Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Seven

Dressed in a kurta and a turban, the politician stands smilingly on the stage. “Is there anyone here who can tell me the name of Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter?” Everyone in the auditorium puts up their hand. “Indira Gandhi!” they cry. “That’s right!” beams the politician.

“And now who can name the sons of Mahatma Gandhi?” he says.

There is a shame-faced silence. No hands rise.

The politician feigns amazement. “How interesting this is!” he says. “Everyone can remember the name of a daughter. But no one can remember the name of a son!”

He walks across the stage, surveying the audience.

“So why do we kill our unborn girls, my friends? Why do our young men grow up with no women to marry?”

When advertisements wanted to show you something freshly contemporary, they showed you a woman in a suit.

Young, professional women were the icons of the new India. Towards the bottom of the economic scale women had always worked, as they often had, also, at the very top; but many of those middle-class women who took up jobs in India’s post-liberalisation economy were doing something novel. Many of them had to fight battles within their families to achieve it; and yet, in aggregate, the revolution was swiftly won — partly because even those who disliked it could see that everything was changing against them.

The years after liberalisation greatly increased the extent to which middle-class self-esteem in general derived from work and income, and it diminished, correspondingly, the force of those unpaid roles of homemaker and mother that had appeared so lofty in twentieth-century mythology. Young women enthusiastically followed the flux of the times, for they had much to gain and little to lose from the move outside the home. They were therefore in many ways the most unequivocal adherents of the new India, which was why their minds were so unencumbered — and why they were so successful in the workplace. The corporate world was more egalitarian than might be assumed — Indian gender inequality never had the same structure as in the West, and the dynamics of the corporate office were not those of the home — and women rose quickly to the highest ranks of corporate India. They were in many ways the model corporate employees, for they had no stake in old, entrenched systems, they analysed situations calmly and objectively, and they felt no fear of change.

It was not the same with men. Men did have a stake in the previous arrangement. Their inner calm derived — in deeper ways than they knew — from the idea of a woman presiding over, and being in, the home. Suddenly women were not only out of the home all the time but also earned their own money and, in this crucial sense, had no need of male support. For men, therefore, the transformation of Indian society was laced with threat. If men appear more frequently in this book than women, in fact, it is because the great ambivalence of India’s changes was often more directly visible in men’s souls than in those of women. Women had to suffer the outbursts of these haunted men — and at times the suffering was considerable — but their own minds were more their own. Sukhvinder was the ‘modern’, self-possessed heroine of her story, and this is why it requires no great effort to identify with her. But if we wish to learn anything at all about the painful churn of values and feelings in early twenty-first century Delhi, we must try to understand what was going on in the heads of the people around her.

Just because Sukhvinder is ‘modern’ does not mean that her husband and mother-in-law were ‘traditional’. Friction between young women and their mothers-in-law was of course well-established in a family system where wives moved into their husband’s family home. Many mothers-in-law, after all, had themselves been brought at some point into an unfamiliar home, to be met there by several kinds of punishment and humiliation — and the cycle often proved to be tragically repetitive. But in earlier times, when older women were more secure in their status, they could also play the role of mentor to daughters-in-law seeking to learn what they knew.¹²

But in the early twenty-first century, older middle-class women like Sukhvinder’s mother-in-law could be very far from secure in their status. They felt often that the kind of knowledge they possessed had little value in this new world where values, precisely, seemed to be disappearing in favour of one single value: that of money. Young women who worked excessively, socialised frequently, dressed unorthodoxly, and showed no interest in all those rituals and practices of the home for which their mothers-in-law had always been venerated, seemed to represent an implicit denigration of everything on which their status rested — and mothers-in-law could feel themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be fighting against these younger women for their own survival: ‘If my son learns to love a woman like that, he will never love me again.’ The ultimate nightmare was that the valueless daughter-in-law, excessively swayed by images of the new, rootless, consumer lifestyle, in which free-wheeling dual-income couples neglected all other ties, might insist on moving with her husband into a separate house, even on cutting off financial support to his irritating, useless parents — who in many cases had little income, after their retirement, except what came from him. The fact that women such as Sukhvinder’s mother-in-law had in their own lives been denied the freedoms enjoyed by the ‘new’, professionally active, women who now entered their homes only intensified such insecurities. Their professional daughters-in-law stood as a living reminder of everything they had not been free to do themselves, and the nonchalance with which they treated their freedoms seemed like pure insolence.

