Delhiwale: Life’s feast with Jane Austen
2025 marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday, inspiring a Delhi Jane Austen Society to discuss her works and local social issues over chai and biskuts.
Surely no enjoyment is as amiable as reading Jane Austen. The year 2025 might be one more year of busy nothings, but it does mark the 250th birth anniversary of the world’s greatest drawing-room novelist. (After all, when Jane Austen’s characters aren’t plotting about paisa-pyar-shaadi, they are found huddled in the drawing-room, gossiping about the weather and the lace on neighbour’s gown).
Jane Austen died at 41. In her brief life, she wrote only about what she knew most intimately—the lives of women and men of rural England. But her storytelling has magically transcended the hyperlocal, becoming relatable to all of us worldwide. Her heroines are our very own mummies and mausis, her heroes our jijajis and phoophajis.
The countdown to the great writer’s birthday (16th December!) is hereby launched with a piece this reporter once wrote about experiencing Delhi through her sensibilities. It was later excerpted in Claire Harman’s 2010 book Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World. Here’s the drastically re-written version:
Such happiness when good people get together, and they always should. Every Delhiwale shall be free to join Delhi’s Jane Austen Society, a reading group of our dreams. The condition being that the lady or the gentleman must have their lungs stained with Delhi’s foul air, and she or he must have read all the six Jane Austen novels.
Each Sunday evening, after the shopping expedition in Mahila Haat’s weekly Book Bazar, we Jane Austen bhakts shall walk to the Urdu Bazar, and agreeably settle down on the Jama Masjid stairs, all the time conducting small talk in a continual state of elegance. Over doodh-waali chai and elaichi biskuts, we shall read selections from Miss Austen’s novels. After which the floor shall be opened to social issues, starting with the latest fashions on arranged marriage lehengas. At some point, the agenda shall be allowed to drift to more democratic themes, precedence given to the concerns of Jumna-paar citizenry who persistently protest that one half of the other Dilli is unable to register the existence of their half.
{{/usCountry}}Each Sunday evening, after the shopping expedition in Mahila Haat’s weekly Book Bazar, we Jane Austen bhakts shall walk to the Urdu Bazar, and agreeably settle down on the Jama Masjid stairs, all the time conducting small talk in a continual state of elegance. Over doodh-waali chai and elaichi biskuts, we shall read selections from Miss Austen’s novels. After which the floor shall be opened to social issues, starting with the latest fashions on arranged marriage lehengas. At some point, the agenda shall be allowed to drift to more democratic themes, precedence given to the concerns of Jumna-paar citizenry who persistently protest that one half of the other Dilli is unable to register the existence of their half.
{{/usCountry}}The Society shall naturally encourage members to share their delights and disappointments in ishq-prem-mohabbat. (Whether raised in Vasant Kunj or Vikas Puri, you must have been touched with love a little now and then in the verdures of Lodhi Garden, or Nehru Park maybe?)
{{/usCountry}}The Society shall naturally encourage members to share their delights and disappointments in ishq-prem-mohabbat. (Whether raised in Vasant Kunj or Vikas Puri, you must have been touched with love a little now and then in the verdures of Lodhi Garden, or Nehru Park maybe?)
{{/usCountry}}The Society shall occasionally lead literary tours to landmarks such as Vikram Seth’s tony family estate in Noida, and the haunting remains of Mirza Ghalib’s rented property in Ballimaran. Fastidious members shall read aloud the respective writer’s immortal lines as feelingly as Marianne Dashwood recites Shakespeare’s sonnets in Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first published novel.
Last and least, it will be appreciated if some of the members command a large household on Golf Course Road or Golf Links Colony. So that the rest of us — the common gentry — can condescendingly attack these moneyed members with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions and distant surmises to gain titillating reportage on the private lives of Delhi’s extreme-wealthy.
At the end of the meet, members shall be obliged to speculate wildly on the next day’s AQI index.
Jai ho Jane.
