Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Like previous building projects on this left bank of the Yamuna river, New Delhi was a heroic enterprise. Thirty thousand workers levelled the land with pickaxes and explosives, while trains brought continual shipments of stone and steel on purpose-built railway lines. Dust and noise erupted in choking clouds from the twenty-two-acre masonry yard where stone was sawn and chiselled into shape, while smoke poured out from the dozens of kilns where the bricks were fired. From the Italian poet’s “vast cemetery” emerged the sketch of a city, at the centre of which sprawled an implausibly vast hexagonal plaza from whose points diverged six boulevards of astonishing breadth towards the ancient cities of Delhi. Observers must have had a sense of folly, for while the first levels of the buildings gave proof of stupefying scale and bewildering style, the city itself remained utterly conceptual, without inhabitants or culture. It was as radical as new beginnings could be: it was not at all certain how, or even if, it could work. When the First World War drained the enterprise of money and energy there were many calls, in fact, for its abandonment; but still the work pressed on, and the new capital of British India was finished within two decades.

It was a city of surprisingly graceful buildings — far more so than those built in London at the same time — and it recalled, quite self-consciously, the ethereal splendour of Athens and Washington, DC. As it came to life, the alien city, whose sapling-lined avenues petered out into the dusty brush, also introduced to this place an entirely unaccustomed ethos.

In order to turn their majestic emptiness into a real city, the British needed people to live in it, which few wished to do. Most of those managing the building project, British and Indian, lodged their families in the old city, or just outside its walls in Civil Lines, where there was commerce, social life and entertainment. In order to get these people — the suppliers of labour, stone, furniture, alcohol, food, and all the rest — to move into the new city, the administrators offered them large plots of land at a greatly discounted rate. So the contractors came. They snapped up sites in the centre of the city for their own mansions, and also bought up large areas of city land as investments. Rich already from the money they had made, by fair means and foul, during Delhi’s construction, the estates they now owned in the centre of what was to become a major capital city guaranteed their families wealth and prestige for a century to come. These contractors, in fact, became Delhi’s new aristocracy.

They were a very different group of people from the effete aristocrats of Shahjahanabad’s twilight. Mostly they were Sikh businessmen from Punjab, men of the world who had made their money in diverse ways — as feudal agriculturalists, as traders, as bandits — and if they muscled in on the British bonanza at all it was because they were masters of that activity which has defined Delhi’s business elite ever since: securing contracts. They were brawny, monumental characters who loved political hustle, and their descendants still speak with awe of the entrepreneurial audacity through which their dynasties were made. The grandson of Ranjit Singh, who built such structures as the Council House, now called the Parliament Building, and who owned Delhi’s lavish Imperial Hotel, recalls a figure wholly as enterprising as the British themselves.

“My grandfather’s next-door neighbour on Curzon Road was Sir Lala Shri Ram, the owner of Delhi Cloth Mills. Both men had the habit of taking tea on their lawns at six-thirty in the morning. One morning in 1932, Sir Lala rushed round to Ranjit’s house during the tea hour. His manner was unusually urgent. He was dressed in a three-piece suit and hat, carried a cane, and was followed by an assistant with a ledger book. ‘Have you seen the news, Singh?’ he cried.

“At that time, the British were trying to take the Asian sugar trade away from the Dutch, who supplied most of India’s sugar from Java, which was part of the Dutch East Indies. In 1932, the British launched an assault on Dutch sugar by imposing huge tariffs on its import into the empire. This created an immediate opportunity for anyone who could produce sugar in India. And, since the Javanese sugar industry would be immediately ruined, there would be Javanese sugar refineries to buy for a song.

“As Sir Lala told him all this, my grandfather quietly took notes. After their meeting he worked the numbers out for himself and saw that Sir Lala had spotted a real opportunity. That very day he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, who lived a life of leisure on a feudal estate in Chamba, enclosing a credit note for 400,000 rupees.

“The brother-in-law took a train to Calcutta, and from there a steamer to Java. He visited four sugar refineries and chose the best. He had it taken apart, shipped in pieces to India, and erected in Luxor in the United Provinces. He supervised the whole process, until the refinery was entirely reassembled. Then he went back to reading literature on his estate. He had no interest in making sugar. He was just in it for the lark.

“Ranjit put his brother in charge of the business. It still runs today. I am a shareholder in it.

“I wish I had recorded him telling this story on camera. Because for him it was so simple. There was nothing extraordinary about it at all. Just go to Java, buy the thing and bring it back. He was incredible.

“But he always maintained a simple lifestyle. He only kept one Jaguar. He never bought himself a plane or anything like that. He had the best suits from Savile Row but in his behaviour he was very down-to-earth. He had left behind a feudal environment, and he knew how easy it would be to fall back into it. One of his cousins in Punjab had 12,000 acres of land and a fleet of Rolls-Royces; he saw that entire fortune disappear in a couple of generations. Those feudal landlords lived in a bubble: the only things they cared about were money, cars, champagne and hunting. I can have a four-hour conversation with those men about weapons.

“That was Ranjit’s nightmare. He always told everyone in his family that they had to study and work: ‘If you don’t have a profession you’ll become feudal and lose everything.’ And it happened. There were family members who sold priceless properties and blew everything on parties. One cousin had a continual party for thirty years.”

From this final recollection we understand well how the fortunes of Delhi’s original contractors have diverged so greatly over the years. Some of their descendants still reign over Delhi life from their estates in the city’s centre. Others have faded away. Property has been divided up and sold. A quantity of energy goes into internecine legal battles over what remains. Land has simply disappeared, great tracts that were occupied and built on by others over the years, the title deeds lost to time, the energy for contestation lost. Many of these people now live straitened lives in wings of divided mansions, maintaining their status with occasional outings of the silver tea service and a haughty disdain for the new money that has replaced their old. Their faces are lined with the burden of family suicides, madness and alcoholism. They have eccentric paranoia about the past, hiding their whisky from the portrait on the wall of their magisterial great-grandfather, Sir something-or-other, who built the house in which now they skulk.

Houses under legal dispute cannot be sold, and they are too expensive to maintain. Mansions lie empty around Connaught Place, their electricity long cut off, attended only by retainers who clean and guard their somnolent grounds. Far from the hurtling pulse of the city — which nonetheless is only on the other side of the wall — these people live desultorily in 30-million-dollar properties, occasionally sweeping the lawn of leaves, and cooking on a wood fire. They prise apart the bars of the rusted gates to make a way out into the street, but they almost never leave. They sleep in the sun. Sometimes they raise their heads to throw futile stones at a trespassing dog, which is as sleepy as they. They watch their children play in the sprawling, ramshackle grounds. They sleep some more. They watch their children’s children, in turn, playing in the grounds.