Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

By its winners and losers, by the culture of those who arrived and by the absence of those who left, it is Partition, more than anything else, that marks the birth of what can be recognised as contemporary Delhi culture. The contemporary city was born out of trauma on a massive scale, and its culture is a traumatised culture. Even those who were born long after Partition, even those, such as myself, who arrived in Delhi from other places and histories, find themselves, before long, taking on many of the post-traumatic tics which are so prominent in the city’s behaviour. This is why the city seems so emotionally broken — and so threatening — to those who arrive from other Indian cities.

Far more than the Jewish holocaust, whose stories were propagated by a myriad of political, legal and documentary processes, the events of the partition of British India remain, for the most part, locked in silence. The holocaust carried great rallying force for the new state of Israel, but for India and Pakistan, Partition violence was the shame that besmirched their independence, and they did not advertise it. In neither country are there official archives of Partition experiences, state memorials or remembrance ceremonies. In private life, the people who lived through those events typically told no one what they had done or seen. By now, prosthetic memories have taken the place of real recollection, for the chain of experience that leads back to those events is cut off. Every Indian Partition family tells the same stories: the armed Muslims descending in hordes on terrified households, the women jumping into wells rather than be dishonoured, the rivers of blood, the miraculous escapes of babies overlooked in the slaughter, the villages where “they did not leave any girl” — for euphemism speaks more powerfully of horror than direct speech. “They came brandishing naked talwars,” they say, referring to an ornate curved sword associated with medieval Muslim rulers — and thus showing how the specific terror of 1947 collapses in the telling into an eternal, mythical vulnerability. For the Sikh and Hindu families who emerged from that catastrophe, what remains is a sense of transcendental horror, which is identified with Islam itself. The people who were adult at the time of Partition had real-life experience of Muslims, which set limits to their imaginings. Their children did not, and they peopled the void of adult silences with the most terrifying and obscene monsters. They reproduced those silences around their own children, so that even as all facts receded, the residual trauma, like DDT in the food chain, became more concentrated with time. Delhi was tormented by a catastrophe that would not go away, no matter how many years went by.

Fleeing to Delhi from Islam, these families were very conscious of making their new lives on Muslim land, and even as they sought to seal themselves off from the past, the evil continued to seep up from the ground. The new colonies in which they were settled in the 1950s were reclaimed from ancient Muslim graveyards (remember Emma Roberts looking down upon “the sepulchres of one hundred and eighty thousand saints and martyrs, belonging to the faithful”), and Islamic ghosts drifted into their nightmares. Though they brought priests to exorcise these ghosts, though they covered their lintels in charms and talismans, the onslaught of evil was simply too great for them to live at ease. They wore rings and amulets to protect themselves but still they looked upon the ground with horror. They did not dig in this earth: their gardens were full of flowers in pots and trees in concrete tubs, for they did not like the idea of what might emerge if they broke the surface to plant. Fathers told their children not to pick up any stone because it might have been used by a Muslim to perform ‘istibra’ — the ritual cleansing of the penis after urination. The earth was corrupted.

The ‘Punjabi culture’ which Partition refugees brought to Delhi is often satirised for its preoccupation with money, property and outward display. But this is as much a ‘post-traumatic’ culture as a Punjabi culture. It is the diametric opposite, in fact, of the Sufi outlook that so influenced the culture of this part of the world in previous times, for which only the inner life was authentic and everything else — power, money, possessions — was to be treated with detachment. Things had turned upside-down. The population somehow resembled one of those trauma patients who adopts a personality opposite to their own so as not to be susceptible to the same hurt again. That older personality, all that tolerance and eloquence, was effeminate, they seemed to say, and it only got us screwed. Now we will care about nothing that we cannot touch, and we will let nothing stand in the way of us getting more of it.

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Delhi drivers spend much of their time gazing into the stationary back window of the car in front, whose angle is perfect for viewing the patient sky: in those back windows, lone clouds drift and fork-tailed kites circle. But it is also in back windows that people place their signature, as if to fight off the anonymity of the vehicular ocean. Sometimes the words are personable: “Sunita and Rakesh”, for instance. Sometimes verbosely confrontational: “Are you racing past me so you can wait longer at the next red light?” Boys like to seem bad: “I am your worst nightmare”, or “I drive like this to PISS YOU OFF!” Smarter cars project global gravitas: “Duke University” or, sometimes, “My child is at Northwestern”. American universities actually make stickers like that. Often the import is spiritual: “Jesus Loves You” comes along sometimes, pictures of Sai Baba frequently. The sword advertises Sikh martial valour. Once I saw a crescent moon with a scimitar: in a place that has long been convinced — long before 9/11 — of Islam’s inherent bellicosity, it struck me as an invitation to trouble, and I realised why I had never seen such a thing before.

The most common signature of all, however, is “Rama” — the single word accompanied, sometimes, by a bow strung with fierce-topped arrows.

Rama was an avatar of the god Vishnu, who took on human form to save the world from the demon Ravana, whose power had swelled to cosmic dimensions as a result of his many thousands of years of meditation, self-denial and physical discipline. Ultimately, Rama destroyed Ravana and was crowned emperor of the world, which he purified and ruled over for 11,000 years. Rama’s triumphant return to his capital of Ayodhya after the defeat of Ravana is remembered every year in the festival of Diwali, possibly the most significant and popular of all mainstream Hindu festivals, and the millennia of his reign are remembered as the blissful time of the earth, when there was universal virtue, when the emperor was attentive to all complaints, and there was peace and justice for all.

This idea of Hindu power and virtue has obviously acquired an additional edge with centuries of rule by non-Hindu invaders. There exists a Hindu melancholy, which finds in Rama an image of what life could have been in this part of the world if the last millennium had been different: to put the name of Rama on the back of your car is, in part, to protest against everything that has gone wrong in those thousand years, which includes the corrupt and unresponsive governments of today. Traumatised places dream of transcendental heroes who can reverse the assaults of history.

But it is possible that Rama appeals to Delhi drivers not only because of his martial power, and the fantasy he holds out of Hindu recovery. Perhaps he also holds a more intimate appeal.

The cliché about Rama is that he is the perfect man, the incarnation of all virtues. So much so that pregnant women read aloud the epic of his life — the Ramayana — to teach his perfection to their unborn children — sons, they hope. What is striking about this wisdom is that it seems, on first sight, to fit so poorly with the stories we actually know about Rama, in which he seems like a deeply flawed and fragile man.