A City of Corruption Post-Independence Delhi in Fikr Taunsvi's Pyaz ke Chhilke

Abstract

This article analyses the portrayal of post-independence Delhi in Pyaz ke Chhilke (Onion Peels or Onion Skins)—a popular satirical column published regularly in the Urdu daily Milap. The column was written by Fikr Taunsvi (1918–1987), an Urdu writer and Partition refugee who settled in Delhi. Based on an analysis of several hundred previously unstudied columns, the article identifies two crucial features of Taunsvi’s depiction of 1950s Delhi: a focus on the everyday and a representation of the city as a space of corruption. Published almost daily, the columns offer a rare, close-range view of urban life, capturing the everyday concerns of the city’s poor, lower-middle, and middle classes, and the routines, interactions, and transactions that unfold across urban spaces. Making the ordinary and routine the focus of writing is both an aesthetic and political choice—an exercise that ultimately reveals an ambivalence between emancipatory politics and an implicit sense of defeat. The various instances of political and societal venality, along with repeated attention to chronic inflation, unemployment, poverty, and broken urban infrastructure, point to corruption in its original sense: a departure from what is correct, the adulteration of a pure form. It signals a departure from the promises of the Nehruvian postcolonial state and the growing frustration of the citizenry. The article supports recent arguments that (anti)corruption—now recognised as a dominant force in independent India’s political shifts—had already emerged as a major concern in public discourse during decolonisation, shaping the interface between citizens and the state.