Young married men usually had more in common with their wives, naturally, than with their mothers. Their wives often had rhythms and lifestyles quite similar to their own, and could talk with them about many of those everyday things their mothers knew nothing about: going out, products, the workplace. But it was precisely this worldliness that could leave men so ambivalent. Even as they enjoyed the lifestyle that came with two professional incomes, they were often unnerved by the amount their wives were out in the world. These men had often absorbed a singularly domestic image of femininity from their mothers, who themselves had never had much truck with the outside, and sought to provide instead a soothing domestic refuge from the male world of competition and struggle. Around young, professional women, they could therefore feel an unsettling kind of misrecognition. Young women did not even look like women of previous generations, for consumerism, with its diets, gyms and skinny publicity models, had ushered in not only different clothes, but entirely different bodies. It was an alluring look but it could trigger associations of decadence, and young men were often confused to discover that they could not feel for female partners the emotions they thought they should feel.

This supremacy of the maternal ethos might appear strange. But it was no mean supremacy. In Hinduism, the dynamic and productive energies of the universe were female, not male, and in the act of procreation, individual mothers channelled the totality of these cosmic forces. Their motherhood drew on the same raw energy of the goddess that gave India’s political ‘mothers’ — Indira Gandhi and all the monumental female politicians who came after her — such awe-inspiring stature. Mothers might have stayed home, but in their sons’ minds especially, they were anything but meek. It was they who supplied all the motive energy for their sons’ achievements, while also protecting them from the evil forces with which the outside world teemed; and if north Indian men frequently reiterated the words of Rudyard Kipling — ‘God could not be everywhere, therefore he made mothers’ — it was by no means emptily.

Conflicts between wives and mothers therefore terrified men. Many men, in fact, listed as their most important criterion in a prospective bride that she respect his mother as he did, for they knew they would be ripped down the middle by these two female forces should they go to war. Men sympathised with both women, but it was like that popular visual trick of ‘rabbit or duck?’: they could see each perspective separately but not both at the same time — and they were often not capable of any kind of synthesis. They might agree with their wives that there were mice in the house which sometimes chewed holes in clothes, but when their mothers showed them the hole in their T-shirt right above the heart, they could not deny it was evidence of the foulest black magic. Being a man in their mother’s eyes and in their wife’s eyes were two mutually exclusive things, and they were under immense pressure to choose one or the other. The fault line between these two positions cut through the most primordial, inarticulate parts of their being, and when the split happened it could take men beyond words. They leapt, very often, to the maternal side, because betrayal of mothers was more impossible to conceive. And they often turned to blows, gentle and violent men both, for they had no words with which to counter their far more clear-headed and articulate wives.

• • •

This new outbreak of punishment of women in the home was only part of a more general intensification of misogyny during this period. Nowhere in India was this so acute as in the north, and particularly in Delhi. If there was one crime that supplied an image for the twenty-first-century capital, it was rape. The newspapers dubbed Delhi India’s ‘rape capital’, and women from other cities feared going there because of the city’s reputation for sexual aggression.

It was not that rape was new, of course: it had always been around, as in the rest of the world. In Delhi, however, the primary locale had historically been the household, and the facts and extent of rape had therefore been considerably veiled. What was novel in the early twenty-first century was the very public spectacle of rape, combined with a terrifying sadism. Each rape case seemed to dig deeper and deeper into the depths of brutal possibility, and sensational sexual violence occupied more and more of the city’s media and conversation. Women were abducted and raped in quasi-ritualistic fashion; some of their victims were left in the street in such mutilated and abject states that one was put in mind less of sex than of retribution, extermination and war.

And this was just the point. What was going on in Delhi was precisely that: a low-level, but widespread, war against women, whose new mobility made them not only the icons of India’s social and economic changes but also the scapegoats.

Rapes were the most dramatic manifestation of this offensive, but a similar retributive menace could be seen in quite ordinary transactions. Women walking alone in the street huddled up and looked at the ground so as to avoid the massed stares of men, which were calculated to cow them in just this way. Sexy pictures of film stars and models on media websites regularly received comments such as, “Tell me why we should not rape women who dress like you? Is this what your parents brought you up for?” — which were duly signed by their male authors, who apparently saw no indignity in visiting those sectors of the internet in order to comment on them in this fashion. Women walking alone in the city at night or sitting alone in a bar were regularly approached by men asking, “How much?” In these and so many other situations there was a redoubling of men’s efforts to remind women that their place was in the home, even as such a battle had become absurd in the context of the society they now lived in.

