How some of Delhi’s erstwhile ‘refugee colonies’ evolved into upscale neighbourhoods

Born in 1943 and raised in what was then Khirki village, on the southern fringes of Delhi, the area, he recalls, would be surrounded by farmlands back then; its boundaries defined less by roads than by fields and open terrain. The upheaval of the Partition of India in 1947 brought with it a sudden and visible transformation. For those who witnessed it, the arrival of the refugees from across the newly-drawn border between India and Pakistan was not an abstract historical event but an everyday reality. Families arrived with little to their name—dispossessed, disoriented, and dependent.

“They would often come asking for some milk for their children,” Singh remembers, a reflection of the difficult conditions in the camps that had been set up to accommodate those coming from across the newly drawn borders.

And yet, alongside these memories of precarity sits a sense of disbelief at what followed. “Now look at their kothis [bungalows],” he says, pointing towards neighbourhoods that, within a generation, have transformed into some of the city’s most affluent and upscale localities.

Those who had once arrived with nothing to Delhi have become property owners, professionals, and businesspeople, central to the economic and cultural life of the city.

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Earlier this month, the Delhi high court, while permitting restaurants at the city’s upscale Khan Market to operate without a no-objection certificate from the fire department as long as they were not accommodating more than 50 guests at a time, reportedly described the market as the “shaan” [pride] of the national capital and a “heritage commercial hub”.

Interestingly, however, Khan market, a symbol of luxury today, had started out as a small market with 154 shops and 74 flats allotted to refugees from the erstwhile North West Frontier Province (NWFP, which became a part of Pakistan following Partition). It was named after the iconic leader Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, who was from the same region.

Back in 1947, Delhi was one of the Indian cities worst hit by communal riots associated with the Partition and resulting mass migration.

According to historian Gyanendra Pandey’s accounts, between 20-25 thousand Muslims were killed and over 330,000 Muslims had left Delhi for the newly formed Pakistan. The result was a shrunken and scarred city reduced by 350,000 to a population of only 570,000. However, with the arrival of the refugees from partitioned Punjab, Sindh and NWFP, the population surged again by a million in 1951 to reach 1,744,072, he wrote. The city also became “an overwhelmingly Punjabi city”, a representation and often a stereotype that continues to hold today. Pandey adds that the population of Muslims in the national capital had declined from 33.22 per cent in 1941 to 5.33 per cent in 1951.

As the newly-independent nation continued to build itself as a republic, it also had the immense task of permanently resettling the refugees. Delhi started to expand as the newly-established The Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation started to allot land and housing, creating some of the very first planned colonies of the city. Neighbourhoods such as Patel Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Moti Nagar, Malviya Nagar and Lajpat Nagar appeared within a few years, named after nationalist leaders.

Forty-eight-year-old homemaker, Prem Kumar, who grew up near Kamla Nagar and now lives in Panchsheel Park, has an easy way to identify colonies which had started off as neighbourhoods to accommodate the refugees. “A typical marker of these colonies is the suffix ‘nagar’. You see, all of them are also markets. That’s all the doing of the Punjabis who came to the city with nothing and did all kinds of businesses in these new neighbourhoods,” she says.

Delhi’s experience was only one version of a much wider story. Across India, refugee resettlement produced very different urban forms, from planned colonies to informal settlements. According to available accounts, several refugee camps had come up in Haryana, Punjab and western UP, with the Kurukshetra camp (in Haryana) being the largest, hosting over five lakhs refugees. In Punjab, industrial towns such as Ambala and Ludhiana absorbed refugees into small-scale manufacturing and trade. Jaipur in Rajasthan absorbed over 40,000 Sindhi and Punjabi refugees, initially settled in Amber and Durgapura camps. Three markets, Bapu Bazaar, Indira Bazaar and Nehru Bazaar, were created to settle these communities, noted a 2017 paper by the Kolkata-based Mahanirban Kolkata Research Group. The story of Kolkata, another city that received a large refugee population owing to its locational proximity to East Pakistan — and later Bangladesh, following its partition from Pakistan in 1971 — was purportedly marked by informality and precarity.

Tellingly, though, rehabilitation did not erase the hierarchies the refugees brought with them; it reproduced and entrenched them in new spaces. Affluent upper caste families with resources and political connections were given prime locations at the centre of the city, while Dalit and poor migrants were pushed to the margins into colonies that lacked basic amenities, point out researchers.

