India, Feb. 16 -- W hat kind of person feels compelled to archive a modern city as it disappears? Perhaps one whose earliest understanding of space was shaped not by the city itself, but by the village that once bordered it. I was raised in Holambi Khurd, a small village on the northern edge of Delhi. It was a settlement of Jats, with a residential school, a little railway station, and many lakes and ponds. The centre of the village was surrounded by large agricultural fields. The settlement followed a spatial order that was neither accidental nor localised. It was a form repeated across north India. At its core lay the "abadi" land - the permanently inhabited nucleus of the village, densely populated and largely undocumented, yet sustained...