But this idea of women in the home carried a very specific and potent significance in India, which derived from the country’s colonial history. During the nineteenth century, a stark division of roles had grown up between the genders. Colonial control of commerce and politics meant that men were obliged to compromise their Indian way of life in order to conduct their affairs — bending, when outside the home, to British law, language, dress, technology and social customs. It became the nationalist duty of women, then, to preserve on everyone else’s behalf a pure and undiluted Indian existence — and this meant staying out of the corrupted public realm. Women were to remain in the home and maintain it as a bastion of spiritual purity: a defence against the colonisation of the soul, and a refuge in which married men could regenerate themselves. In the colonial context this was not necessarily a passive idea of women’s roles; as one historian writes:

We are tempted to put this down as ‘conservatism’, a mere defence of ‘traditional’ norms. But this would be a mistake. The colonial situation, and the ideological response of nationalism, introduced an entirely new substance to these terms […] The world was where the European power had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue of its superior material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity of the East which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. That is where the East was undominated, sovereign, master of its own fate. […] In the entire phase of the national struggle, the crucial need was to protect, preserve and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence. No encroachments by the colonizer must be allowed in that inner sanctum. In the world, imitation of and adaptation to western norms was a necessity; at home they were tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity.¹³

A very extensive emotional and historical network was held in place, then, by the idea of the spiritually pure — and confined — Indian woman, which was why this image of womanhood was sacralised in Indian popular culture throughout the twentieth century. For some, it was the foundation of India itself, for if women were to abandon their role in the home, its culture would become indistinguishable from the irreligious rest of the world — which would amount to the “annihilation of one’s very identity”. And crucially, men could not maintain this distinction for themselves: they derived their sense of self, in a sense, not from what they themselves possessed, but from what was held in trust for them by their mothers and wives — who could at any moment, also, allow it to crumble away.

Perhaps in this light it becomes easier to see why the unsentimental abandonment of the domestic sphere by great numbers of middle-class women might have turbulent repercussions. The 2000s were a period, after all, when Indian middle-class life was assailed by more general questions of identity — for many of its rhythms had become indistinguishable from the ones in those foreign lands against which India had traditionally defined itself — and it was felt in some quarters that the cosmos would go up in smoke if domestic traditions were not strenuously asserted. It was a period, too, when many older male entitlements were done away with by the new ethos of risk and competition, and when many men therefore suffered a disorienting loss of status and certainty. Everything, then, was in flux, and even men who were doing well in other respects often felt that the society around them was headed towards some kind of catastrophe, and they understood this as a problem of values, against whose loss they railed endlessly. Women — particularly women out in public — received the backlash. Retaliations in the home were only part of a generalised male attempt to take out these anxieties on young women, whose new independence and mobility was seen as a destabilising cause.

Politicians and journalists often tried to claim that the upsurge of rapes in the capital was due to the presence there of large numbers of poor migrants — people who, in the impoverished imagination of the middle classes, were entirely lacking in culture or values. Indian culture venerated mothers, wives and sisters, went the thought, and no ‘properly raised’ Indian man would ever think of subjecting them to improper acts. But the problem was almost the opposite of this, and far more discouraging. The problem derived, precisely, from that ‘Indian culture’ whose veneration of those idealised, domestic women also somehow implied an abhorrence for ‘public’ women (and the two senses of that word, when applied to women, inevitably merged). The violence originated not with men without culture or values, but with just those men who were most concerned with these things. It was obvious in the comments of policemen, judges and politicians, for instance, that, even as they were called upon to express outrage for these crimes, they could barely suppress their feeling that women who walk in the streets at night deserve anything they get. A significant number of rape cases were filed, indeed, against politicians themselves. These were men who had pledged their lives, in a certain sense, to the protection of ‘values’, and in twenty-first century Delhi, unfortunately, such men were not necessarily outraged by the punishment of women.

Delhi was in the grip of one of those mad moments in human history, in other words, when terrible violence is imagined by its perpetrators as constructive and principled. Violence against women in the changing world of post-liberalisation India came not just from a minority of uncultured misfits. It came from the mainstream, and from every social class. It came not from an absence of values at all, but from a psychotic excess.

