Glare of a Gilded Age

"Dasgupta has just tried to persuade us that Delhi turned out very differently from New York and Paris because of its particular history and culture, yet now he forecasts that New York and Paris will be doomed to Delhi’s fate, ignoring the particular histories and cultures of those two cities."

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.

The Punjabi refugees arriving in Delhi were both impoverished and emasculated, Dasgupta argues, and in reaction to these awful conditions, they fashioned for themselves a post-partition culture of material excess and machismo. “This is why the city seems so emotionally broken — and so threatening — to those who arrive from other Indian cities.” From this Punjabi machismo, Dasgupta gleans the latent aggression of Delhi, which ripples under the city’s skin and which has contributed to a recent spate of sexual violence against women. From the lust for excess, he extrapolates Delhi’s avidness for wealth, an avidness that quickened after 1991, when the Indian economy was thrown open to foreign investment.

As a thesis, this is interesting, but it also feels too slight and too neat, unaccommodating, for instance, of the dozens of other communities that make up Delhi or of the multiplicity of motives for avarice. Yet Dasgupta parses his contention over a wearying chunk of the book, just as he rehearses, at inordinate length, the already antique trope that globalization has been a destabilizing if exciting force — a traumatic force, even — in the world’s poorer markets.

Dasgupta also makes the case — again, tenuous but interesting — that Delhi’s unsettling present is the future of most of the world’s urban centers, that elites everywhere will withdraw from their territories as they have done in Delhi, and that even Western cities will face the social frictions and resource scarcities that Delhi is already facing. But there is some sleight of hand here. Dasgupta has just tried to persuade us that Delhi turned out very differently from New York and Paris because of its particular history and culture, yet now he forecasts that New York and Paris will be doomed to Delhi’s fate, ignoring the particular histories and cultures of those two cities.

“Capital” is a choppy book, bouncing between slabs of history, Dasgupta’s thoughts on the sociology of the city and his interviews with people drawn largely from Delhi’s upper classes. The interviews are puzzling artifacts, often consisting of transcripts that run on for pages at a time. The style is modeled perhaps on Studs Terkel’s oral histories, but Dasgupta never allows his subjects’ distinct voices to emerge and, curiously for a novelist, he seems to lack much interest in filling them out as characters.

A few spring somewhat to life of their own accord, notably a bumptious young man he calls Mickey Chopra, the 28-year-old scion of a billion-dollar business empire who wants to move on from running his nightclub to buying land and establishing an agribusiness empire in Africa, and whose idea of self-restraint is to wait awhile before buying his “nice Gulfstream plane.” But most of the others — the retired drug dealer, the auto parts czar, the survivors of various wrecked marriages, the assorted entrepreneurs — are just mouthpieces for the moneyed life. A reader makes the same discovery many visitors to Delhi make soon after their arrival: Hearing people talk about how they earned their money, and about what they want to do with it, isn’t very entrancing.

Within the convolutions of Delhi’s greed, Dasgupta manages to smuggle in one improbable hope: that politicians and entrepreneurs, hurrying their ill-gotten gains home from foreign tax havens, will now invest heavily in India, spurring its progress in a way its government seems unable to do. (The suggestion comes from an acquaintance of Dasgupta’s who moves illegal money for the Indian elite.) But there are alternative, bleaker futures, and in his sparkling 1970 book “Delhi: Capital City,” a civil servant named Asok Mitra hinted at one of them.

Peering back into history and noting the rise and fall of nine cities on the site where Delhi now stands, Mitra was reminded of Hercules’ fight with the wrestler Antaeus, son of the earth goddess. Every time he was thrown to the ground, Antaeus was healed by his mother’s touch, and Hercules could win only by hoisting his rival into the air and crushing him. “I sometimes wonder,” Mitra wrote, “if this is how the nine cities of Delhi perished in successive periods of history” — if Delhi, heaved up to new heights of wealth and vulgarity, lost contact altogether with the ground realities of the country it governed and propelled itself into disaster. Today’s Delhi may never perish in quite the manner of its nine predecessors, but “Capital” is filled with signs that the city needs urgently to be brought back to earth.