Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

We are in a sort of wasteland where a row of brick houses is being built. Construction work seems to have been abandoned for months, and three-metre-tall golden grasses grow rapturously out of the unfinished brick rectangles. Washing lines are slung between trees, and the ground is covered with unused bricks.

“This entire area is in the flood plain,” says Anupam. “All these houses will be flooded in the monsoon. That is why no one built here until now. But land has become so valuable that people will even build in places that are not habitable for part of the year.”

We can see the river in the distance. We cross the hard soil. Bits of ancient pillars are lying half buried in the ground. We reach a cluster of small temples. And then, before us, is the Yamuna: blue, tranquil, magnificent.

I gasp with the sight of it.

“Yes,” says Anupam sympathetically. “One can never believe that the river can be like this.”

This is not the black, sludgy channel we have been following all day. This is the primordial river, clear and fecund.

We are in every sense, ‘before’ Delhi. Before the river meets the city. Before the city was ever here.

Boys paddle gleefully in the water. Families of moorhens glide across its surface. Rowing boats are moored at the river’s edge, where you can see two metres to the bottom. In the middle of the river is a belt of golden reeds; the opposite bank must be a couple of kilometres away. Bright blue kingfishers chirp shrilly in the trees, which lean desirously over the water. A woman collects river water in a plastic canister.

We sit down on the steps to look at the river. Nearby a group of men is playing cards under a peepul tree. One of them is a naked sadhu.

“I don’t know why they have to put up these temples,” says Anupam. “This is pure encroachment: some businessman who thinks he needs a shrine to himself next to the Yamuna and pays some bureaucrat to let him build here. I would be surprised if God would feel like visiting such ugly things.”

And he adds, “But they too will pass away. The river will do the work.”

We are in that altered soundscape of a river estuary, the sounds clear over the surface of the water. Birds call out across large distances.

The horizon is open, and it is a relief. I realise how consumed my being has become by the internal drama of my dense adopted city. I have forgotten expansiveness. This megalopolis, where everything is vast, somehow offers little opportunity to see further than across the street. Everything is blocked off. Your eyes forget how to focus on the infinite.

“I’m glad you could see this,” says Anupam. “Now you realise why Delhi is here. It is one of the beautiful places of the earth.”

The conversations I had with the individuals who appear in this book were one of the great privileges of my life. Since I have concealed their identities in order to protect their privacy, my gratitude, too, must remain anonymous; but I thank each one of them devoutly, nonetheless, for the candour and enthusiasm with which they gave of their experiences.

I thank also my parents, not so much for sharing their stories with me, as for the courage with which they lived them in the first place.

Capital owes much to discussions with inspiring friends and acquaintances, of whom the following is surely an incomplete list: Moushmi Basu, Gautam Bhan, Gautam Bhatia, Shalini Bhutani, Arani Bose, Eisha Chopra, Taru Dalmia, William Dalrymple, Puru Das, Veena Das, Sapna Desai, Ashish Dhawan, Raseel Gujral, Satish Gujral, Pankaj Vir Gupta, Deepti Kapoor, Raghu Karnad, Bharti Kher, Martand Khosla, Romi Khosla, Nadine Kreisberger, Siddhartha Lokanandi, Diya Mehra, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Anurag Mishra, Rajat Mitra, Geetika Narang, Reena Nath, Nandan Nilekani, Ritesh Pandey, Basharat Peer, Gary Reid, Pradip Saha, Vivek Sahni, Aditi Saraf, Chiki Sarkar, Jonathan Shainin, Abhishek Sharan, Sher Singh, Ayesha Sood, Jyoti Thottam, Madhu Trehan and Ashutosh Varshney.

During those interviews that took place in Hindi, Mihir Pandya was much more than an able interpreter. Deepak Mehta and Ashis Nandy were wise and inspiring mentors. I gained enormously from the visionary suggestions and generous contributions of Ashish Mahajan, Kanta Murali, Ayesha Punvani and Anand Vivek Taneja, to whom I am especially grateful.

The companionship, intellectual and otherwise, of Bhrigupati Singh and Prerna Singh was foundational, as always.

Without my amazing daughter, Amália, I would not have been capable of writing Capital at all. Thank you, thank you, my love.

1. Vivek Narayanan, ‘In the Early Days of the Delhi Metro’, 2005, in Sudeep Sen (ed), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012), p. 528

2. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2002), pp. 9–21

3. Jawarharlal Nehru, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1928), p. 3

4. New York Times , 29 June 1991

5. Indeed $10 million was loose change to Gary Wendt, who was one of America’s highest-paid executives. The year after his meeting with Raman Roy, he paid $20 million to his ex-wife, Lorna, as a divorce settlement. In 2000 he became one of the small group of American executives to earn over $100 million a year when he became chairman and CEO of the financial services giant Conseco. One of the first things he did when he joined the new company was to outsource all Conseco’s back-office operations to India.

6. Some months after this interview it was announced that Manish Arora and Paco Rabanne were parting ways for undisclosed mutual reasons.

7. See The Hindu , 12 April 2011

8. Akash Kapur, ‘How India Became America’, New York Times , 9 March 2012

9. Quoted in ‘Clinton Urges Indian High-Tech Leaders to Help Poor’, Washington Post , 25 March 2000

10. ‘Obama’s Passage to India: What He Needs to Do’, Time , 2 November 2010

11. ‘The Prize is India’, Newsweek , 20 November 2009

12. See for instance the 1966 novel Mitro Marjani (translated from Hindi into English as To Hell With You Mitro ) by Krishna Sobti, which portrays a sensual young woman whose greed for experience causes many disruptions in her husband’s household; it is her mother-in-law who stands by her and defends her, in a kind of female solidarity, from the aggression of the family’s men, including her own son.

13. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 237–9

14. My thanks to Anand Vivek Taneja for this translation.

15. Compiled from Emma Roberts’ parallel accounts of Delhi in Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (1835) and Views in India, China and on the Shores of the Red Sea (1835); spellings modernised.

16. Thanks to Basharat Peer for both introducing me to and translating this poem.

17. Letter from 1857 quoted in Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam (eds), Ghalib 1797–1869: Life and Letters (Oxford University Press India, 1997), p. 148

18. Letter from 1861 quoted in Russell & Islam , Ghalib, p. 252

19. Quoted in Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee, New Delhi: Making of a Capital (Lustre Press, 2009), p. 22.

20. Guido Gozzano, Journey Toward the Cradle of Mankind , translated by David Marinelli, 1913 (reprinted Marlboro Press, 1996), pp. 124–30.

21. Quoted in Singh & Mukherjee, New Delhi , p. 22