The financial heart of India has long been Mumbai, but it is Delhi, increasingly, that seems to be driven by money, galvanized by it, besotted with it. Delhi is India’s capital. It is where the nation’s networks of crony capitalism converge, where money seeks license to earn more money. Delhi talks to itself about money — about what money can buy, about the cabinet minister pocketing kickbacks, about the suburban swatch of land that a lawyer’s untaxed, all-cash fee has purchased and, in near-reverential tones, about the ingenious and illegal ways more money can be made. This last subject, in particular, exercises the city’s soul enormously. Delhi is flatulent with greed.

When Rana Dasgupta moved to the city from New York in 2000, the reimagination of Delhi had just begun, and there was, he writes toward the beginning of “Capital,” a thrilling anticipation and a “utopian clamor” to the city’s first paddles into the global market economy. Even as Dasgupta watched, however, the transition went off-kilter: “The land grabs and corruption-as-usual that became so blatant in those later years, the extension of the power of elites at the cost of everyone else, the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic — it made it difficult to dream of surprising futures any more.” Real development slowed, but the personal fortunes of the elite soared. “Even as people made more money, things made less sense.”

In “Capital,” his third book, Dasgupta attempts to unscramble the disquieting city that Delhi has become. His first two books were works of fiction; the second, “Solo,” won Dasgupta the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and drew warm praise from James Wood for his “sentences of lancing power and beauty.” “Capital” grew out of an article entitled “Capital Gains” that Dasgupta wrote for Granta, but the book is more uneven and less artful than its parent. His sentences remain skilled and frequently beautiful, and Dasgupta is excellent at recognizing irony, assembling quiet metaphors and prizing the most resonant details out of the world around him. But while he is also effective at capturing and communicating the low horror of the malaise that afflicts Delhi, “Capital” proves unconvincing in its diagnoses of the reasons behind that malaise.

Delhi has been born out of trauma, Dasgupta proposes — or, to be precise, out of a procession of traumas, spread through its long history. He gives us a sharp, lovely idea: “This is both the reality and the fantasy of Delhi: The city is always already destroyed.” Rulers took and retook the capital, sacking or abandoning it at will. Many of these were Islamic invaders from the west, imposing a humiliation from which the Hindu right still smarts today. There was the pain of British colonialism and then of the subcontinent’s partition in 1947, an event of near-biblical mayhem, during which millions of Hindu refugees fled from the newly formed Pakistan into India, just as millions of Muslims bolted in the opposite direction. Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in riots.