Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

She has been talking for a long time, and it is dark. People have come and gone. At the table next to us, an enormously rotund man with a ponytail has sat down with a beautiful woman a head taller than he. She has a chihuahua in her lap.

We pay the bill and head back inside the mall. I say farewell to Sukhvinder. I shake the hand of her companion, whose identity I still do not know.

I am thinking about all her stories. I get into the elevator to go down to the parking lot. Another man gets in with me: he is holding a Gucci shopping bag, whose enormous size brings a slight strut to his demeanour. It is a strange spectacle, these men from Delhi business families who demonstrate their masculinity by buying handbags.

The elevator doors slide open and I emerge into the brown light of the basement. The air is fetid and hot. The air conditioning cools the mall’s interior to a mild non-place; it is down here that the heat of the north Indian plains seems to be stored. Immediately, I begin to sweat.

I get into the car and drive to the exit, where there is a payment booth. I hand my ticket to the man inside and wonder how many hours he has to spend in this sub-terranean oven. “Fifty rupees,” he says to me, and I start fumbling in my pocket for change.

As I am doing so, the man reaches out of the window and picks something off my windscreen. It is a huge red flower, fallen from the silk cotton tree that grows outside my house. Lodged in the windscreen wiper, it has travelled with me all the way from the leafy city to this wasteland out of town.

The man inspects it as if it has just descended from outer space.

“Can I keep it?” he asks.

“Of course.”

And he sets it on his ledge inside the booth, and gazes at it, enchanted, as if trees were long extinct, and known only through children’s books.

Dressed in a kurta and a turban, the politician stands smilingly on the stage. “Is there anyone here who can tell me the name of Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter?” Everyone in the auditorium puts up their hand. “Indira Gandhi!” they cry. “That’s right!” beams the politician.

“And now who can name the sons of Mahatma Gandhi?” he says.

There is a shame-faced silence. No hands rise.

The politician feigns amazement. “How interesting this is!” he says. “Everyone can remember the name of a daughter. But no one can remember the name of a son!”

He walks across the stage, surveying the audience.

“So why do we kill our unborn girls, my friends? Why do our young men grow up with no women to marry?”

When advertisements wanted to show you something freshly contemporary, they showed you a woman in a suit.

Young, professional women were the icons of the new India. Towards the bottom of the economic scale women had always worked, as they often had, also, at the very top; but many of those middle-class women who took up jobs in India’s post-liberalisation economy were doing something novel. Many of them had to fight battles within their families to achieve it; and yet, in aggregate, the revolution was swiftly won — partly because even those who disliked it could see that everything was changing against them.

The years after liberalisation greatly increased the extent to which middle-class self-esteem in general derived from work and income, and it diminished, correspondingly, the force of those unpaid roles of homemaker and mother that had appeared so lofty in twentieth-century mythology. Young women enthusiastically followed the flux of the times, for they had much to gain and little to lose from the move outside the home. They were therefore in many ways the most unequivocal adherents of the new India, which was why their minds were so unencumbered — and why they were so successful in the workplace. The corporate world was more egalitarian than might be assumed — Indian gender inequality never had the same structure as in the West, and the dynamics of the corporate office were not those of the home — and women rose quickly to the highest ranks of corporate India. They were in many ways the model corporate employees, for they had no stake in old, entrenched systems, they analysed situations calmly and objectively, and they felt no fear of change.

It was not the same with men. Men did have a stake in the previous arrangement. Their inner calm derived — in deeper ways than they knew — from the idea of a woman presiding over, and being in , the home. Suddenly women were not only out of the home all the time but also earned their own money and, in this crucial sense, had no need of male support. For men, therefore, the transformation of Indian society was laced with threat. If men appear more frequently in this book than women, in fact, it is because the great ambivalence of India’s changes was often more directly visible in men’s souls than in those of women. Women had to suffer the outbursts of these haunted men — and at times the suffering was considerable — but their own minds were more their own. Sukhvinder was the ‘modern’, self-possessed heroine of her story, and this is why it requires no great effort to identify with her. But if we wish to learn anything at all about the painful churn of values and feelings in early twenty-first century Delhi, we must try to understand what was going on in the heads of the people around her.

Just because Sukhvinder is ‘modern’ does not mean that her husband and mother-in-law were ‘traditional’. Friction between young women and their mothers-in-law was of course well-established in a family system where wives moved into their husband’s family home. Many mothers-in-law, after all, had themselves been brought at some point into an unfamiliar home, to be met there by several kinds of punishment and humiliation — and the cycle often proved to be tragically repetitive. But in earlier times, when older women were more secure in their status, they could also play the role of mentor to daughters-in-law seeking to learn what they knew. 12

But in the early twenty-first century, older middle-class women like Sukhvinder’s mother-in-law could be very far from secure in their status. They felt often that the kind of knowledge they possessed had little value in this new world where values , precisely, seemed to be disappearing in favour of one single value : that of money. Young women who worked excessively, socialised frequently, dressed unorthodoxly, and showed no interest in all those rituals and practices of the home for which their mothers-in-law had always been venerated, seemed to represent an implicit denigration of everything on which their status rested — and mothers-in-law could feel themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be fighting against these younger women for their own survival: ‘If my son learns to love a woman like that, he will never love me again.’ The ultimate nightmare was that the valueless daughter-in-law, excessively swayed by images of the new, rootless, consumer lifestyle, in which free-wheeling dual-income couples neglected all other ties, might insist on moving with her husband into a separate house, even on cutting off financial support to his irritating, useless parents — who in many cases had little income, after their retirement, except what came from him. The fact that women such as Sukhvinder’s mother-in-law had in their own lives been denied the freedoms enjoyed by the ‘new’, professionally active, women who now entered their homes only intensified such insecurities. Their professional daughters-in-law stood as a living reminder of everything they had not been free to do themselves, and the nonchalance with which they treated their freedoms seemed like pure insolence.

Young married men usually had more in common with their wives, naturally, than with their mothers. Their wives often had rhythms and lifestyles quite similar to their own, and could talk with them about many of those everyday things their mothers knew nothing about: going out, products, the workplace. But it was precisely this worldliness that could leave men so ambivalent. Even as they enjoyed the lifestyle that came with two professional incomes, they were often unnerved by the amount their wives were out in the world. These men had often absorbed a singularly domestic image of femininity from their mothers, who themselves had never had much truck with the outside, and sought to provide instead a soothing domestic refuge from the male world of competition and struggle. Around young, professional women, they could therefore feel an unsettling kind of misrecognition. Young women did not even look like women of previous generations, for consumerism, with its diets, gyms and skinny publicity models, had ushered in not only different clothes, but entirely different bodies. It was an alluring look but it could trigger associations of decadence, and young men were often confused to discover that they could not feel for female partners the emotions they thought they should feel.