Delhi’s ridge was once a shared, sacred landscape. Now faith needs permission

It begins, as it has for generations, on a crisp Diwali morning in Devli – an urban village in south Delhi nestled between the residential colonies of Sangam Vihar and farmhouses of Chattarpur. Cauldrons bubble with dal, puris are fanned into steel trays, and elders hum bhajans to Mahamai: the village deity believed to have shielded the community through illness and upheaval for over a century. It’s the annual bhandara, a collective act of gratitude. But now, before the first flame is lit or the first offering made, there’s a question on everyone’s lips:

“Will the authorities allow us this year?”

Mahamai’s shrine sits quietly on the Aravalli ridge that once marked the village’s edge. Today, it’s an uncertain border between Devli’s collective memory and Delhi’s bureaucratic present. Forest guards patrol it. Entry is conditional. Worship, negotiable.

Oral histories from Devli recall the shrine’s origins amidst tragedy. Long before cremation grounds came nearby, villagers carried their dead to the banks of the Yamuna. Then, an epidemic referred to as mahamari struck with such ferocity that the act of transporting the deceased became impossible. Pyres burned in relentless succession, grief stacked upon grief. With nowhere left to turn, Devli’s residents sanctified the ridge, placing Mahamai there as protector and witness. The symptoms and timeline align with the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic, but the villagers didn’t name it that. They remembered the fever, the breathlessness, and the fear.

For over a hundred years since, families have walked the same stony path to offer prayers, until 2018, when guards blocked the route. Locals were forced to seek written permission to access a site consecrated by their own ancestors. That dissonance of asking entry into a sacred space born out of collective mourning has left a lasting wound. The bhandara still continues, but with caveats: last-minute calls to officials, documentation trails, and a sense of being unwelcome guests on their own land, which is now merely part of the Delhi ridge, devoid of longstanding cultural links between this protected natural environment and its erstwhile inhabitants.

Ridge before its management

The ridge, as the rocky outcrop of the Aravalli hills, is part of one of the oldest geological formations on Earth, and a place steeped in history. It is part of a range that is today also at the centre of a raging debate between development, through mining and urbanisation, or environmental conservation, through protection for nature from humans such as the declaration of the ridge in Delhi as mostly reserved forests and a wildlife sanctuary. And yet this conservation story of the Aravallis and the Delhi ridge is not a history of pristine nature, untouched by human activity or settlement. 

Rather, as various archaeological finds along with modern historical records have affirmed time and again, the ridge has always been inhabited for its geographical advantages, ranging from the prehistoric Stone Ages to both precolonial and colonial times, with the British particularly choosing Raisina Hill as the vantage point to establish their colonial seat of power in New Delhi that we then inherited. 

Furthermore, as the ridge crosses the border into Haryana, there is the sacred forested landscape of Mangar Bani, which has also remained till today only due to its ties to human cultures that inhabited the surroundings and believed these woods to be sacred. Thus, ensuring their protection through community-enforced principles that thereafter evolved into Panchayati rule and is now considered a sacred grove deemed as a forest by the government of Haryana. 

But this form of community-driven protection has ended, at least in the parts of the Aravallis that lie within Delhi, with Panchayati Raj having been phased out of Delhi since the late 1980s. The result is a bureaucratically bounded, enclosed and governmentally-administered vision of this natural inheritance in Delhi’s urbanising landscape bereft of the socio-cultural logics and traditional legacies that protected these sacred geographies before, and over much longer periods of human history.

Colonial zoning and our vanishing village commons

Devli is one such village of the Delhi ridge whose past represents communal ties with this natural landscape, ties that were wrought through an active relation with this natural landscape as its sacred geography sustaining both conservation goals and meaningful relationships between its inhabitants and their natural habitats. But then Devli was urbanised alongside Delhi’s colonial and postcolonial expansion. 

Land use planning and attendant logics of zoning areas into prescribed categories practised by the British for extractive or aesthetic purposes cordoned off village commons across India into forests and green cover over the course of the twentieth century. This transformed symbiotic relationships between rural communities and their natural environs into systems of conditional use and access. The colonial reclassification of surrounding natural landscapes into uncultivable wastelands, along with the declaration of denser woodlands as areas protected or reserved for forests, all translated as a failure: to honour the entwined relationship that sustained human life and activity in relation with their natural settings in this region. 

Urbanisation of Delhi after India’s independence only accelerated the cleavage between inhabitants and their environments as bureaucratic and judicial orders mapped into the green zones of the Delhi masterplan added new restrictions and limits for ridge management. This simultaneously fuelled an informal economy of urban expansions outside the purview of the masterplan leading to the development of Sainik Farms and Sangam Vihar around Devli. Due to all these colonial and postcolonial developments, apart from the acquisition of vast tracts of agropastoral lands for Delhi’s urban expansion, villages of its ridge experienced an enforced disconnect from the natural landscapes that they had revered as well as sustained their culture and livelihoods from.

