Making the city, undoing the river: urban policies and representations of the Yamuna in Delhi
This paper starts from a paradox: the city of Delhi is built on the banks of the Yamuna, a river of great religious and historical significance, yet seems to turn its back on it, the river being largely absent from the city's contemporary experience and imagination. Writer Rana Dasgupta, among others, notes the "denial" of the Yamuna by the inhabitants of the Indian capital, which has become a toxic net of sewage and chemical effluents. This symbolic divorce between the city and the river is partly rooted in colonial urban policies which, while drawing water from the river to supply the city, developed the new imperial capital away from the Yamuna, whose landscape was deemed unpleasant.
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