Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Such histories instruct many Westerners, and not just them, that the future of today’s ‘immature’ cities will follow the Western past. We were just like them, goes the logic, before we became like us. And — since modernity moves inexorably, inevitably in one well-known direction — they will become like us too. It is only a matter of time. But as investment advisers are fond of pointing out, the past is no guide to the future. And there are many reasons to doubt that Delhi will follow a course mapped out by other cities in different eras and far away. It is more likely that the emerging places of the world will follow quite different paths and produce different realities. It is probable, in such places, that the formal will never defeat or even rival the informal. Large portions of their cities will continue to be self-administered by communities who are little known to authorities or to each other. They will continue to build architectural and social systems that are both ingenious and unknown. In the grip of ‘globalisation’ they will remain quite foreign and untamed.

Even the idea of the centralised authority that produced Paris and New York seems difficult to imagine in the place where I write. It must be remembered that this authority had already been in preparation for centuries in the West before it was activated as a political principle, because everything it was imagined to be — benign, omnipotent, omniscient and, above all, singular — was borrowed from the Judeo-Christian idea of God. This model of government was therefore already familiar to Christian societies before it existed: it was a secular translation of widely held spiritual assumptions, and no metaphysical U-turn was required to embrace an authority of that sort. This is not the case where I am: many even of the most Westernised of my co-citizens find the singular eye of the Western state excessively pedantic and tiring, and find relief in India’s more paradoxical multitude of authorities.

But perhaps these theological concerns are insignificant beside the much more basic fact that Delhi enters the zone of Western globalisation at a moment when the era of state authority is on the wane everywhere, even in the West. The rise of New York coincided with the intensification of centralised authority in all rich countries. But now there are signs that this is over. Impoverished Western administrations increasingly fail to collect revenues from corporations and financial elites, which can easily out-manoeuvre them in this transnational age. They surrender more and more of their earlier functions and they ride increasingly off the investments made in their days of greater authority and surplus. This is the tenor of the day. And indeed, in Delhi, things seem to be moving in the opposite direction. The story of contemporary Delhi is one of the gradual breaking away of various groups from their historical relationships with centralised authority. Hardly anyone, from any stratum of society, lives as if they believed that governments will solve their problems. The poor have the most direct and necessary relationship with the state, but in the cities many of them have been battling with administrators for many years, and want nothing from them except to be left alone to build their own streets and houses and communities. The middle classes have little taste for what the state does: they do not wish to give to it and they do not wish to receive from it. Ideally they would seal themselves off from the broad currents of this country and exist in as privatised a way as possible; so they run to ‘corporate cities’ where they pay corporations to provide them with roads, parks and physical security. Many of the very rich, meanwhile, have taken control of politicians and political processes for their own ends, not the other way round. They have engineered a commercial system whose speed and efficiency derives from bypassing and subduing the state’s mastery and independence.

What of these rich, some will ask? Can they not use their extraordinary influence to build institutions and infrastructure to organise Delhi’s tumultuous energies that they might better nourish the future? In these oligarchic times, indeed, many have begun to feel that only the super-rich possess requisite the power and dynamism, anymore, to build anything of enduring significance. But somewhere in the back of this question, too, is twentieth-century New York. People remember the concert halls, libraries, museums, universities, public housing and all the rest built by the members of New York’s gilded-age elite, and wonder when their upstart Delhi peers will take on this role. But that surprising impulse on the part of heedless capitalists to nurture their city and society is unlikely to be reproduced by the Delhi rich. And this is in part because they constitute — like the rich everywhere today — a deterritorialised elite. If the barons of early twentieth-century New York built libraries and opera houses with their own money because it was essential to their idea of success that their city resemble and surpass the great cities of Europe. New York was not only where they derived their income: it was the theatre of their lives and the signature of their arrival. They would create a ‘New World’ that would better the old: they would not send their sons to study on the other side of the world, in musty Oxford and Cambridge, they would build new, superior, American institutions. They were preoccupied by ‘backwardness’ in their local infrastructure and population because it was a slight on their own selves. But today’s global elite is much less invested in local and even national spaces than the American elite of a century ago. Delhi does not hold the overwhelming significance for its super-rich that New York did for those earlier masters: it is just the place where they accumulate income, and they have rather little inclination to turn it into an urban masterpiece. They have no personal need of such an enterprise because they have become used to seeing the world’s existing resources as their own: they do not need to build great universities for themselves because they have already been built for them — in the United States.

Such a feeling is not confined to Delhi. It applies to elites everywhere. Members of the Delhi elite are identical to their peers from Paris, Moscow or São Paulo — in that they possess houses in London, educate their children in the United States, holiday in St Tropez, use clinics in Lausanne, and keep their money — offshore, nowhere. That circumstance in which great quantities of private wealth were ploughed back into the needs and concerns of one place, which was ‘our place’, no longer pertains. Not here, not elsewhere.

Perhaps, too, we can talk of changes in the sense not only of space but of time. To build great works requires supreme confidence in future time, and this has everywhere diminished. Though capitalism’s cycles of investment and return have always clamped down on eternity, somehow its very cruellest phase — during American slavery, for instance, or European imperialism — was able to sustain a more generous sense of the future, delivering to the world schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, universities, parks, public spaces and vital systems which continue to shape our existence today. But then in Europe and America it is difficult to find institutions of culture or learning built now that are imagined to last till, say, the year 2500. Contemporary Delhi, in this respect again, falls in with the general case.

In places where historical ruptures have been few or lenient, and where institutions have been allowed to flourish for many centuries, those institutions have often risen to global significance, in part because the expanse of time they hold within has become so exquisitely rare. Even in aggressively contemporary places like Delhi, people with resources and ambition send their children to universities that have often taken four centuries (Harvard) or even eight centuries (Oxford and Cambridge) to evolve. This is not just about ‘brand names’: it derives from an understanding that there are aspects of the development of an individual that require him or her to be immersed in much greater currents of time than are available in most of contemporary life. Learning is one of those areas: we understand, intuitively, that it is not possible to build up overnight what ancient institutions of learning possess. But we also know this about our own time: that we are able to use what our predecessors built far better than we are able to build for those to come. In this sense the short-termism of Delhi, the hyper-accelerated existence where everyone is trying to draw out whatever they can get before the whole resource is exhausted, is not just Delhi’s problem. It is true that the ramifications of the problem are revealed most starkly in places like Delhi, whose own pre-modern institutions were laid bare, and so cannot block the view of twenty-first-century landscapes. But it is a problem of the global system, and one that may only be avoided if we can recover our sense of eternity — in disobedience to all accepted processes of contemporary thought and feeling.