Capital Intensive

Removed from the gloss and lustre of history, and the idea of Delhi as a double spread of picture-book ruins, Delhi Metropolitan is about the city of makeshift encampments. Though historical and imperial conquests do find their way into the text, as does present-day business culture, Ranjana Sengupta’s heart lies in sociology — in the struggle of ordinary people seeking to make Delhi their home. At its very core, the book engages through compassionate insight rather than architectural contemplation. In doing so, it explores the strata of ordinary life: old men baking biscuits in the ovens of south Delhi, refugees in small sewing shops at Khanna Market, small-time traders at Daryaganj, the seething mass of people and products that move within the routes of an ordinary day — a refugee culture which, ironically, is both a qualifier of disparate and conflicting communities, and the most potent denial of the homogeneity essential to healthy urbanity.

The idea that a city can be formed out of a collection of refugees is not entirely alien. New York’s vibrancy is touted as the sole reason for its urban character. Within the larger frame of Manhattan survive neighbourhoods so ethnically pure that it is hard to believe they are set in the most cosmopolitan city. Indians, Italians, Haitians, all plying their trades in their own language, living among their own, eating their own foods and carrying on as if the New York skyline in the distance is just another extension of Canton, Cairo or Calcutta.

Delhi’s recent history is similarly a collective of individual histories, of religions, professions and ethnic groups, banding together in enclaves that give identity and coherence to their existence. How they have survived the pressure of Delhi’s changing reality is in part the resilience of the communities, and in part the result of the monolithic culture of their neighbourhoods. A settlement of Punjabis creates Punjabi Bagh; the Bengalis carve out their own in Chittaranjan Park. Reasons for such affiliations are, of course, largely bureaucratic, and the individual is forced into a collective in order to buy land, build and live. But the essential purpose of the city, caught up in the drive for variety, sharing and living among diverse peoples, produces the opposite effect.

Under its dynastic history and bureaucratic conformity, Delhi seethes with real people and small pleasures: migrant labourers under flyovers, Khushwant Singh’s memories of Connaught Place at the time of Partition. Sengupta gropes within this disjointed universe — unpredictable but reassuring, beautiful and terrifying — of people, episodes and rituals. Her writing strikes at the core of humanity and its persistent will to survive — and against all odds — flourish.

Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City is one of the finest biographies of a city. By comparison, Sengupta has an inclusive approach, with a wider cast of characters. The writing is assembled in an engaging, journalistic style that lends an urgent realism to the narrative, but over the course of the book, the results are less satisfying than Mehta’s. After this, only she is in a position to delve into the darker soul of the Capital’s Maximum City.