‘Dreaming a Paradise’ book review: Insightful, thought-provoking and unsettling

In her book Dreaming a Paradise: Migrations and the Story of Buland Masjid, documentary photographer, filmmaker and writer Chitvan Gill writes (quoting from various sources): “… more than half the population of Delhi lives in ‘illegal, makeshift’ and unplanned shelters, which are, by and by, ‘regularised’, creating self-inflicted chaos… by 2019, 1,797 unauthorised colonies had come up on public or private land without any approved layout or building plans. An estimated four million people were living in these neighbourhoods…”

Numbers, which often rob the truth of its humanity, let the more privileged forget that these are people being talked of; people with feelings, who too have a right to aspire to something more than mere existence. It is these people Gill tries to acquaint us with in Dreaming a Paradise, a look, up close and personal, at the inhabitants of the area known as Buland Masjid, in Delhi’s Shastri Park area.

Gill near-bookends her work with chapters devoted to specific residents of Buland Masjid. There’s Maqsood in Chapter 2, who was forced as a child to give up studying because he is a Muslim. And yet he—like Haji Aneesud Din of Chapter 8, whose comfortable childhood fell apart after his father’s death—is a ‘good human being’, one who works not just for social welfare, but also for awareness. Gill tells the stories of Maqsood and Haji, and others like them with sensitivity and compassion, interspersing them with information, facts and insight. She quotes from literature, studies and memoirs to build up a compelling and disturbing picture of a ruthless world, engineered to serve the rich at the expense of the poor.

She also manages to effectively provide a nuanced view of how a migrant community like Buland Masjid may be worthy of both our admiration and compassion. She shows how the residents have hauled themselves up from dire poverty and turned their lives around to give their children an education good enough to move out.