On this note, the older villagers from Devli fondly remember how the johad, the community pond and the ridge areas were providing resources to the whole village like wood for fuel, grazing grounds for the livestock and water for cattle. It was this substantive relationship with the ridge that was ultimately the ground for its sacrality, and proved to be the source of faith in Mahamai's motherhood towards its children, the villagers. 

As Balbir Singh, a village elder in his seventies, affirmatively described in a heavy helpless tone: “When we had nothing, Mahamai was still there. The village’s first breath, its first rites, all began on that hill. Now we have to ask for permission to go there. It feels like folding our hands just to meet our own mother." Restrictions on accessing this village shrine illustrate what happens when community ties through faith become collateral in the clash between ecological regulation and cultural rights. It poses an uncomfortable question: when the state draws new boundaries, whose memories get fenced out?

Urbanisation and new boundaries of governing access

However, as the villagers have witnessed recently, the fencing of these sacred geographies and the implications they bear for conserving the ridge have only accelerated as processes of urbanisation advance into peripheral areas in Delhi. 

In Delhi’s city planning lexicon, Devli was declared an urban village only in 2019, even though residential colonies and densely built farmhouses have dominated its semi-urban landscape for decades. Then in September 2020, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs placed its Gaon Sabha areas under the control of the Delhi Development Authority for the purpose of development and maintenance. This was also the time when accessing the ridge became even more difficult for the villagers and neighbouring residents. Something that had not happened since portions of the Southern Ridge were notified as Reserved Forests during the 1990s or even when in 1996 the Supreme Court directed that uncultivated surplus lands of Devli’s Gaon Sabha falling in the ridge be made available to the forest department to protect this portion of the Aravallis in the Delhi ridge.

This troubling experience of the villagers and surrounding communities that visit and cultivate relationships across many such sacred sites located in the Delhi Ridge, begets the question of how did the broader story of development and urbanisation in the capital impact other villages in Delhi and their relationship to similar sacred geographies.

Learning from Shadipur and Khampur Raya

As an example of a historically relevant link, Shadipur village in central Delhi serves us well where such cultural access has been preserved before and after India’s independence. 

As long-term residents explain, the village played a key role in rehabilitating refugees during and after the Partition. Its lands were used to build dedicated housing colonies in Delhi, while the village community offered work and support to the newcomers.

Located close to the existing extent of urban development in Delhi during those times, Shadipur became one of the earliest villages to be declared urban in 1966 as part of the capital city’s planned expansion after India’s independence. Its success story offers a glimpse into how villagers were earlier able to negotiate rights and permissions for access to their sacred geographies subsumed by the city, particularly for cultural events and gatherings, which last even today. This example offers hope in terms of how durable such relationships can turn out to be when sustained by the community with the authorities, despite changing governance arrangements since the IARI campus colloquially known as Pusa Institute, where their shrine is located, was originally established in Delhi in 1936 on village lands that do not belong to Shadipur residents anymore.

Another example lies in neighbouring Khampur Raya, next to Shadipur, where parts of the village fall within Delhi’s Central Ridge. Here too, access to sacred geographies has been restricted, not for conservation or the city’s development, but due to neoliberal pressures linked to private sector involvement in Delhi’s urbanisation. This case is a unique situation where a historical artists colony called Kathputli colony established on the lands of this village, is being redeveloped after its declaration as a slum under a public-private partnership between DDA and Raheja developers. 

Due to this privatised mode of development, the village deity’s abode has ended up inside the new luxury housing complex that has been developed by the real estate developer as part of this deal. Subsequently, access to this place has been drastically limited. While villagers of Khampur Raya have protested and demanded rights for an easier way to visit their deity, entry from the main gate still entails providing personal identification details, and the possibility of denial looms, especially for the general public who often choose to participate in and enrich the cultural lives of such sacred geographies in Delhi.

Who gets to protect the ridge?

Ultimately, demands of planned urbanisation and calls for environmental protection in Delhi-NCR will only continue to grow with the impending approval of Delhi’s Master Plan for 2041, as the long drawn battle in the region between mining and development in the Aravallis or their protection and conservation continues. 

But these stories from villages of the Delhi ridge also raise a different set of questions: Who can truly conserve environmentally sensitive landscapes and how? Can only the government and its bureaucratic arm police such spaces or do urbanising village communities and surrounding urban inhabitants also have a role to play in such bottom-up conservation? Are the present forms of developmental, commercial or environmental logics sufficient to protect such complex natural landscapes? Or do we also need to reaffirm the cultural value of these sacred geographies but in more modern, pluralistic terms as the syncretic co-existence of both village deities and Sufi pir baba shrines dotting the Delhi ridge already demonstrates? Also, how can our planned urban transitions become more sensitive to cultural practices and histories that precede them? And finally, beyond the pressing question of conserving their sacred geographies, can there be a broader balance that can be struck between Delhi as the capital territory and Delhi as a city built from villages?

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