Coming from Madanpur Khadar, a village tucked in South East Delhi, the first thing that Gagandeep Singh Bidhuri learnt was to hide his vilage identity—from friends, strangers, and sometimes even himself. To avoid the village label which was frowned upon by his classmates, he began calling a nearby posh colony home, often stepping off the bus one stop earlier. Now a lawyer, he looks back on that quiet shame with clarity, taking tiny steps to reclaim his identity with pride. Together with Parth Shokeen and Puneet Singh Singhal—both from different villages of Delhi—Bidhuri created Dilli Dehat, an online archive documenting Delhi’s 300-odd villages and its rural soul. “The Dilli Dehat project is a source of validation and an expression of my identity,” Bidhuri says.
Dilli Dehat began as a conversation on social media in January and has become a heartfelt pursuit: to trace, preserve, and reclaim a Delhi that is vanishing in plain sight. Through Instagram, Dilli Dehat collects fragments of memory and material—old photos, oral tales, rituals, and lore. With 46k followers on Instagram, it builds a language, one that speaks of places that have been swallowed whole by the metropolis—Chandrawal near North Campus, Zamrudpur beside Greater Kailash, Basant village in Vasant Kunj. “Landing up at Basant village amidst the sought-after aroma of Vasant Kunj,” Bidhuri says, “is like enjoying a cup of cappuccino and suddenly sipping kaadha in between.”
Yet, these juxtapositions are more than quirky contrasts. They are the remains of a culture steadily being erased and bulldozed for development, cloaked under the tag of ‘urban’. The trio believes that everyone in Delhi is, in some sense, a refugee. “Some because they migrated from present-day Pakistan, and others because everything around them is almost alien to them now,” Bidhuri says, “My father and I grew up in the same lands, yet our childhood is very different.” A quiet sadness resurfaces on his face as he recalls the marigold flowers his father used to pluck—now nowhere to be found in the city.
The project’s visual archive is rich with scenes both intimate and surreal. One photograph shows village men gazing skyward as a plane takes off above them—Palam airport, built on village lands—casting a shadow over the very people it displaced. This photograph received numerous comments saying “That was my village.” From tales of Chandrawal villagers looting a British armoury in 1857 to the ghost of a beheaded sheikh said to have roamed the streets of Tughlaqabad village, these stories are stored in the memory of the people who grew up here.
Even in Delhi’s folklore, the rural is always present, but overlooked. The origin story of Basant Panchami, for example, talks of village women carrying mustard flowers to the Kalkaji temple. Moved by the sight, Amir Khusrao offered the flowers to Nizamuddin Auliya and sang Sakal Ban. “Nizamuddin and Khusrao have been talked about,” Bidhuri reflects, “but who were the women carrying the flowers who inspired the genesis of this festival? They were the village women. They were Dilli Dehat.”
In the long run, the trio dreams of a museum for Delhi’s subaltern history—a space to remember the 300-odd villages that have faded from the city’s imagination. “The condition of the villages around Delhi is a lot like the Yamuna—we know it cannot be revived,” he says. “But it is an example of what should not be done to rituals, traditions, and people.”