Author meets rich people

By all accounts, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: A portrait of twenty-first century Delhi , was the much awaited ‘big’ release of the year. In Delhi’s literary circles, which is yet another vibrant Delhi being that Dasgupta chooses to ignore in his book, the buzz was that this would be the city’s equivalent of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City . At this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival, William Dalrymple in his introduction to Dasgupta’s book, talked of it as the one that would replace his own City of Djinns as the ultimate Delhi book. Perhaps it is the universal truth that reality will always be inferior to expectation, but like eating an ice cream on a cold winter’s night at India Gate — an experience that makes you wonder what everyone else sees in it that you are missing — Capital falls much short of its promise.

Dasgupta moved to Delhi in 2000 from New York. He planned to stay for a short time, until he finished his work of fiction and convinced his girlfriend (“my beloved” as he refers to her) to move back to the US. But as the true effects of economic liberalisation come to effect and the city shifts shape, Dasgupta is too fascinated to leave. He finds and talks to an array of typical Delhi characters — the super powerful, and the super rich. Through their stories, Dasgupta tries to draw out the evolution of Delhi. What it distils down to, however, is a monotone of greed and unhappiness.

The book paints fantastic pictures of fancy homes and ordinary seeming people shifting millions of dollars every day. And then uses these examples to highlight an aspect of moral devolution of the city. But in his eagerness to draw the macro picture out of a micro-example, Dasgupta seems to take what he can out of the story. In his interview with Manish Arora, for example, the designer tells him about an obsessive love he had for someone for five years. “Another drastic experience I had in Delhi,” is how he begins the story. “It was not a little crush: it went on for five or six years. My friends told me I was blind, I was obsessed, but it just went on. It was horrible. And suddenly — I don’t know what happened to me — I got out after five years and I looked at the rest of my life and said Wow. Now…” What Delhi had to do with either the obsessive love or Arora’s snapping out of it is unclear. Much like the other people Dasgupta features in the book, the link to Delhi is tenuous at best, often just an irrelevant coincidence.

In a way though, the positioning of Capital is the book’s essential problem. The book works if you think of capital less as a geographic construct and more as an economic construct. The changes in the social and moral psyche that Dasgupta writes about are indeed real. Much has changed in the last 10 years, as Indians have gotten richer, more educated, better travelled and almost entirely ardent supporters of any self-benefiting capitalism. Delhi has always been the place where money buys power. Now both the power and the money needed to buy it have increased many fold. Just like they have, in any other business, in any other part of the country. Dasgupta’s characters too could have been in any part of India. There is nothing uniquely Delhi about them.

Mehta’s Maximum City captured the city’s craziness and energy only because he threw himself into its filthy core. Dasgupta, on the other hand, holds himself back and views the city as though it were an exhibit in a museum. Beyond a point, Capital crumbles into simply a well-written account of an experience that can best be summed up as “author meets rich people.”

Perhaps Dasgupta and his publishers felt that enough has been written about Delhi’s ‘little people’. Aman Sethi’s Free Man and Mayank Austen Soofi’s Nobody Can Love You More are recent examples of sublime works that tell you the story of the city through its everyman (and woman). They are books that reveal parts of the city that even long-term residents remain ignorant of. But like a bunch of teenagers in a Delhi metro, all of who dress and look alike, the characters in Dasgupta’s Capital reveal themselves to be essentially the same, fighting the same insecurities and beset by similar fears. Capital is a book worth reading, if what you seek is a look at how Indian lives have changed after liberalisation. But as a Delhi book it, sadly, has no capital whatsoever.

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