Corrupted by Delhi: Rana Dasgupta on Capital contradictions

It’s not Das Kapital. It’s Dasgupta’s Capital instead. There’s a moment right at the beginning of Rana Dasgupta’s portrait of 21st century Delhi, Capital (Fourth Estate), that in many ways sums up the city. Dasgupta is ushered into the palatial home of a rich businessman, a house built “like two space stations, one glass and one stone, crossing over each other.” The guards on walkie-talkies tell him to walk to the swimming pool at the back to meet “Sir”.

The sliding doors are drawn half across, blocking one side of the entrance: I set off through the other, open side and – do I hear the guards’ warning cries before or after? – walk straight into a sheet of plate glass, so clean and so non-reflective that even though I have just staggered back from it, even though I have just been bent double, clutching my crumpled nose, I still cannot tell it’s there.

It’s a splendid comic moment of collision that is just “so Delhi”, bringing into painful focus a city rife with nose-snubbing clashes of class, where power is measured not by money but by access, and doors are closed, even invisible, to those who do not belong.

Dasgupta, who was born in Canterbury but moved to Delhi in 2001 talked about Capital after the book launch at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival.

What impression did you have of Delhi when you first came there? 

I didn’t speak any of its languages (other than English). I had no sense of what this city was about which made me alienated and unfamiliar with it. But it also gave me a certain kind of freedom. I went all over the city. I just wandered. I inhabited it with a great deal of curiosity and pleasure. In those early years I had a very open relationship with the city.

Did it strike you as strange seeing all the neighbourhoods with names like colonies and enclaves? 

One of the things about Delhi is that there is a code, there is a language, there’s a kind of slang for how you describe your relationship to it and people’s relationship to each other and places which in many ways often conceals very obscene realities. It’s a very segregated city. It’s a city that’s very clubbish where strangers don’t really talk to each other. You have to be introduced to be accepted into whatever kind of community it is. A lot of these things like colonies and enclaves and all these words are part of the construction of that idea.

Why do you say unlike many other great cities Delhi has not been imagined in a literary way? 

Delhi of course had its great literary moment under the Mughals. Centuries later anyone who writes about Delhi finds himself drawn into that moment. The particular geography of that Mughal moment – its gardens, its mosques, its royal splendour - is very literary. There’s a kind of Mughal nostalgia that dominates writing about Delhi. So when I say Delhi has not been imagined what I am saying is the Delhi I live in has rarely appeared in literature.

Has living in Delhi made you a more corrupt person? 

We have a society in Delhi in which basically everything is built around who you are. And everyone is trying to acquire social power in order to better function within it Everyone from rich to poor is trying to acquire networks and connections which are based simply around the idea of bypassing all the obstacles that hold everyone back. Whether it’s a visa or trying to get your kid into school or sort out a legal problem, you are constantly trying to do corrupt things. And very few people are free of it.

So this idea that you have to acquire specialness, that everyone else has to obey the rule but you, of course don’t, is something that infiltrates your life. You start thinking about what can people do for me, what kind of connections can I make. Is this person I am chatting to useful to me?

Why would you want to raise your daughter in a city like that? 

Well I might want my daughter to have other experiences. To some extent one has to be taught ideas and social patterns from other places to bring up a kid well and I don’t see that necessarily as a bad thing. But there is another side to all this. I find Delhi incredibly energetic. I don’t really feel like she would have a better upbringing in my own country – England. I feel that living in Delhi she is exposed to incredible variety of life.

Like most emerging world cities, it’s a city of enormous contrasts where pulling these people together into one single project and making them live harmoniously is very problematic. And the challenges they impose on you are very exciting challenges and I think they are healthy for a young person to deal with.

This last year has seen a lot of talk and protest about women’s safety and rape and Delhi has been described as the rape capital. How does it affect your feelings about Delhi?

The problem is not that we have some bad men in Delhi. The problem is we have a crisis of our imagination of our social relations in which women are also complicit. There is the idea that the pure woman exists in the home, that women who go out, who have economic lives, social lives, sexual lives are not pure and are fair game and can be punished for it in ways small and large. That’s an idea that is held in place by many women and men in the city. It’s not just crazy people who do these crimes. It’s also our policemen, our politicians who think that their task is to hold the values of society in place and protect them.

I think the year or so we have had has in some ways been heartening because it has led to a lot of introspection about values and who we are but some of it has also been very conservative and re-entrenched this idea of the pure women. The idea that we should be protecting our sisters and our mothers because they are pure leaves open the category of women who are not and who don’t want to be mothers. Are they not worthy of our protection?

AAP came to power in Delhi after your book was written. How significant is that especially now there’s so much discussion about the symbolism of where Arvind Kejriwal chooses to live?

I think it has enormous symbolic importance because the shift at Independence from the British political elite to an Indian political elite was too seamless in many respects. The imperial relationship of political managers to society was preserved intact in many respects. And it’s become so blatant in the geography of the city. That enormous protection and exclusivity afforded to the elite. More than half of the police resources are devoted to protecting and surrounding the political elite and not to solving crimes or delivering justice.

I think making a statement that that is not how you wish to live your life as a politician is enormously important. I think this moment in which people have decided in favour of somebody who breaks the political rules, breaks the political equilibrium that we have seen so long is a statement of a great desire to re-imagine what politics is.

So what do you think should be done with the Lutyens bungalows? Razed to create more accessible housing?

I think that given what we know of real estate realities if you were to suddenly sell hundreds of acres of prime real estate in Delhi it would be a crazy disaster. I think Delhi is a city of great amnesia and it should not destroy its historical heritage. But I think prime resources like that should be public resources. It should not be private to people who run the country. We could have an incredible park of incredible buildings which could be art galleries , museums, offices of all sorts which are open to the public. And schools. There is no land available for schools. The undersupply of education in the capital is absolutely insane and the corruption around school admissions is one of the things that dominates middle class life. Land can be made available for shopping malls. But land cannot be made available for schools.

Rana Dasgupta will be in conversation with William Dalyrmple at the Jaipur Literature Festival about Capital on January 20th.