• • •

“I come from a very wealthy family,” says Anil. “My uncle is the head of a big tea company. We have plantations in Assam, and some of my uncles discovered oil on their plantations. They’re billionaires. They live in a huge house in London, they have twenty-four servants. My family name is rare so everyone knows I must be related to them.”

Anil is a Marwari: he comes from a community with its roots in Rajasthan which is known particularly for its business acumen. India’s richest woman, Savitri Jindal, who inherited her husband’s steel empire, is a Marwari, as is Britain’s richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, another steel magnate. Marwaris are known also for the strictness with which they keep traditions of diet and family life. Their commercial success derives partly, in fact, from the great fidelity with which each generation takes over, not only the family business but also the abstinent, hard-working lifestyle that built it.

About thirty-five years old, Anil is quite extraordinarily rotund, and carries himself with that altered gait of people who must support an enormous stomach. His speech sticks in his mouth in a way that resembles a lisp but seems to affect all his consonants.

“I was working in Atlanta at the time my mom decided it was time I got married. I was running my business so I couldn’t come to Delhi, and I got married through the newspaper. My mom wanted to make sure there was someone to take care of me. As soon as they put the ad out there were loads of applicants because of my name. So we chose a girl, I came back to Delhi to get married, and then we went to Mauritius on our honeymoon.

“The honeymoon was perfect. I didn’t have all this fat in those days. In fact, I was a taekwondo black belt. She and I were both excellent dancers and when we used to dance together, everyone else used to stop dancing and watch. My wife was a great singer, so she sang at all the karaoke sessions and everyone loved it. She wasn’t beautiful, but I didn’t mind. She was perfect for that time we were on honeymoon — she used to massage my head at the end of the day, wash my clothes and polish my shoes, massage my feet.”

We are sitting in the bar of Delhi’s golf club.

Driving along the dusty, congested roads of central Delhi gives no sense of the verdant landscape behind the high walls that line them: it is only when you ascend, for instance, to the top of the Taj Hotel, that you can look down and see that these roads are but arid strips through an enormous expanse of green. The several-acre lawns of the politicians’ bungalows add up to a great garden tract of their own. The Mughal tombs at either end of Lodhi Road have expansive grounds of lawns and fountains; between them is the pleasant botanical sprawl of Lodhi Gardens, home to diplomatic joggers and unmarried lovers, who go — the lovers, that is — to hold hands and kiss under its bushes.

But most verdant and extensive of all is the golf club, set up by the British in 1931, and extending over 220 acres in the middle of the city. Unknown to all but Delhi’s elite, the club is so pampered and insulated that it has an ecosystem all of its own. Walking in past the Mercedes promotional diorama of glinting limousines, the roar of the street fades behind the cushion of forest. Flirting pairs of yellow butterflies, a species I have never seen elsewhere, flutter on every side. Three hundred species of birds fill the air with song. Peacocks wander lazily across the lawns as, in quieter moments, do sambar deer. The hedges are perfect, the Mughal tombs — their red sandstone heart-rending against the golfing green — the most lovingly maintained in the city.

Here, in the bar, sit Delhi’s landowners, lawyers and businessmen, laughing, chatting and exchanging fraternal handshakes.

“When we got back from our honeymoon, she thought she was going to have a lifestyle like my uncle. She thought she was going to have twenty-four servants and a mansion in London. But we don’t live like that. We’re not from that side of the family. I bought her a Toyota SUV and she was very disappointed. She thought she would get a Mercedes.

“We were only together for another twelve days. During that time she managed to persuade my mom to take her to the bank deposit box where she kept her jewellery. She said, ‘Mom, could I borrow that necklace you wore to the wedding? It was so beautiful!’ So my mom took her to the lock-up and she borrowed three necklaces, each one worth a crore [$200,000]. My mom said to her, ‘Look: you have to be careful with these because they’re worth a lot of money.’ ‘Of course I will.’

“After that she said she was going to her home town to spend a few days with her mother. I said, Fine — I thought maybe after the first sex, a woman wants to chat to her mother about it. But then she didn’t come back. She kept making excuses and then her mother said to me on the phone, ‘You don’t seem to love her.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve only been together twenty-eight days!’

“She said to my parents, ‘Your son doesn’t love our daughter. He only wants to work. He was checking email when he was in Mauritius on honeymoon.’ I mean, what am I supposed to do? Can’t a guy check email? As it was, she wanted to have sex five or six times a day, which is not normal, and I was having trouble keeping up.

