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| (c) Radhika Iyengar 2015 |
Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is an ambitious departure from Rana Dasgupta’s previous work. He maps, with acute patience, the turbulent history of a city that was built, torn apart, ravaged and rebuilt over centuries—the aftermath of which provide important brushstrokes to the portrait of contemporary Delhi. The book shifts back and forth chronologically, juxtaposing modern-day events with the city’s macabre past in order to supply a wider context to the construction of an informed narrative about modern Delhi. The pages are littered with historical playbacks that sweep across centuries—the magnificent Mughal reign, the British raj, the catastrophic 1984 riots, the economic liberalization, which are juxtaposed with eye-opening personal accounts of those who inhabit this enigmatic city from varying economic strata.
In the light of the book recently making it to
the Crossword Book Award shortlist, I
revisited an interview I had done with him not too long ago.
With two award-winning
novels behind you, what prompted you to write about Delhi, its people and its
history?
I would say that two things prompted me. One is that, not much has been written
about contemporary Delhi. Through books, we know a lot about early-independence
Delhi and we know a lot about Mughal Delhi—these are Delhis that appear again
and again in literature. Even contemporary writers, who write about Delhi, find
themselves constantly going back to the Mughal period because that’s what is
‘literary’, in a way. But I felt that the city I was living in on a day-today
basis, what I was reading about in the papers, what I was seeing on the
streets, needed to also be described and recorded, because it is a very intense
reality. It is a reality that all of us in our lives try to understand and
discuss why things are the way they are. And I thought that this was a
book-length project. It required you to go back to the traumas of partition and
even pre-partition history to understand that. The other thing was that in
Indian history, the rise of Delhi in the last 20 years marks a new kind of
period. What happened to us in the post 1991 period is that we saw a new kind
of Indian commerce where big businesses were attached to Indian politics. There
was a drift of the business people to Delhi from all over the country and
outside, to knock on the doors of politics— to network and do deals with
politicians. So I thought it was important to describe and document this as
well.
What informed your decision to take a journalistic route while writing about
Delhi?
By the time I started writing the book on Delhi, I had been living here for a
decade. I felt that it had been a very extraordinary decade, not just in my life,
but in the life of the city. And this needed to be written about. I always felt that
it needed to be written about in non-fiction terms, because I just thought it was
more extraordinary than to make up. I mean, I don’t know what you felt about
the stories that you read, but these personalities cannot be persons who could be
made up, and that’s the whole point.
In one of your essays, you
describe Delhi as ‘an impenetrable, wary city.’ How did you get an impenetrable
city to open up to you?
Well, I think, it’s like a club. I mean, it’s a
club kind of a city, which is to say that it is impenetrable to the outsider,
but when you have lived here for a while, then a lot of those doors open
because you start to have your own networks and you begin to know people. So
like a club, if you have the right introduction to somebody then the people are
quite open. So as I have said in the book, people are amazingly open when their
friend says, ‘Speak to this guy.’ I spent about 18 months just being passed
from one person to another, asking people for their stories. I also think that
people really like to talk. One of the things that is common to all the
characters that appear in this book—some of them are rich, some of them are
poor, some of them are intellectual, some of them are not—is that all of them
have a very, very intense inner life. They are conscious that things are changing
every day. So when I actually sat them down, they told me about how their
family functioned or how they made money. There was a lot for them to say since
they had been having this inner monologue a lot. So it became an ambiguous kind
of a relationship, almost like a therapist, where it wasn’t clear anymore who
was driving the conversation or who was getting the most value out of it. Also,
I was a mere outsider to these people. I didn’t go to school with them, so they
knew I wouldn’t judge them in the same way the people who knew them personally
would. I was kind of an empty figure, which made it easier for them to talk
about intimate things.
Delhi
has been described as a very cold city. A lot of the voices that you bring in
from different pockets of Delhi are extremely bitter. Were you conscious of
this?
I am aware that I have written a very dark book
about Delhi, but it’s probably because it does strike me as a very dark city.
What I think is that there is a difference between the intimate and collective.
What I find in the city is that the intimate space can be very warm. People are
very good at maintaining friendships in the city; they take a lot of care of
their family and friends. At home, guests are hosted extravagantly. And this is
married to a deep wariness of what is outside the home. And I think that fear
and suspicion is related to the very violent history of the city, where every
generation has seen the collective rise up in insane ways. I mean, of course
1947 was the most traumatic of those moments, and again so was 1984. So when
one talks about the city, it’s important to talk about the collective
experiences, which is where I find a lot of darkness, a lot of fear, a lot of
bitterness. And therefore, I think one of the reasons why the desire for money
is so big in the city is because with money comes some kind of insulation from
the city. You can employ people, you can live in guarded neighbourhoods and you
can basically not feel the worst effects of this kind of fear and apprehension.
{delhi, books, non-fiction, crossword book award shortlist, rana dasgupta, author, writing, literature}
