If you’ve spent any time around Delhi University, you know how quickly it becomes a world of its own. The shorthand rolls off the tongue. North Campus. South Campus. Canteens, corridors, societies, library steps, a hundred conversations happening at once.

That’s why this detail stops you for a second when you first hear it. When the University of Delhi opened in 1922, it began from a rented space connected to the Ritz Cinema building at Kashmere Gate. There were no sprawling lawns waiting outside, and none of the familiar red-and-cream buildings either. Just a university trying to begin, inside the city, using the space it could get.

Early DU was small. The ambition was clear, but the set-up was still catching up. That gap between the plan on paper and what’s actually possible on the ground can feel familiar, whether you’ve worked in a newsroom, a college, or anywhere else where things are being built as they run.

So the university started where it could. The city already had buildings with rooms, entrances, schedules, movement.........

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