“Eventually we got a divorce settlement where we paid her 10 lakhs [$20,000] and she gave the necklaces back. She had to give them back because we had all the receipts and photos and everything.

“I was really shaken up by this because divorce is really bad for Marwaris. You can do anything you like behind closed doors — you can beat your wife and everything — but you should not get divorced.

“When she left, I lost it. I started drinking heavily. I started eating meat, which I had never done. I put on a lot of weight. That’s when I started doing this thing with prostitutes. I wanted to humiliate girls. And because my wife liked sex, I took it out on girls who liked sex.

“I did not sleep with these girls, I just humiliated them. If any of my friends wanted a prostitute, I would arrange it for them. I would do the deal with the guy and I would tell him that we had to be able to do anything to the girl, with any number of people, or the deal was off. I would go and pick up the girl and I would tell her to suck me in the car for free. It was all about humiliation: I came in her mouth not for pleasure but to humiliate her. When I delivered her to my friends we would sit around drinking whisky and I would ask her to strip in front of everyone and to do all kinds of humiliating things. To put money in her cunt.

“Because I did everything for my wife. I gave her everything she wanted. I gave up my business in the US to be with her. I gave her a Toyota SUV just because I wanted her to have it. I gave her the respect of society, being the wife of such a rich family of India. I gave her all that and she screwed me. What was I supposed to do?”

I ask Anil if he had girlfriends before his wife.

“I wouldn’t say I was a virgin when I got married. But I only had girlfriends outside India, never in India. I never touched an Indian girl before I got married.”

“The prostitutes. Were they Indian?”

“Yes.”

Anil is preoccupied by boundaries, and by the purity of what lies within. It was acceptable for him to have pre-marital sex outside India, but not to corrupt the Indian woman. It was possible to do business with both American corporations and ultra-conservative Islamists — for he had made some of his money from deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan — but he had to keep his body pure of meat and alcohol. In getting married, however, Anil had relaxed his boundaries. He had opened up his intimate world to an outsider, and in return he had been utterly undone. He had found that the pure Indian woman of his imagination not only had a sexual appetite in excess of his own, but that she was capable of perfidy. In the resulting emotional chaos he began both to defile his own body and to extend a ceremonial kind of sadism towards Indian women.

He tells all of this quite naturally, and without any kind of apology. He does not seem to feel that he is morally compromised. In fact he lectures lengthily, even tediously, about morals.

“You should not have desires,” he says. “You should make yourself enjoy what life has given you. I do meditation every day to control my desires. For instance, I could spend my time complaining that I was in Delhi and wishing I was somewhere else, but that would just make me unhappy. I hate the fact that Delhi has no respect for women. But you have to be content where you are. People are too full of desires. Women, especially. Women don’t know how to control their desires.

“True happiness is about sacrifice. Love is about sacrifice. When you’re in love with a person, you just want to sacrifice for that person. Like Radha did for Lord Krishna. Like Sita did for Rama. If someone asks for your life, give your life. If blood, give blood. Like Mahatma Gandhi said, if someone slaps you on one cheek, offer them the other cheek. But the problem is today, people don’t have that much patience.

“Now I’m trying to improve my karma. I’ve stopped the business with prostitutes. I’ve given up meat. When your karma is good, you’ll automatically bump into people who are profitable to you. But when it is bad, you meet people who will fleece you. So I’m being a good person, trying to help people however I can. For instance, my favourite masseur came to the house. He wanted socks. So I gave him my socks. He’s a poor man: he comes every day and he gives me a full-body massage. Tomorrow if he wants a shirt, I’ll give him a shirt. You do whatever you can. Goodness is in circulation like money. The amount of good and bad in the world always remains the same. It neither increases nor decreases, it only changes hands. It is never yours: you are only the custodian. If you don’t use it, someone else will take it. If I do something good, I take the credit from you. You get minus, I get plus. It’s like a double credit. It is up to you to get as much as you can from other people. The only way to get it is to take it from other people because it is like money: it circulates with people. When I give socks to my masseur, I take his goodness from him.”

It is still subdued in the bar at this early hour of the evening, so it is difficult to ignore the man who shouts out to someone in the opposite corner, asking if he is going tonight to a dinner hosted by a prominent industrialist. He drops the name twice, loudly, and an elderly Sikh man stands up to protest.

“Cool it!” he calls out authoritatively. “We’re all invited to the same dinner. We don’t need to hear about it from you. If you want to come in here, learn how to behave!”