Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

This was partly because of altered ecological conditions, particularly as regarded water. The expanding cities found themselves in a greater and greater water deficit, and had to pull it in from further and further afield, drying out villages and agriculture to a radius of hundreds of kilometres. New factories in the countryside needed large and predictable water supplies — some of them made fizzy drinks, after all, or even bottled water — and the corporations looking to make these investments did so only if the state would guarantee these supplies through wet times and dry. Where the availability of water was already precarious, it could now become unviable.

But liberalisation also changed the economics of agriculture, introducing new earning options to farmers which also carried with them much higher levels of risk. Many farmers were anyway pushed towards such new options because the high-intensity farming introduced in the 1960s — the ‘Green Revolution’ — had by that time exhausted their land and they were obliged to explore the possibility of new crops and chemical supplements. At the same time, the arrival of global corporations looking to India’s farmers to supply raw materials for processed foods presented them with new revenue and indeed lifestyle opportunities. Many farmers therefore opted to stop growing food and to pursue higher returns by growing cash crops such as sugar cane, coffee, cotton, spices or flowers. But this left a financially vulnerable group highly exposed to market fluctuations — the price of food, for instance, which they now had to buy, soared during those years — and sometimes the gamble ended in ruin.

Also, in the years after 1991, successive Indian governments signed up to international trade agreements that committed them to accepting and enforcing foreign corporations’ demands regarding the use of their products; these included protection for the new generations of patented seeds issued by global biotech corporations. Farmers subscribed to these products in large numbers precisely because agricultural conditions were so bad and the seeds were offered as a solution. But according to the licenses, these seeds had to be bought each season from the manufacturers, and many of them were engineered to produce sterile offspring, so that farmers could not, as they traditionally had, save seeds from one season to plant the next. The seeds were also designed, often, to be used in conjunction with certain fertiliser and pesticide products which required not only significant cash outlay but also extensive training, which was usually lacking. In an environmental context that was already becoming more stern, many farmers exhausted their land with the new chemicals and entered an impossible spiral of debt, usually incurred to local money-lenders who charged extremely high rates of interest (in this, as in so many things, the poor paid more than the rich for the same resource).

Together, all these things were fatal. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, some 15,000 Indian farmers committed suicide every year. The only way out.

• • •

Given the great numbers of people affected by the crisis of the Indian countryside, slight exacerbations were enough to unleash very large tides of refugees who departed, naturally enough, for the cities. Most of the 7 million who were added to Delhi’s population between the censuses of 1991 and 2011 were poor rural migrants such as these. They were the stock characters of modernity’s now-venerable story: the shattered tribes whose land had been cut open for minerals, the desperate farmers who could no longer feed themselves from the land, and the embroiderers, potters and wood carvers — sometimes the last of ancient lines — whose work had been made obsolete by new factories.

Some of these people ended up protecting and enhancing the very wealth that had derailed their lives in the first place — for Delhi’s affluent households were hungry for servants. The fact that it was so easy to purchase cheap labour, in fact, was essential to urban middle-class identity. Even modestly off families often employed a chauffeur, while a maid to come early in the morning and clean the floors of the previous day’s dust was de rigueur. Wealthier households had security guards sitting permanently in plastic chairs outside their gates, their main qualification for this non-job being that they were alive rather than, say, not.

This entourage of labour gave the rich dignity in their own eyes, and defined for them, indeed, what was seemly. It was not normal or appropriate for wealthy people to do certain things for themselves, and this had an impact on the very shape of the city. The fact that there was nowhere to park, for instance, did not bother them because they did not drive themselves: their chauffeurs dropped them off in front of a restaurant and circled until they came out. The fact that every ordinary task, from posting a letter to buying a train ticket, involved so much interminable jostling in crowds received no middle-class censure, because these were things they almost never did. In general, a kind of affected incompetence characterised the behaviour of the city’s rich, who would ring for a servant to look for their car keys, or summon a waiter to pick up the wine bottle that stood in front of them and pour its contents into their glass.

The power to employ labour was real power. Much of the daily effort of middle-class Europeans and Americans was foreign to their Indian counterparts — washing the dishes, doing the laundry, making the kids’ dinner — who could often be more productive in other domains as a result. And yet their relationships with their domestic servants were frequently, and bizarrely, resentful. If you listened to middle-class people complaining about their maids, you could be forgiven for feeling that the role of these women was not to perform essential labour in the house but rather to lose keys, steal jewellery, break dishes, waste electricity, ruin clothes, put things in the wrong place, teach bad habits to the children, allow fruit to go rotten and, above all, to destroy everyone else’s life by missing a day’s work because — so they said — they were sick, or their children had been mauled by wild dogs or electrocuted by live lines submerged in the flood, or their slum was being demolished or their husband had died or their sister was getting married in some godforsaken village — or some other equally improbable tale. Such maid-inflicted woes were a staple of middle-class conversation, to the extent that one wondered why so many privileged people seemed to be so invested in the perfidy of the poor. There seemed to be some historical intensity to the way in which the middle classes placed the blame for everything that was wrong in their lives on the heads of their maids. A few generations ago, after all, many of Delhi’s propertied classes were themselves refugees, and it was as if, looking into the eyes of these new migrants who now cooked their meals and looked after their children, they were put in mind of violent and unpleasant things they would rather not remember.

The corollary of all this was that, in middle-class minds, servants did not deserve their salaries. Servants’ salaries were not a reflection of their contribution to the household but rather a kind of charitable donation given in spite of their incompetence. The middle classes were fond of seeing themselves as under-appreciated benefactors and their image of the poor was not as a productive engine but as a pack of parasites living off their own intelligence and hard work. It was they, the middle classes, who contributed real value to the economy, and they were determined to ensure that the fruits of that economy’s growth remain confined to their own kind. Even as their own incomes multiplied manifold, they fought furiously against pay rises for the people who served them. When you moved into a new middle-class neighbourhood, the old residents, some of them owners of million-dollar properties, would come to tell you that the garbage collector would charge Rs 100 [$2] per month but you were only to give him Rs 50 [$1], “otherwise the price will go up for all of us”. The scandal of a maid who was asking for her Rs 2,000 [$40] monthly salary to be raised to Rs 3,000 was frequently discussed over Rs 3,000 dinners.