Book Excerpt: And quiet flowed the Yamuna, from Lal Kot to New Delhi

"View of Delhi from the river showing the King's Palace. Engraving from 1858, Engraver Unkown Photo by D Walker". Credit: iStock

Amoeba-like, the boundaries of Delhi have shifted shape. Over the centuries, various rulers established at least nine ancient and medieval cities in Mehrauli, Siri Fort, Firozabad, Shahjahanabad, Shergarh, Quila Rai Pithora and nearby sites. Despite a dizzy dance of changing allegiances, the Yamuna River remained a constant fixture in the lives of the city’s residents, supplying the city with water through a network of tributaries and streams, canals, stepwells and tanks.

One of the oldest such water-holding structures in Delhi is Surajkund. This tank was built by Tomar Rajputs in the eighth century, along with Badkhal Lake. Hauz-i-Shamsi, the largest water tank in Delhi, was built in the thirteenth century by Sultan Iltutmish (father of Razia Sultana, the only woman monarch of Delhi). In the fourteenth century, Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the king of the Delhi Sultanate, diverted the waters of the Yamuna through a canal directly into his fort, Firoz Shah Kotla, thus ensuring that the wells in the fort never ran dry. These channels were later maintained and repaired by the Mughal kings Akbar and Jahangir, and further extended during Shah Jahan’s reign. By 1843, Shahjahanabad had 600 wells which supplied the city with water. Small streams were connected to ponds and tanks, and used to recharge groundwater, which then fed the wells and their larger counterparts, the baolis of Delhi.

By 1803, the city belonged to the British. The expanding colonial city needed an ever-increasing supply of water. The water bodies of Delhi were failing, becoming polluted and falling into disrepair.

The Ali Mardan Khan Canal, constructed during Shah Jahan’s reign to conduct water from the Yamuna to the Red Fort, was an engineering marvel. Fed by the Yamuna and the Sabi rivers, the canal supplied many nearby tanks with water. By the mid-eighteenth century, this once-glorious canal lacked water.

Although the British administration restored the canal in the early nineteenth century, they did not understand the importance of the connection between the canal and its tanks, leaving the tanks dry. In 1846, another tank was built to supply drinking water to Delhi, but its water became brackish and unfit for drinking within just a few years. Writing to his friend Yusuf Mirza in 1859, the famous poet Mirza Ghalib spoke bitterly about the destruction of his beloved city by the British.

From Ammu Jan’s Gate to the moat of the Fort, except for Lal Diggi and one or two wells, no trace of any building will remain . . . I should rejoice in the desolation of Delhi. When its residents have gone, then to hell with the city.

On their part, the British worried about the impact of traditional practices of night soil (human and animal faeces) disposal, in sewers and pits. Toxic discharge from these pits contaminated the subsoil, making its way to the Yamuna, giving rise to epidemics like cholera. Advancements in science and technology spurred their interest in finding technological solutions to the problem of water scarcity. By the mid-nineteenth century, advancements in water chemistry led to the development of quantitative tests to assess water quality. These tests convinced British administrators that much of Delhi’s drinking water was impure, unfit for consumption.

Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata) had moved to a piped water system to ensure the supply of clean water. Buoyed by this success, the British government directed the Delhi Municipal Committee (DMC) to develop a similar plan. In 1869, the DMC developed a proposal to supply piped water to Delhi, conveying it from unpolluted streams, canals and wells outside the city’s periphery. Although initial attempts were not very successful, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Delhi had a piped water network in place. Unfortunately, the city had also grown substantially by then. The waterworks system, sufficient for the needs of the nineteenth-century city, could only provide half the water the city required by the time it was built. The project also came with its social costs.

An entire hamlet, the village of Chandrawal, had to be removed and relocated to make way for the  project.

As the city grew, so did its appetite for water. By 1911, the British moved their capital from Calcutta to Delhi. They searched for a suitable location to build the new capital, one that could showcase the majesty of the British Empire. After rejecting the east bank of the Yamuna because it was too swampy, and the west bank because it was already developed, they settled on an area that lay between the Yamuna and the central ridge of the Aravalli Hills. This became Lutyens’ Delhi.

To supply the new capital with water, they built an additional pumping station on the Yamuna, but the shortage of water persisted.

Alongside water supply, the quality of water continued to be a cause for concern. Alum was used to precipitate impurities and chlorine to purify the water.

Yet contaminated sewage continued to make its way into Delhi’s water supply, causing frequent outbreaks of cholera and enteric diseases. Administrators began to restrict a number of activities which they termed ‘unsanitary’. In 1917, the British administration in Delhi banned the cultivation of melons within 1.6 km of the New Water Waterworks in Wazirabad, compensating the farmers for their loss of income. Failing to take the sociocultural realities of local relationships with water into account, they prohibited activities like bathing and washing in the river, banning the use of the riverbank by dhobis (washermen/washerwomen).

At the same time, they began to view the riverfront as a place of recreation, making plans for parks and a golf course. Although these plans did not materialize, a new imagination of the Yamuna came into play under the colonial administration. The prohibitions they put in place began a process of exclusion of local communities, distancing them from the river—a process whose signature is still visible.

Excerpted with permission from Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities by Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli@2023 by Penguin