Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

If the city of Delhi is globally interesting, it is not because it is an example of a city on its way to maturity. It is interesting because it is already mature , and its maturity looks nothing like what we were led to expect, in times past, that mature global cities looked like. This city, with its broken public space, with its densely packed poor living close to some of the most sweeping, most sparsely populated areas of any big city anywhere in the world, with its aspiring classes desperately trying to lift themselves out of the pathetic condition of the city into a more dependable and self-sufficient world of private electricity supplies and private security — this is not some backward stage of world history. It is the world’s future.

To look at contemporary Delhi is to look at the symptoms of the global twenty-first century in their most glaring and advanced form. We understand here, as we cannot in the centres of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism, which will continue for some time with their old momentum, what a strange and disquieting reality it is, this one we are all heading towards.

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The river along whose banks we walk, Anupam and I, is epic. Rising in the Himalayas, near the roof of the world, it flows south-east for more than 1,000 kilometres, passing Delhi and Agra, before pouring into its parallel sister, that other great Himalayan river, the Ganges, which carries its waters the rest of the way across the sub-continent to flood out, finally, into the Bay of Bengal.

The fertile alluvial plain between these two rivers nurtured the ancient Vedic culture which produced such achievements as the Mahabharata ; the battle of Kurukshetra at the centre of this epic is said to have taken place on the Yamuna banks a couple of hundred kilometres north of Delhi. The place where the two rivers meet, just outside Allahabad, is a place of affecting natural grandeur: the Yamuna’s dark waters run up against the light waters of the Ganges, and for kilometres they flow alongside each other in the basin, two unmixed strands, until finally their shades become one. Every twelve years, tens of millions of people gather at this site for the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering, whose centrepiece consists of spiritual purification through immersion in the waters of the two sacred rivers.

Of the two, it is the Yamuna that has the more delicate and beautiful mythology. The name ‘Yamuna’ is a cognate of ‘Yami’; Yama and Yami were, according to the Rig Veda, the first mortals: twins born of the sun god. Yami was filled with desire for her brother and tried to convince him that they should produce children together for the population of the earth; Yama was filled with horror and chose to die rather than to commit incest. Lacking offspring, he could never be freed from the realm of the dead. He became the god of death, keeping account of the life-time of all mortals. In some accounts he is a terrible, vengeful figure; in others a tragic one, weeping eternally over his painful duty of cutting beings from their lives.

Yami wept too: for the brother who had spurned her and whom she now would never see — and it was from these sisterly tears that the Yamuna river flowed. Born of grief, these waters had the power to absorb the sin and sorrow of the world, and gods and mortals alike swam in them to cleanse themselves of ill: this is how they turned so much darker than the cheerful Ganges. And Yamuna’s sadness continued, for she fell in love with Krishna, who was born by her side, who played in her waters as a child, whose love affairs unfolded on her wooded banks, and whose great philosophic discourse — recounted in the Bhagavad Gita — was delivered by her side; but Krishna left her behind and continued his dance elsewhere. So the Yamuna speaks of feminine melancholy: of the frustrated desire for love, fulfilment and male perfection.

Anupam and I have walked a long way, and the heat of the day has subsided. We have taken the route of the highway, and the river disappears from view for long periods at a time. Over our head a flyover is being constructed: cranes lift immense concrete sections into place.

“Now we are north of the city,” says Anupam, “and you will see Wazirabad, where the British dammed the river.”

We climb over the barrier at the side of the road and walk towards the river. There’s a small shanty town on the banks and some strips of farmland. We come to the edge of a large, stinking channel.

“This is the largest sewage drain flowing into the river. All the sewage from north Delhi comes through here. This channel carries enormous volume. I would say it is six or seven metres deep.”

The waters of this channel are like fast-flowing tar. Where they meet the banks, the earth is scorched of vegetation. Anupam and I are both coughing with the fumes. The smell is particular: it is not simply that of human excrement, though this is the base. It has also a vegetable richness, and notes of chemical pique.

“Do you want to hear something about this drain? The canal the Mughals built now empties into here. That canal, which brings crystal clear water from more than 100 kilometres away, which the Mughal emperor used to drink in his palace — the modern water administrators could not think what to do with it. So they just dumped that water into this drain so it could flow back into the Yamuna. Recently I was at a meeting with the Water Board and I told them this, and the head of the Water Board said, ‘It is impossible.’ I insisted, and he asked his staff to check, and they came back to him and said, ‘It’s true, Sir.’ This is madness, because we are starved here not for water but for clean water. And the clean water we have, we mix with effluent without anyone ever using it.”

I remember a line from the eighteenth-century poet, Mir: “My weeping eyes are like a canal, my ruined heart like the city of Delhi.”

We climb up on a wall to look down at the sewage flowing into the river. The two water streams are of equal size just like, downriver, where the dark Yamuna meets the light Ganges, they are wary of each other for a while. Here it is the Yamuna that is light and the city’s effluent that is dark: the two colours flow next to each other beneath us.

“Over there, on the other side, you can see the dam. Upstream from here. You can see all the pipelines taking clean water into the city, where it will be treated and distributed. Sewage comes out of the city back into the river, mostly untreated. This is the first sewage channel — as you can see it’s just a couple of hundred metres south of the dam. There are many more such channels feeding into the river as you go southwards. There is a lot of solid waste in this sewage, which is another reason why the water level is constantly rising. The river is getting silted up.”

It is difficult to breathe here, and we head back to the road.

“Now you understand why the river looks as it does,” he says, climbing back over the fence. We have been walking for hours, and he is as strong and nimble as when we set out. “This is the mess that Delhi sends into the river, and this is what the river looks like to all the cities south of here. Mathura, where Krishna was born and where everyone goes to bathe in the river as he did, is foul. Agra too, where the Taj Mahal was built on the banks of this river. Only after Agra, where the Chambal river flows into the Yamuna, does the water get clean again. The Chambal is another huge river, and flushes out all this effluent from Delhi.”

Anupam can see that I am shocked by what we have just seen, and he begins to laugh.

“You should not get depressed,” he says. “Human beings have been on the planet for a very short time. Not more than 100,000 years. They have only been in this place for a few thousand years. Their own lives are extremely short. It is true that with technology we have gathered the power to damage this river very quickly. It hurts that it has been done in our lifetime. It should not have been done. But this damage will not last for long. The city is fighting a battle with the river, but the river is millions of years old and Delhi cannot win this battle. When there is no more Delhi the Yamuna will still flow, and it will be clean once more. It hurts to see this damage of course, but it never depresses me. It will be taken care of later. Of course that will not happen in my lifetime, but I do not have the ego to imagine that everything must happen during the short period I am on the earth. It will happen, and that is good enough. History is very long, and we are only a small part of it.”