Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

It was often poor migrants from the small towns who preserved the idea of beautiful speech. The landed Partition refugees counted their houses and saved-up money, and they rejoiced in their superiority to these ragged, later arrivals; but sometimes they heard the speech of the working classes, who had come in from other places where the poetic, ecstatic elements of Hindustani had not become foreign — and they realised how inarticulate they themselves had become.

Perhaps the love for poetry and fine language, which now had no object, was transferred to Bombay cinema, which enjoyed cultish adoration in the decades following Partition. It was to the Bombay film studios that many of the migrant Urdu poets and playwrights then headed, and there they created a cinema of delicate feeling in which heroes spoke in exquisite, Persianate Hindi and sang love songs whose metaphors recalled the heights of Urdu poetry. The three male superstars of the era, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand, all arrived in Bombay from what is now Pakistan, and, if Hindi cinema from the 1950s and ’60s still carries such emotional charge, even among people who were born long after it, it is because it remained a last refuge of romantic, poetic aspects of Hindustani culture that were largely driven underground by the severer ethos of the independent nation. Significantly, perhaps, Bombay cinema was one of the few domains of Indian public life where Muslim men were unabashedly adored — even though they donned Hindu stage names.

It is instructive that this cinema also had cult appeal across the entire Soviet Bloc, where audiences were governed by other mirthless regimes and where, moreover, they had in the 1930s and ’40s lived through mass traumas of their own. For it was a cinema that existed slightly outside the everyday world, a cinema that operated as if the previous things, the finer things, endured (its stories were almost entirely silent about Partition, for instance, as if it had not been born from that throe). It was of extraordinary poignancy to people, wherever they might be, for whom those things had been lost.

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Defence Colony is one of south Delhi’s leafiest and most desirable neighbourhoods. Its spacious plots were given out in the years following Indian independence to officers in the armed services. The original inhabitants are now elderly and lead lives of archaic rhythms: brisk walks in Defence Colony’s many parks at six in the morning — sometimes accompanied by sessions of energetic clapping or synchronised group laughter — followed by breakfast and the newspaper on the balcony at seven. Lunch and dog walks are coordinated by the ‘boys’ who work in the house, the sons and grandsons, often, of servants known and trusted from army days. Tea and biscuits arrive on the terrace with military regularity in the afternoon. Dinner and bed happen early for these five o’clock risers, but there may be time for an evening drink at the local club, where reminiscences are shared about the escapades of yore. They will talk about military college in the 1940s, before Partition split the army, too, into India and Pakistan. Half their college mates became the enemy at that point, and they fought them in three major wars, but this did not impede ancient affections (which sometimes even included surreptitious cooperation across the lines: “Hold off on such-and-such target, old boy: my sister’s son is holed up there”) and still now they preserve friendships with their former colleagues on the other side of the border. They talk of long-gone whisky-quaffing superiors with Wodehousian nicknames.

They are sturdy men and women with a powerful sense, both, of duty and pleasure. “When there wasn’t a war on,” one of the aged — but immaculate and beautiful — military wives said to me once, her accent Sandhurst, her glass full of gin-and-tonic, “it was the best life you could imagine. All of us together on a military base, drinks and billiards in the evening, and lots of tall men in uniform… ”

Frugal people with comfortable homes and respectable pensions, there was nothing particularly wanting in these people’s lives. They enjoyed social prestige and connections, their children were well educated, well married and well employed. Unexpectedly, however, in their old age, they surpassed adequacy, and became rich.

In the property boom of the early 2000s, the plots they were living on reached values of $2 million, then $3 million, then $4 million. These numbers were gossiped around the neighbourhood. Few of them really wanted a change in their lives, but there was pressure to release this value, often from their children, who were in the prime of their careers. The old-timers moved out and rented elsewhere as, one by one, the houses came down. They were idiosyncratic houses, often designed by the owners, but they had some grace and proportion: large, high-ceilinged rooms, roof terraces for the winter sun, and airy ground-floor rooms for the summer, well shaded by gardens of trees. Over a short period of time most of them were reduced to rubble, and Defence Colony rows became gap-toothed. Shacks came up in the holes, to house builders and their families: dark-skinned country children played in the streets by day, while at night melancholic songs could be heard as the women roasted rotis on wood fires. As the buildings rose, the labourers’ accommodation rapidly improved: soon they lived in five-star apartments, their laundry strung merrily across marble halls, even their songs more joyful. And then the work was complete and these families went somewhere else to live in tents again.

The new buildings were very different from the old: great fortresses of international-style apartments. There were no more gardens, which would have been an impossible sacrifice of real estate; there were no more open-air verandas, sun-deflecting white-washed walls, shading trees, or any other signs of the architectural intelligence that had previously accumulated, over many centuries, in this harsh-seasoned place. These new colossi towered over the trees, their stone faces grimly to the sun, the greenhouse effect of their floor-to-ceiling windows off-set by great batteries of air conditioners. High walls, security keypads and CCTV cameras completed the promise of ‘international living’.

The original owners retained a couple of apartments in these blocks for themselves and their children. The others they sold for $1 million each.

All this explains why, as I approach the house of Colonel Oberoi, the street is like a building site. The dust of demolition and construction powders the tongue. The air screams with the roar of masonry saws on Italian marble (the epithet, in fact, is unnecessary: all marble here is Italian, wherever it comes from). In front of one of the houses, a team operates a specialised drill for sinking still deeper the illegal private wells that all these houses use to bypass the rationing of the municipal water supply: as the water table runs dry, these wells, which until recently ran fifty feet below the surface, must now sink to 200 feet. The companies who possess the expertise and equipment to drill to those depths have more work than they can handle.

I am late for Colonel Oberoi, and my apologetic telephone call from the car did nothing to appease him. “I will give you five minutes to get here,” he growled down the phone.

Colonel Oberoi’s house has not been knocked down. It is one of the rare original houses still to be standing. Colonel Oberoi designed it himself, and it is highly eccentric: an attempt to fit an old-style courtyard design into a New Delhi row-house plot.

“My mother insisted on a courtyard,” he says, “when we built this in the fifties.”

For a house that has been occupied for more than fifty years, there is an astonishing lack of stuff. The walls are bare, as are the light bulbs. On the sideboard are several photos of grandchildren and military award ceremonies.