Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Tea arrives on a tray with biscuits and a sugar bowl. I ask Mr Kapoor where his family came from.

“We were in Sialkot before the partition,” he says. “We had a good situation there. In 1947 we ran away with just one change of clothes: we jumped in the car and came to Delhi.”

Mr Kapoor was in his early twenties in 1947. He tells me how he revived his family’s lost medical instruments business in their new home. It happened astonishingly quickly. It is clear that, even if many of his class lost their tangible assets in 1947, their social networks travelled with them almost intact, and they could still call upon the same kind of favours and introductions as before. The new housing extensions to Delhi were conceived, in fact, to preserve previous distinctions of rank, caste, ethnicity and profession, and networks could be recultivated with ease. And in a new capital city with a new population in need of every kind of product and commodity, those who had good contacts and entrepreneurial drive found themselves thriving almost before they had found a house to live in. By the early 1950s Mr Kapoor had established a monopoly across north India, and was well on his way to becoming rich.

“It wasn’t very difficult, honestly, to do what I did,” he says. “I just worked very hard and learned along the way. You have to enjoy what you do. Otherwise you should do something else.”

By the 1960s, Mr Kapoor was rich enough to build a large hotel; several more real-estate investments were to follow. Partition refugees, who had been denuded of their assets, were magnetically drawn to the consolations of property, and they acquired as much of it as they could. In the long-term, this served them better than they could ever have imagined: with the recent boom in property prices, they have seen their fortunes turn fabulous. Mr Kapoor owns houses in Delhi’s best neighbourhoods, and a farmhouse outside — a property portfolio whose worth must now lie between $50 and $100 million. It is this property boom that has generated, over the last few years, the extreme self-confidence of the city’s propertied classes, who now find themselves rich on a global scale, and without doing very much. They differentiate themselves from everyone else in the city by their ‘unearned income’ — and if Delhi’s exclusive restaurants are strangely full, on weekday afternoons, of carefree men and women of working age, it is because there is a lot of it.

I hear Rahul’s voice in the hallway. He bursts into the room.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I was running late.”

“Don’t worry,” says his grandfather calmly. “We are having a lovely time.”

Rahul is sweaty from the gym and, since it is a mild day, he wants to sit outside. I pick up my cup of tea to follow him.

“Leave that,” he says. “I’ll have it brought out for you.”

We go to sit on the terrace, which overlooks a walled garden surrounded by majestic trees. A cavernous reception room, all beige leather and marble, opens out here.

“What did you think of my grandfather?” Rahul says.

I offer some warm impressions.

“That guy has balls the size of this table,” he says earnestly. “He built everything we have. That generation built things their whole lives and it adds up to a big story. Young people just fritter it away and it doesn’t mean very much.”

Rahul is slight, intense and twenty-five. He looks calculatedly stylish in his gym clothes. Drinks are brought for us on a tray: he sips a fresh lime soda.

“That generation was strong. My grandfather is nearly ninety and when I drink whisky with him, it’s me who has to give up first.”

Some construction work is going on at a nearby house; Rahul is extremely, even excessively, disturbed by the noise of a drill. He waits for the drill to stop before he begins his story. There is something fastidious about him.

“My family came from Sialkot, which is now in Pakistan. In British India, Sialkot was the centre of surgical instruments manufacturing. My family controlled that industry. When they left Sialkot in 1947, they spread out over India and started it up afresh.

“My other grandfather, my mother’s father, was also a legendary character. He went to south India because he knew there would be little competition. He started off cycling round hospitals, selling products out of a trunk. His company is now by far the biggest medical instruments supplier in south India. It was a shrewd move for a Punjabi to go to the south: south Indians aren’t good businessmen. They’re academic types down there, not very tough. So if a hospital put out a tender, my grandfather and his brothers would guard the room where the documents had to be delivered and beat up anyone who tried to submit a competing proposal. They couldn’t do anything. But once they all got together and ambushed him and beat him up for revenge.

“He was an amazing man. He was a big philanthropist who set up the best schools in Madras. The one bad thing about him was that he had a thing about Muslims. When he came across during the partition, his son was killed by Muslims. After that he tried to have a son many times but only succeeded in producing five daughters. So he hated Muslims till the end of his life. Just the mention of them would drive him into a rage. For a Punjabi man the one thing you have to do is produce an heir to take over your business. His business was shut down after his death. His daughters were spoiled rich girls who didn’t want to do anything, and it’s not good for men to go into their wives’ family business — it’s as if they’re a failure.”

Rahul’s family, like the majority of Delhi’s business elite, comes from the Punjabi khatri sub-caste, one that is equally divided between Hindus and Sikhs. It is probable that khatris were always members of the lowly trader caste, but they like to claim more aristocratic origins, saying that the word ‘khatri’ derives from ‘kshatriya’, the name of the superior warrior caste. They say that they were heroically oppressed during the thousand years of Muslim rule but that their spirit never flagged and, with the wealth and education they had acquired, they rose to important positions in the Mughal military administration. It was the chauvinistic emperor Aurangzeb, they say, who threw them out of his bureaucracy and forced them to become shopkeepers. Even in this commercial role, however, they retained their martial identity.

The way that Rahul remembers his grandfathers is typical of the way this identity functions today. Many young Punjabi businessmen are frustrated at the way their families have become lax with wealth and comfort, and they tell and re-tell the stories of their grandparents’ impoverishment and subsequent recovery. They cling to this historical suffering, and the warlike vigour with which their grandparents faced it, in order to retain their own sense of martial purpose.

As Rahul’s story indicates, however, not everyone can have been happy about the tactics with which Punjabi businessmen built up their empires. The victims of these tactics also saw them as warlike, and not in a positive sense. Many parts of the country resented the ferocity with which Punjabis sought to monopolise business, and the nativist movements of the west and south were specifically designed to protect local economies from the onslaught of businessmen from the north.

“Until recently I didn’t realise we were rich. My family had very middle-class values. My grandfather would always tell us to switch off the light. My mother got angry if we wasted food. They were very financially conservative. They put all their money in fixed deposits and just left it there. They never took loans. They didn’t spend much money.

“When I went to our factory as a kid, thousands of people lined up to see us. So I felt like a prince. But I still didn’t realise we were wealthy until I was in college. Then I became a shareholder in the family business: I went through the balance sheet, I saw what my father was paid and what we owned. That’s when I found out.