Take, for example, Regharpura, located next to Karol Bagh. The settlement first came up during colonial times, when leather tanners from the Regar community in Rajasthan, who had been employed in construction work for New Delhi, were settled here. Historian Ravindar Kaur in her book Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi migrants of Delhi, shows how the logic of caste was built into the rehabilitation. The Ministry of Rehabilitation had, as early as February 15, 1948, established a “Harijan section” specifically to address the housing needs of uprooted Dalit communities, allocating funds for colonies such as Regharpura, she writes. By August 1948, the Regharpura scheme was nearing completion, with two cooperative housing societies formed and a modest share capital of Rs 4,000 raised. These were initially huts, later replaced by modest tin sheds, markedly different from the land allocations made to upper-caste Punjabi Hindus.

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A popular perception of “refugee colonies” in Delhi is that of livelihoods associated with markets and trade.

Unlike many other forms of state housing, partition colonies quickly became sites of intense economic activity. With limited access to formal employment, they turned their homes into sites of production and commerce, with ground floors often used as shops and upper floors for living. “We Punjabis are very enterprising. We had nothing when we came here, so we didn’t have to fear anything that an old Delhi family would. No job was too lowly for us. My family had a clothing business in Lahore and owned farmlands. Once here, we did everything to survive . My parents sold homemade crochet on the roadside, then put up a stall and then I bought and expanded this store. You go to any market today, it is a Punjabi market,” shares 59-year-old Pradeep Pahwa, who owns a clothing store in Malviya Nagar Market.

Most of the large Delhi markets today, such as Lajpat Nagar, Kamla Nagar, Malviya Nagar and Khan Market, trace their origins back to the 1950s. Khan Market started out as a humble neighbourhood market that met everyday needs with grocery shops, books, photo studios and clothing. Owing to its proximity to the quarters of diplomats and civil servants in central Delhi, it soon became popular with the elite, eventually evolving into what it is today, with its cafes and luxury boutiques, while still retaining some of the old stores. According to a 2025 ranking, the market was the 24th most expensive retail space in the world.

A slightly different but equally significant trajectory can be seen in Chittaranjan Park (CR Park), a colony that emerged a decade later to accommodate refugees from East Bengal. After the Partition of India, the intelligentsia and civil servants of erstwhile Bengal found themselves divided between East and West Bengal. While West Bengal remained within India, many from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) migrated to Indian cities, including Delhi, in the years following the Partition. Unlike the waves of Punjabi refugees, these migrants were often educated professionals who began to collectively demand a planned residential colony in the capital.

In 1954, a group of them formed the East Pakistan Displaced Persons Association to lobby the government for land. It was only in the 1960s that this demand materialised, when plots were allotted in what were then the far-flung southern stretches of the city, surrounded by Jahanpanah forest — largely uninhabited, rocky, and forested terrain.

Initially called the East Pakistan Displaced Persons (EPDP) Colony, the area developed into a distinct Bengali enclave, shaped by shared language, food, and cultural life. “It is our mini Kolkata. From distinctly Bengali spices and vegetables to culinary favourites like luchi [poori] and soojir payesh [rawa halwa], there are things that you either find in a Calcutta market or a CR park market,” shares 35-year-old Aruna Banerjee, whose father was one of the early residents of the colony.

Over the decades, location played a significant role in the transformation of the erstwhile ‘refugee colonies’ into some of Delhi’s upscale locations. Many partition colonies, initially on the outskirts of the city, were eventually subsumed within the expanding city and became the commercial hubs.

“Lodhi Road was the southern boundary of the imperial suburban open fields and scrub lay beyond, where jackals howled and black bucks roamed,” writes Ranjana Sengupta, in an anthology, City Improbable: An Anthology of Writings on Delhi. The city expanded southwards from there, with Nizamuddin being one of the first colonies to be developed for elites from Karachi, just on the outskirts.

Sheetal Marwah, a 62-year-old resident of Greater Kailash (GK) 1, recalls how the colony was surrounded by forests and open fields up until the 1980s. “It was not uncommon to see a nilgai or even a black buck. Everything changed from the 1990s onwards. Suddenly, we found ourselves in the middle of a metropolis. And you see the condition today; there is no place to walk”. Her father had been a wealthy transport business owner in Lahore, who came to Delhi after Partition, she says. That was how the family ended up in GK.

