Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

And life, in the 1990s, cost little. Houses in the most tranquil parts of the city had often been built with small apartments on the roofs intended for servants. This arrangement reflected an earlier, more paternalistic relationship between wealthier families and their domestic staff — but outlooks had changed and this relationship had turned balder with the years: now the city had such an abundance of poor migrants from the countryside, who were lodged in slums so conveniently close to affluent neighbourhoods, that the rich could cheaply buy any services they needed without having to go to the trouble of accommodating servants and taking on responsibilities for their families. (Often, they also campaigned for the slums near their streets to be demolished; sometimes it actually happened and they were astonished and outraged when their maids then stopped turning up for work.) Instead they could turn those servant quarters to rent. In those days, these rooftop apartments, too small and inconvenient for a family, but often endowed with dreamy terraces that were perfect for smoking dope on in the winter sun, went for about $50 a month — an amount that people with marketable skills could earn easily, and with time left over — and they filled up with young men and women wanting to be on their own and to live a creative life.

By definition, such people were a sub-culture, unrepresentative of the city as a whole. Part of the very reason why they thrived in Delhi, in fact, was that no one was interested in them. The very apathy of the middle-class city, its culture of indifference and looking after one’s own, allowed people whose lives had always been excessively monitored and commented upon to discover in its self-absorbed enclaves a precious kind of freedom: anonymity.

But many of them were possessed with great energy and talent, and as they rose to visibility and influence, they took on disproportionate significance in the city’s culture. They were, as one prominent artist from among their number puts it, Delhi’s ‘bastards’: people without position or lineage who staked their lives on a different kind of future and, in many cases, came out on top. People half a generation younger looked up to them with respect and adoration, because they had added a whole new range of feelings and possibilities for life to an all-too formulaic city, and they had helped to make this barren place of bureaucracy and immigrants into twenty-first century India’s cultural centre.

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Manish Arora* is now a successful fashion designer, but when he came to Delhi in 1991 he had no idea what he wanted to do. All he knew was he had to get out of his parents’ house in Bombay and live on his own.

“Living alone was not a very common thing in the family I come from. You lived with your parents until you got married. It was a big deal even to express that I might want to study in Delhi.”

“Was it about sex?”

“I’d been having sex since I was thirteen or fourteen. That wasn’t a problem. I suppose sex became easier when I came to Delhi. But that wasn’t the reason. I was seventeen, I was studying commerce in Bombay, and I wasn’t very good at it, I wasn’t happy. I happened to see an advertisement in the newspaper about this institute in Delhi — the National Institute of Fashion Technology — and I thought, ‘Why not apply?’ My cousins were in Delhi: they sent me the form and I went along for the entrance exam, not thinking at all about what I was doing. I turned up and there were hundreds of applicants and they all came with lots of equipment for drawing and painting — and I had just a pen in my pocket, that’s all. I didn’t even know the exam lasted for seven hours. I remember running to a public phone in the break to tell my mother I was still alive.

“Afterwards, they invited me to Delhi for an interview. Even then I didn’t think much about it. My parents didn’t either: ‘It’s an excuse to go and meet his cousins.’ And even after the interview, I never stopped to think I’d be selected. But when I got back to Bombay, a letter was waiting for me, offering me a place. In those days there was only one campus and they took just thirty students a year from all over India. So I was very happy. But even when I began, I didn’t take it very seriously. I failed the first semester. But at some point in the middle — I don’t know what happened, but it struck me: I’ve found the right place . And then it all began.”

One has the sense, looking at Manish’s clothes, that they are the product of a mind that is preternaturally free. They are vivid and outré — they have something of the circus, Bombay kitsch and Pop art — and they bring you in touch with fantastic joy. But they are cut, embroidered and finished with the precision of a miniature painting: Manish is also a traditionalist, and the brilliant use he makes of longstanding Indian techniques shows how deeply he has absorbed their discipline. This balance of freedom and constraint generates in him, it would appear, a ferocious productivity: alongside his own brand, Manish Arora, he designs a sportswear line, Fish Fry, which is manufactured by Reebok, and innumerable one-off collections for other companies.

Recently, his undertakings were multiplied when he was invited to become creative director for Paco Rabanne in Paris. It was the first time any French fashion house had given creative control to a designer from Asia: the fact that this one looked to Manish to revive its long-flagging fortunes said much about not only his own originality but also the changing relationship of French fashion to the world. Manish now lives between Paris and Delhi.

“Even though they’re now in Mumbai, my parents are actually from Punjab. Both their families came across at Partition. My father’s been working in Mumbai for forty years but they haven’t absorbed a single thing of the city: they’re still like anybody’s parents would be in a small town in Punjab. My mother has never left India. They are very naive.

“I am their only child, so it’s very important to them that I’ve become successful. Now they don’t mind that I’m not married! All is forgotten suddenly. That’s one reason I have to keep doing well so they are charged about me. But they don’t have a clue what I do. They’re just happy to see my picture in the newspaper. They don’t know I have a job with Paco Rabanne, for example. They just know their son has a job in Paris, which is good enough for them. You understand now — they’re that kind of parents. They don’t even know who Paco Rabanne is. And in a very nice way. I’m very happy it’s like that.

“But I had horrifying moments when I was a child. My parents didn’t get along and divorce didn’t exist in my family — it still doesn’t in the kind of background I come from. You fight but you live with each other your whole life. Of course now they’re old so it’s all become fine but my childhood was ruined. So that was one of the reasons why I left Bombay because I was disturbed mentally as a child. I loved Delhi because it gave me freedom from all that, and great friends, and a place to work myself out.”

Manish cackles with ironic laughter to deflect such solemn talk. He is a small man — we look eye to eye — and there is something about his pointed face, which tapers into a grey goatee, something about his jaunty rising eyebrows and deep-set shining eyes, that gives him a faintly diabolical air. You feel that his confidence derives from the fact that he has at some point in his life marshalled great forces of self-sufficiency to get through.

“But I think today I could say that’s why I’ve tried to do what I wanted to. If everything had been fine with my family when I was a child, maybe I would have been the most boring person today. I would just be doing some stupid business and I’d be married to a woman to hide the fact I was gay. But no: I wanted to leave, and I give that a lot of credit for what I am today. Because I told myself deep inside that I want to get out of this whole thing and be proud of myself. Maybe the fact I was lacking attention from my parents is what drove me to seek attention from everybody else. Which means: doing well in your own field so that you get appreciated. You can be greedy like that. Sometimes you can work hard only to be appreciated. And maybe that’s why I’ve never been interested in money. What I need from life is people constantly telling me that I am great at my work. And that I’ve genuinely earned it — not because I acted in one movie and became an overnight hit. I guess that’s what I live for. Because I didn’t get much appreciation as a child.