Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

But the deficiency was not in things, necessarily, so much as in the imagination. It felt as though Delhi had somehow not been imagined yet, and unlike those who lived in much-imagined cities — Paris, New York, Mumbai — we in Delhi had very few codes with which to order the data-chaos around us. The ‘city’ did not yet exist: it remained for the present a mere force field of raw and raging stimuli — which was one of the reasons it left us all so petulant and exhausted. “Senseless!” cried the local newspapers with each new abomination, so reiterating one of Delhi’s centuries-old ideas — that everything is ultimately without meaning. But I wondered if it was possible to turn this history on its head. Though we were caught in the vortex of change, there seemed to be meaning everywhere, and even the horror seemed to have something to say. Individuals, certainly, were ferociously convinced of their own significance, even as they despaired of the rest. I resolved to start with them, with the torrent of Delhi’s inner life, and to seek there the rhythm, the history, the mesh, from which a city’s lineaments might emerge. It did all mean something, I felt. There was a ‘city’ to be made.

But the book I began to write was only in part a book about Delhi. It was just as much a book about the global system itself. I did not feel that the scenes I witnessed around me were of concern only to this place. Nor did I feel that they were scenes of a ‘primitive’ part of the system, which was struggling to ‘catch up’ with the advanced West. They felt, rather, to be hypermodern scenes which were replicated, with some variations, elsewhere on the rockface of contemporary global capitalism. Indeed, the book I began to write felt like a report from the global future: for it seemed to be in those ‘emerging’ centres like this, which missed out on international capitalism’s mid-twentieth-century — its moment of greatest inclusiveness and hope — that one could best observe the most recent layer of global time. It was no longer in the West, I felt, but in places such as this, that people from all over the world could find their own destiny most clearly writ.

In this sense, I remained true to the universalism of my early years in Delhi. But it was a universalism of a darker kind, and one that had to work much harder to uncover the idealism within.

• • •

My father was anxious when I moved to Delhi. He had spent too much of his life escaping this country to watch his son migrate there with equanimity. But as time went on he began to see the possibilities in this unforeseen situation. I became a route back into his past, an emissary between his adult life and his youth. When he and my mother came to stay with me in Delhi, he was more animated than I had seen him in years. His teenage self emerged as he spoke Hindi again — a language he had hardly spoken since his Delhi days — and browsed the music stores for CDs of his beloved Hindustani classical music. In his enthusiasm he asked me to take him to see the house he had lived in during the time his family lived in Delhi in the 1950s.

We set out, he and my mother and I, for Karol Bagh. “15/64 Western Extension Area, Ajmal Khan Road,” he chanted momentously in the back of the car. We drove through the wide, fluid streets of the bureaucratic area, turned off in the direction of Karol Bagh. The afternoon was drawing to a close and the streets were full of trucks loading and unloading at Karol Bagh’s endless stores. The Punjabi traders who moved here in 1947 had prospered, and now the entire area was bursting at the seams: shops and warehouses extended out onto the streets, apartments had grown upwards and outwards into every possible gap, and parked cars filled in the rest. We missed our turn and had to do a U-turn, a mistake that cost us half an hour. Sitting in the traffic, we watched cycle rickshaws weaving ahead and dropping women off in front of sari shops. In the smoking force-field of the Delhi market, a car was the worst form of transport, and there was no market more smoking than Karol Bagh.

My father became increasingly upset as we penetrated deeper and deeper into the end-of-day clamour. “Karol Bagh used to be a bagh ,” he said, “a garden . I used to ride my bike on these streets. What happened?” We asked again and again for the address, “15/64 Western Extension Area?” No one could help. My mother read out numbers from the doors, which climbed promisingly close to our target, then skipped it and began a new series altogether. It didn’t seem to exist anymore. Where the house must have been was now a row of steel-fronted warehouses. More U-turns were an exhausting prospect. “Let’s go home,” said my father, agitated. “You can’t drive in this chaos. Let’s go.”

As we drove home, my father silent with the disappointment of another failed homecoming, I remember thinking that his sixty-year absence from this place was not necessary to the shock he was feeling. Even people who had never left Karol Bagh, even men and women who had watched every transformation of the past six decades, also had moments of incredulity when they thought back to the past. You could hear them often, in fact, those old people who tried to convey to those who had not been around then, how things were. But often they could not articulate it well. Words and memories jammed; for the human organism is superbly adaptive, and rewires itself with such uncanny efficiency for a changed environment that it becomes difficult to remember how things were — or how one was — before. This process, in early twenty-first century Delhi, was greatly accelerated. Change was happening at such a stupefying pace that people of every age were cut off even from their recent existence. They looked at vast shopping malls, malls whose construction had appalled and offended them, and now they could not even remember what had been there before, or why they had objected so strongly. My father’s failure to revisit his Delhi home was only a particular example of a general condition: no one, not even the young, could revisit the Delhi they had come from because it no longer existed.

We tend to think of migration as movement in space; but in some ways this kind of migration is a sideways step within the far grander, onward exodus that everyone who lives amid the churn of capitalism is part of: the migration across the plains of time.

I find it interesting, therefore, that my father has in his old age displaced onto a collection of clocks — and not, say, maps — his attachments to lost places. Like many migrants, he has always been mesmerised by the idea of the heirloom . His corporate success swung him into the orbit of the British bourgeoisie, whose houses were full of inheritance: chests and ornaments, paintings and vases. He by contrast had not a single object to show from where or which lineage he had come. So in recent years my frugal father has begun to spend significant amounts of money on amassing a collection of nineteenth-century French carriage clocks. He is not a great Francophile, and it is not romantic to him, except in the terms of clock-making history, that these timepieces were made in Paris. What is important is that they have been ticking for the entirety of his life and long before: they are old enough to have chimed the quarter-hour not only for the entire history of independent India but throughout the British rule which went before. And so, with each pealing cacophony in his Cambridge home, they restore all the absences of time. Aged, stately things, they make time calm and complete, they gather up all history and store it so that it will never seep away.

I’m very proud to be an Indian. When I was a kid and people would ask me where I was from I would be embarrassed to say I was from India. But something changed in the nineties. Now I’m very proud to say I’m from here. In those days there was nothing, you know, and the place was so dirty. Now we have BMWs on the streets. By the time I’m fifty it will really have arrived. My kids’ generation will really see it. Everything is happening, people have so much energy. It’s all happening here.