Old Delhi, Delhi, India | 2023: The video starts just at the northern edge of Chandni Chowk as we walk north along the Lothian road on a lovely weekend morning. We walk until we reach the old St. Stephen's College building and the St. James. Church. Unfortunately we are are allowed in to the church because of ongoing renovation work inside.
St. James Church was built by an anglo-Indian called James Skinner who was an officer in the British Indian Army. Skinner is also buried within the. church complex and so is his bureaucrat British compatriot, William Fraser. From the St. James Church to walk east towards a big palatial building which is now a government office but which at one point in time used to be the house of British bureaucrat William Fraser.
As expected we are not allowed in to this government building either so we keep walking until we reach another seemingly British era building which is in the area and now stands mostly abandoned with only a few pieces of different colored clothes donning its front.
We keep walking from this area towards the walled city gates of Kashmere Gate. While Kashmere Gate today is an entire area, technically the term refers to the gates that were build into the wall of Chandni Chowk or Shahjahanabad in the north direction. We reach and relax at the site of Kashmere Gate which is now mostly abandoned but is still a site to behold amidst all the chaos that exists all around it. Interestingly, the Kashmere Gate gates are right adjacent to the Kashmere Gate Inter-State Bus Terminus (ISBT).
We week walking and after traveling around a kilometer reach the other side of Kashmere Gate area where a historical cemetery from the British times is located. This is the Nicholson Cemetery named after another British commander and army officer, John Nicholson. This cemetery houses the graves of many Britishers from the time around India's first fight for Independence, also called Mutiny of 1857. This cemetery presents a very calm, quiet, and eerie look today even though it is located in one of the noisiest areas of this part of the city. We end our walk here in the calm, amid the graves of hundreds of Britishers and Indians who died over the last 165 years.
16 окт 2024
