MCD heritage cell sends five-member survey team to document oral histories across 100 Delhi villages

Delhi’s heritage problem is not just about crumbling domes and old stone. It is also about songs no one records, wedding rituals no one writes down, and village origin stories that survive only because a few elders still remember them. That is the gap the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is now trying to close. Its heritage cell has sent a small survey team into 100 villages across the capital to build an archive of oral histories and everyday traditions before urban change wipes them out. ### Why are Delhi’s villages suddenly the story? Because Delhi is not only a megacity. It is also a patchwork of old settlements that were villages long before they were absorbed into the capital’s sprawl. Many still carry their own fairs, shrines, dialect traces, kinship stories, and seasonal customs. But the pressure is obvious — roads widen, farms disappear, younger residents move into city life, and memory stops being something a whole community shares. ### What is the MCD team actually collecting? Not just dates and place names. The team is documenting birth and marriage customs, death rituals, local bhajans, village legends, old photographs, and stories about temples, ponds, and settlement origins. They are also asking very basic but revealing questions — where children studied, how people traveled, what food was cooked for ceremonies, what women sang at weddings, and how festivals were observed in practice. ### How big is the project? The headline number is 100 villages, drawn from roughly 350 to 360 urban villages in Delhi. But the work is being staged. The first phase covers 25 villages spread across zones including Najafgarh, Narela, South Delhi, Civil Lines, Central Delhi, and Karol Bagh. Villages named in the early list include Begumpur, Chirag Dilli, Mehrauli, Hauz Khas, Isapur, Budhpur, Munirka, Dhansa, Palam, Jaunti, Nizamuddin, Rani Khera, Bawana, Narela, Wazirabad, and Chandrawal. (hindustantimes.com) ### Who is doing the work on the ground? The reporting is a little messy on team size — some accounts describe a five-member survey team, while another says four members from the heritage cell are doing the fieldwork. What is clear is that this is a very small operation for a very large task. The team spends about a week in each village and often returns 6 or 7 times, because elders can speak for hours and different residents sometimes tell conflicting versions of the same story. (hindustantimes.com) That is not a bug. It is basically how oral history works. ### What have they found so far? Quite a lot, even in the early rounds. In Jharoda, the team recorded a local account that the village takes its name from a woman named Jhado, treated as a kind of ancestral grandmother by the community. In Naraina, they found a Holi tradition built around dhons — large kettle drums — with one shared Holika bonfire for the whole village rather than several separate ones. These are exactly the kinds of practices that disappear quietly if nobody documents them. (hindustantimes.com) ### Why does this matter beyond nostalgia? Because official heritage work usually privileges buildings. Delhi’s own heritage cell website is still centered on hundreds of physical heritage sites — monuments, structures, ruins, architectural details. This project widens the frame. It treats villages as living heritage, where memory, ritual, and community practice matter as much as masonry. That is a meaningful shift in what counts as worth preserving. (hindustantimes.com) ### Where does all this material go? The plan is to catalogue the recordings, photographs, and notes at Town Hall in Chandni Chowk as part of a larger municipal museum project. So this is not just fieldwork for a report that disappears into a file. The idea is to turn scattered village memory into a civic archive. (heritage.mcd.gov.in) ### Bottom line? Delhi is finally trying to preserve something cities usually lose first — not monuments, but memory. And memory is fragile. Once the last people who carry it are gone, there is no restoration project that can bring it back. (hindustantimes.com)