditional manjha-making skills, vocabulary and techniques passed from one generation to another. For some of those at Azaadi Ki Patang Baazi, that gap was precisely what made the evening compelling. Aditi, a 23-year-old social work student who has been in Delhi for the past three years, says that she “finally got a chance to be here to experience kite-flying myself”.
“Nostalgia can make us remember a tradition, but that alone cannot keep a tradition alive. We don't have to recreate the past exactly as it was. We have to carry its spirit forward,” says Fouzia. “Azaadi Ki Patang Baazi is one small attempt to bring the kite down from the pages of history and put it back into the hands of people.”