Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta (Penguin)

The novelist and critic U. R. Ananthamurthy once said that India lives simultaneously in the twelfth and twenty-first centuries. He might have added: and all the centuries in between. No city better exemplifies Ananthamurthy’s maxim than the country’s capital, Delhi. The three port cities of Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai were given shape by the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereas Delhi, which lies deep in the interior, has been a center of political and economic power for close to a thousand years. And perhaps even longer: some of the action of the epic Mahabharata is said to have taken place close to what is now Delhi.

Judged by this deep history, my own acquaintance with Delhi is insubstantial; but by the standards of an individual’s life span, it is slightly more than modest. I was born and raised in Dehradun, a sub-Himalayan town five hours drive north of the capital. I visited Delhi often as a boy. In 1974, I moved there to go to university. My years as a student coincided with Indira Gandhi’s Emergency—whose atmosphere of fear and intimidation I recall vividly—and the victory of the first non-Congress government in independent India. I returned to Delhi in 1989 to work as a scholar, and I was witness to the alarming rise of religious conflict in and around the capital, and the state’s loosening of its formerly tight rein on the economy. Later I moved to Bangalore, but I still visit the capital four or five times a year. It is hard to resist the city’s fabulously beautiful monuments and its Indian classical music scene—but it repels me with the cold, hard individualism of its inhabitants, who seem much more within and unto themselves than the warm-hearted hillmen of my own hometown, or the garrulous Bengalis of Kolkata, a city in which I have also spent long periods.

The history and heritage of Delhi are encoded in, among other things, its road signs. This must be the only city in the world to have them in four languages—English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu—each with its own script. These different languages denote differences of religion, ethnicity, and class. English stands for the Christian conquerors who moved here from Kolkata in 1912 and built a grand edifice of buildings and bungalows, the so-called “Lutyens’ Delhi.” The Hindi stands in part for the nationalist elite, who moved into the white man’s offices and homes after Independence, and in part for the ordinary (and usually Hindu) speaker of what is North India’s, and now Delhi’s, most commonly spoken language. Urdu denotes the pre-colonial past, when Muslim rulers professed to speak Persian but their subjects elaborated a vernacular hybrid known for its subtle humor and its lyrical poetry. Punjabi (written in the Gurmukhi script) is the language of the Sikhs, who have had a long presence in Delhi, as workers, traders, rebels, and refugees.

The Mughal city of Delhi was built alongside the west bank of the River Yamuna. The British city lies immediately to its south. Over the years, however, Delhi has grown massively in size. Farmland to the east of the river gave way to rows upon rows of apartment buildings. The city has also steadily expanded toward the south and west, where ancient villages now lie surrounded sometimes by shining corporate offices and malls, sometimes by automobile factories and shanty towns. At Independence in 1947, the three major Indian cities were Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Now Delhi has overtaken them all. A United Nations report on urbanization, released this past July, estimates that the greater metropolitan area contains some 25 million people. Only Tokyo among the world’s cities has more.

Delhi is a center of culture and language, but also of wealth and power. Rana Dasgupta’s new book is decidedly oriented toward the latter. Sikhs figure in passing (as in the pogrom against them in 1984), the decline of Urdu is commented on, and the architectural conceits of the Mughals and the British do not pass unnoticed. Yet the focus of Capital is clearly captured in its punning title: this is the political capital of India, but also the place where much economic capital is gathered and spent. The Delhi of this book is seen and described as a hub of intrigue and influence, and, even more so, of money and things.