Over the decades, as the city grew southwards and westwards, places like GK, Lajpat Nagar and Rajinder Nagar became well-connected, benefiting from road networks, public transport, and proximity to employment centres. This spatial advantage translated directly into rising property values. Several erstwhile refugee colonies, especially in south Delhi, came to be associated with higher property values, better infrastructure, and aspirational lifestyles. In contrast, colonies further removed from this south-central axis have not experienced the same degree of valorisation, even if they have remained economically stable, say those working in the real estate business.

“It’s all about connectivity — many lawyers live here because courts are close. Otherwise, too, all good markets, schools and hospitals are in the locality,” says Navraj Sahni, a property dealer in the Lajpat Nagar and Jangpura areas. He adds: “The plots are larger and there’s a certain prestige attached to these areas; people want that address and that’s what keeps pushing the demand and prices up.”

Across south Delhi localities like Lajpat Nagar, GK, Malviya Nagar and CR Park, old residences are giving way to newer, multi-level apartments; with some original residents at times selling off to move to localities like Noida, Gurgaon and Faridabad.

Ajay Chawla, a 50-year-old trader of spices was born in Malviya Nagar. “My family lived in the Kingsway Camp [later known as Guru Teg Bahadur Nagar] for a few months before we were given this land. I was born here. The colony used to be quiet and green, with only one-storied family homes. But now as families have expanded and costs have gone up, everyone has moved to builder floors. You can see how congested it is,” he says, waving in the general direction of the neighbourhood.

Not far off, in CR Park, Kajal Das, a broker, claims in the past five years he has seen about 60 houses being pulled down to make way for newer apartments. “A three-bedroom apartment in this neighbourhood now costs anything between Rs 3.5 to 6 crores,” he says, adding, “Property prices have nearly doubled here in the past five-ten years.”

Often the constructions end up changing the demographics of the area, the uniqueness of each colony, replacing them with a homogenised, urban character.

“Growing up, the place was almost entirely Bengali. You knew everyone and the culture was very rooted. Now it’s much more cosmopolitan, with professionals from across the country moving in and many of the older families have children settled abroad. It is also more crowded and less green. Maybe in a few years, our colony will look like any other in Delhi. But during Durga Puja, it still feels like the old days; that same sense of community comes back, even if just for a few days,” says Banerjee.

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Rajendra Nagar, in the central zone, has a similar story. Once a neighbourhood of quiet lanes and art deco styled homes that came up here in the 1950s, it has evolved into an upscale neighbourhood and a preferred location for bureaucrats and others working in Lutyens’s Delhi [central New Delhi area built by British architect Edwin Lutyens and so often referred to by his name].

Urvashi Chhatwal, 52, an old resident. Her own family had come from Lahore and settled in Kamla Nagar in North Delhi. She moved to Rajendra Nagar after she got married. Her two sons now live in Gurgaon and the couple continues to live in their old neighbourhood. “I don’t think I could feel at home anywhere else now,” she says.

For those renting homes in the area, though, it's just a matter of time before they move to a place they can call their own.

“I moved here (New Rajendra Nagar) almost three years back and rents have steadily increased despite failing amenities; broken roads, monsoon flooding, lack of parking space and electricity cuts,” says Deepali Singh, a lawyer by profession.

What still makes it “posh”, as any builder and property dealer will claim, is the “location”.

But Singh adds: “Posh is really just a label. It doesn’t mean the problems disappear, only that you’re paying more to manage them.”

It’s the same disillusionment voiced by Sasha (identified by first name only), as she strolls down Khan Market. “While cycles have been replaced by luxury cars, the experience has become worse. I only come for some of the old-time stores, especially bookstores like Baharisons; otherwise, the market has lost its charm. Every day it is dug up; you can no longer walk and all the space is taken up by cars,” she complains.

And so, as Delhi continues to evolve, the pattern emerges: a consolidation of wealth and aspiration within central zones, even as physical expansion continues outwards, populated by the working class, rehabilitation colonies and marginalised groups. The very colonies that once symbolised mobility, openness, and expansion are now showing signs of saturation. The kothis that once stood as markers of success have been divided, rebuilt, and stacked into vertical units; the neighbourhoods that once lay on the edge are now firmly at the centre — dense, expensive, and increasingly crumbling.