"‘Imagining Capital in the City: Urban Life in DLF’s Public Projection, 1949-1960", Anish Vanaik, Purdue University

Delhi Land and Finance (DLF), now India’s largest real estate firm, first muscled its way into Indian urban development in the late 1940s. About a decade later, Delhi’s Master Plan of 1961 - brought private land development to a close in the city. Between 1950 and 1960, however, DLF’s spurt of urban development was spectacularly successful, creating close to 30 ‘colonies’ in the rapidly expanding city. Among the distinctive elements of DLF’s activity in this period was a determined effort to build a public brand. This drew on a fascinating set of ambient ideas: a future of plenitude, a present of resilient response to emergency, reliable engineering and an unabashed embrace of urban modernity. Through a range of materials relating to DLF’s public projection, including advertisements, naming conventions and brochures, in English, Hindi and Urdu this paper reconstructs the elements of the early DLF brand. In the process, it argues, that we see the early presence of an imagining of city life in the aftermath of Partition that was quite distinct from bothDelhi’s own traditions and the modernity promised in the Master Plan.