Jangpura, Part I: Some history

Last night I was hanging out with my friends Alice, Pooja, and Anand. Alice and Pooja also live in Jangpura, and Pooja has been working in Bhogal Market (which is in Jangpura) for the past few months. Pooja introduced me to Jangpura's interesting history, so I decided to look it up. Here's what I found out about my neighborhood:

Today's Bhogal Market used to be a village on the (Old) Delhi-Mathura road known as Bhogal. In the early 19th century, as the British expanded the city and established a "New" Delhi, someone named Colonel Charles Young relocated a village called Raisina to a new settlement adjacent to Bhogal village called "Youngpura" (Young Village) in order to make room for the viceroy's palace--now Rashtrapati Bhavan, where the President of India resides--atop Raisina Hill. Youngpura and adjacent Bhogal eventually became what is today known as Jangpura, obviously a distortion of the original name of Youngpura.

In 1947, when British India got its independence and was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Punjabi refugees from the Pakistani side of the border settled in Jangpura. (This explains the disproportionate number of Sikhs in my neighborhood.) Jangpura became a planned colony for the Partition refugees. Plots of land, formerly farmland, were set aside for houses and parks. As more and more people came to Jangpura, the neighborhood had to expand and Jangpura Extension was created.

(NOTE: I got a lot of this information from blogs, so I can't guarantee that this history is 100% true.)

Today, Jangpura/Bhogal continues its tradition of welcoming displaced people; many refugees from Afghanistan have settled here, especially in Bhogal. Pooja told me that many shops in Bhogal Market are owned by Afghanis. I had no idea they weren't Indian! Apparently you can tell someone is Afghani if he is super nice (according to Pooja, all the Afghanis are very sweet) or speaks broken Hindi (I wouldn't even notice).

Stay tuned for Jangpura, Part II: Why I love living here.