Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

The land between these showcase installations and the waterfront is an uncannily dead zone which the city’s managers seem to have designated as a dumping ground. Behind the Secretariat building is a graveyard for retired ambulances, which are piled unceremoniously by the side of the road. There is a huge amount of masonry waste: unused paving slabs, sections of concrete pipe, and entire walls removed from the destroyed township, which are lent against each other like files on a shelf. A few hundred rusting steel chairs have been piled up on one patch of ground, a couple of storeys high.

We are very close to the centre of the city but it as if its consciousness ends just short of the river. Delhi has its back to the water and only the roving underclass seems to come here, whose signs are everywhere: bedding in the bushes, discarded plastic bottles, human excrement, and the charred circles of cooking fires.

“The previous cities of Delhi were built so that rulers could look at the river,” says Anupam. “The Mughals loved the Yamuna, and built their Red Fort on its banks. A few hundred miles downstream they built more grand buildings looking over it: the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. But the British did not like to look at this river, and when they came they turned away from it. I think it’s because they found it unnerving. European rivers flow from gradual glacial melt, and they are the same all year round. You can build walls to contain them and put buildings right on the riverfront. But this is a monsoon river. You have to leave an enormous flood plain on both sides to accommodate the river’s expansion during the monsoon, and for the rest of the year this flood plain is muddy and empty. I think the British found it ugly. They found such a volatile river intimidating.”

I tell Anupam about an old woman I met in Civil Lines who remembered how the river ran along the end of her garden in the 1920s. There was a mud wall keeping the water out: every month the gardener would make a hole in the wall, the river would flow in, irrigating the garden, and the children would chase the enormous silver fish that flapped about on the lawn. She and her siblings learned to swim by jumping off the end of the lawn into the river.

“Civil Lines was the first British encampment,” Anupam says, “outside the walls of the existing Mughal city. But when they came to build their own city they moved away from the river, and for the first time the city had no aesthetic relationship to the Yamuna. It’s more important than it sounds. Looking at a river, swimming in a river — these are the first stages of cherishing it. The Seine can never be ruined as the Yamuna has been, because the whole of Paris is built for people to look at it. In Delhi, there used to be a great amount of life around the river — swimming, religious festivals, water games — but it has all come to an end. Think of religious immersion: it is not just superstition. It is a practice of water preservation. If our prime minister had to immerse himself in the Yamuna every year, it would be a lot cleaner than it is now. But everyone has turned their backs on the river in obedience to the modern city, and so it is filthy and forgotten.”

We walk down to the river’s edge. The water is black and chemically alive: it heaves muddily with bubbles erupting from its depths. Looking across its expanse, however, one can only see the mirror of the sky, and there is a satisfying feeling of riverine peace. Some twenty metres from the bank is a large statue of Shiva, submerged up to its shoulders. Egrets flit over the surface.

Over our heads is one of the river’s road bridges. A young couple have parked their car on the bridge and are now clambering down to the water. It is not easy. The concrete slopes are steep and fifteen metres high. The husband is carrying some kind of package; the wife wears a sari and sandals. Eventually they make it down to where we are standing. The package, it turns out, is a framed photograph of a dead male ancestor — a father, perhaps — decked in flowers. They throw it into the viscous water, watch it sink, and begin to climb back up to the highway above.

The edge of the water is choked with other similar offerings. Flower garlands, broken coconuts, photographs of Sai Baba, mats of shaved baby hair — and all the plastic bags in which these things have been brought — hug the lapping edge in a broad floating carpet.

“I don’t think I would place a photograph of my father in this water,” I say.

“No one is looking at the water,” says Anupam. “They are acting automatically, without looking.”

We begin to walk upstream. We pass the grave of a Muslim saint, around which is a spotless clearing furnished with elegant shelters made of sheaves of long river grasses. We cross stinking canals flowing into the river. No one is around: one would think we were far from any city even though we are now walking parallel to the new overhead highway that runs along the Yamuna bank.

We have set ourselves a long walk, but we have started in the hottest part of the day, and before long we withdraw under the shadow of this highway. The road is like a giant awning overhead, and it is cool here and curiously quiet. Hundreds of cycle rickshaws are parked in rows, and boys are working on repairs. Men go down to the river to wash their hands; they return to eat lunch next to us. Laundry is slung over rickshaws. Birds sing. Pylons carry cables across the river from the power station just a little upstream.

“Why do you think people have always built cities in this place?” Anupam says as we look at the flowing water. “It is because this stretch of the west Yamuna bank has the richest groundwater for hundreds of miles around. Delhi marks the point where the Yamuna comes closest to the Aravalli Hills, which end just to the south-west of us. Seventeen streams used to flow over this plain from the Aravallis into the Yamuna, making the ground abundant in clean water. For the first thousand years of Delhi’s history, every city drew its water from this rich underground supply. Every large house had a well in the courtyard. Each locality had fifty or so wells. Large communal wells were built for people to gather water and also to socialise in the presence of water.

“There were always new invasions and new cities. But those dynasties all came from the plains, and though they had different visions of religion and government, they had the same vision of water. Each conqueror inherited the infrastructure of the last and added to it, so that for 1,000 years Delhi evolved a continuous and sophisticated water system. The philosophy was simple: if you take, you must put back. Whenever they sank new wells they also built new tanks. These tanks captured monsoon rain so that it did not run off into the river, and they allowed this water to gradually seep down and recharge the water table. By the Mughal period, Delhi had 800 of these water bodies. Some were small, some as big as lakes. Many of them had religious and spiritual associations, because it is with the sacred that people protect their water systems. Today, people call these systems ‘traditional’ but this word is condescending, and implies that they are obsolete. They are not. In the entire history of technology nothing has improved on them, and they will still be around in many centuries when electric pumps and dams have long run dry.

“The Mughals were the first to use the river to supplement groundwater supplies. Their metropolis had greater water needs than anything previously built here so they needed to take from the Yamuna. But the river flowed under the walls of their city: there was no way to lift it to the city level. So they went 125 kilometres upstream to where the river was flowing at a higher altitude than their city, and they built a canal from that point which brought water into Shahjahanabad by gravity.”