A 113-year-old Durga Puja in Timarpur is using its annual public display to recover a largely undocumented chapter of Delhi’s urban history: the arrival of Bengali families around the time the British shifted the capital from Calcutta in 1911. The presentation, titled ‘Dillir Buke Bangla’, connects railway mobility, government housing and community formation to the making of modern Delhi.
The exhibition at the Timarpur Durga Puja pandal does not present migration as a single movement or a complete account of Bengali settlement in the capital. Instead, it reconstructs an early phase of migration between approximately 1908 and 1920, when Bengali families began arriving in greater numbers and many first settled in Timarpur. The organisers describe the area as the city’s first government colony, established after Delhi was declared the capital of British India.
That history matters because Delhi’s growth is often narrated through its later expansion: planned neighbourhoods, new colonies, post-Independence migration and large-scale infrastructure. The Timarpur display points to an earlier layer, when the city’s administrative transformation created demand for housing, transport connections and social networks for newcomers. In this account, migration was not only a demographic event. It was also a process through which people adapted to unfamiliar weather, language and surroundings while establishing a durable presence in the capital.
The railway is central to the exhibition’s narrative. Its entrance is designed as a giant steam engine carrying the insignia of the East Indian Railway, which operated the Calcutta-Delhi train route at the time. The organisers say Bengalis had been arriving in Delhi in smaller numbers since the rail link from Calcutta became operational in 1864, but that arrivals increased around the shift of the capital.
This places transport infrastructure at the centre of a community history. The railway did more than move passengers between two major cities. It created a physical link through which workers and families could relocate, maintain contact with relatives and carry documents, possessions and cultural practices into a new urban setting. The exhibition’s focus on tickets, railway companies and routes reflects how closely migration and infrastructure were connected.
The first destination for many of these families was Timarpur, where they were initially housed in temporary quarters, according to the organisers. The available account does not establish the precise size or administrative structure of the colony, but it shows how early government accommodation became part of the city’s settlement geography. Temporary housing offered a foothold in a capital that was undergoing institutional change and receiving new residents from outside the region.
The exhibition recreates this experience through six imaginary families. The decision to use fictional representations is significant because the organisers say they could not find records of the individuals who moved during that period. Rather than present the six families as historical subjects, the team used them to represent the broader uncertainties and choices faced by migrants: leaving established social surroundings, travelling to a new capital and building lives in a city that was still being reshaped.
The distinction between representation and evidence is important. Kamal Banerjea, one of a seven-member curation team, said the presentation does not claim to represent the entire Bengali migration to Delhi. Bengali communities in Kashmere Gate and Chandni Chowk, and later in Karol Bagh, Minto Road and areas around Kali Bari, were also part of the wider story. The Timarpur account is therefore a focused entry point into a larger urban history rather than a complete map of Bengali settlement.
The team spent six months assembling the material. It filed Right to Information applications with different departments, searched digital archives in Delhi and consulted old wedding invitations and receipts preserved by community members. It also examined railway companies and routes connecting Calcutta with Delhi, looking for tickets and other evidence of the journey.
This method reveals a recurring problem in documenting urban change: the people who shape neighbourhoods are not always preserved in formal records. Government files may establish the existence of a colony or an administrative decision, but everyday histories can survive in personal papers, invitations, receipts and family collections. In Timarpur, community-held documents helped fill gaps left by the absence of records identifying the families who migrated during the period.
The exhibition’s physical treatment of those materials also reflects an attempt to make archival research accessible to a public audience. Old documents and letters were reproduced using illustration software, treated with tea water to create an aged appearance and printed using offset printing rather than digital printing. Banerjea said artificial intelligence was used in the process, while most of the creative work came from the team.
The display therefore operates on two levels. It is a cultural event rooted in a long-running religious tradition, and it is also an informal archive of a neighbourhood’s relationship with the city. The Durga Puja, which organisers identify as Delhi’s second oldest and which has endured since 1914, provides an institutional continuity through which the migration story can be publicly revisited. The annual gathering becomes a setting for connecting present-day community life with the administrative and transport changes that preceded it.
The Timarpur narrative also complicates the idea that Delhi’s communities emerged only from later planned development. The story begins with a capital in transition, a railway route linking Calcutta and Delhi, temporary quarters for arriving families and a network of settlements that eventually extended across different parts of the city. The names of Kashmere Gate, Chandni Chowk, Karol Bagh, Minto Road and areas around Kali Bari indicate that community formation was distributed across Delhi rather than confined to one colony.
At the same time, the supplied evidence does not establish how many Bengali migrants arrived, how long families remained in temporary quarters or how government housing was allocated. It also does not document the occupations, income levels or legal status of the families represented by the exhibition. These gaps are not filled by the organisers’ fictional reconstructions. They remain questions for further archival and municipal research.
What the display does establish is a connection between three forces in Delhi’s early urbanisation: the relocation of the imperial capital, the expansion of railway connectivity and the creation of government accommodation. Together, they altered who could reach the city, where new arrivals could initially live and how communities could reproduce their social and cultural life.
That connection offers a useful way to read Delhi’s urban history from the ground up. Capitals are often described through official plans, administrative boundaries and major buildings. But the city also takes shape through journeys, temporary housing, preserved documents and recurring neighbourhood institutions. The Timarpur Puja’s archive brings those less visible processes into public view while acknowledging that the record remains incomplete.
The next stage for this history depends on how such community archives are preserved and connected with official records. For now, the exhibition’s documented contribution is narrower but valuable: it introduces the legacy of Bengali families who arrived during a formative period in Delhi’s development and places their movement within the city’s railway, housing and settlement history.
