Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Ten 1947

The car honks merrily as it approaches the main intersection, as if there were only ten other cars on the streets, as if such signals were not entirely drowned in the hubbub. Having broadcast its alert, it then drives serenely, and without looking, into the furious path of 16 million people and their traffic.

There is nothing urban about this place, I think. No metropolitan ethos emerges from all these multitudes who live together. So many of the people who created the modern city came as refugees from small towns and villages, and even after decades in Delhi, that is where they still live.

The Dominion of India came into being on 15 August 1947. Perforated by hundreds of principalities, which as yet retained their independence from it, the new territory looked like a moth-eaten remnant, torn away as it had been from a much larger swathe called the British Indian Empire, which, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, gave rise progressively to four new nations: Burma (1938), India and Pakistan (1947) and, with the rupture of this last, Bangladesh (1971).

The British Indian Empire was so called not because it was part of the British empire — though it was that — but because it was itself a super-territory, comprising an enormous array of nationalities and cultures. With a population roughly equivalent to Europe’s, and a similar range of languages, it could easily, in other circumstances, have given rise to as many countries as that western flank of the landmass — or many more. In this sense, the old empire presented fewer conceptual challenges than the issuing nations. Empires do not need to conceal the fact that they are the artificial result of transnational might. A ‘nation’, by contrast, must rest on some natural logic, which is its perennial problem. Like most of the hundred or so other new nations of the twentieth century, the nascent states of south Asia had no historical basis except in imperial conquest, nor did they possess any single language, culture or ethnicity that could give them coherence. They were both too big and too small to match any category of experience — and their new administrators were greatly preoccupied by the search for symbols and slogans that would redefine their lumpy agglomerations as self-evident homelands.

The name ‘Pakistan’ was one such attempt to conjure coherence out of variance. It was an acronym of disparate territories, coined by a Cambridge student named Choudhary Rahmat Ali, who wrote in 1933 of the dream of providing a separate nation for the “thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN — by which we mean the five Northern units of India, viz: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan.” Having settled on this neologism, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan’s first head of state, was furious when he discovered that the other new country across the border was going to call itself ‘India’. He had imagined that his neighbours would throw out the British word and all its colonial associations, and, like Pakistan, bring in an untouched name for the era to come. By calling themselves ‘India’, they passed off their infant state as an antique and pretended that all the history associated with that name was theirs, that all the millennia of competition for the lands beyond the Indus river — Pakistan’s river! — all the region’s great civilisations, whether they had existed within the territory of this new India or not, were the inheritance, solely, of their shrunken land.

India not only took the name; India got Delhi. Delhi was the city to which both of the last two empires had moved their capital, and these empires, great builders both, had fashioned the kind of monumental buildings and vistas that provided instant national dignity. While the government of Pakistan camped for over a decade in Karachi, waiting for a new capital to be constructed, Indian officials could use the impressive parliamentary infrastructure built to symbolise British authority in India, to which the British empire had devoted several of its best architects and millions of pounds. As British administrators packed their bags and boarded ships, India’s new ministers moved into the bougainvillea-bedecked bungalows they left behind.

But the city would never again resemble the administrative cantonment the British had known. For, as the flags of independent India were hoisted over their garden city, it was immediately overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the terrors of the empire’s partition. And it is out of this, more than anything else, that the contemporary city was born.

• • •

The partition of the British sub-continental territory into a new ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ caused what has been called “one of the great human convulsions of history”.²⁴ Within the space of a few months, 14 million people moved one way or the other across the new borders in the north-west and the east. As many as 12 million of those refugees crossed the north-western border, which came within 400 kilometres of Delhi and divided into two the state of Punjab: Hindus and Sikhs, mainly, moving to the Indian side, Muslims to the Pakistani. Many of them moved for fear of the violent treatment they would receive as religious minorities in whichever of the two new states was walling up around them, and indeed the unscrambling of these conjoined religious populations was accompanied by staggering violence. Some 1 million people died in the partition of British India — some of hunger and disease, but most in the mass killings whose astringent memory still lurks in Punjabi households — not only in India and Pakistan, but all over the world. Muslims in what became India, and Hindus and Sikhs in what became Pakistan, were cut down in their houses and in the streets; they were pulled out of departing cars and buses and murdered. In what was to become a cliché of Partition storytelling, trains of refugees attempting to escape were stormed and everyone aboard slaughtered: the trains still ran, arriving at the other end like omens from hell. Seventy-five thousand women were raped or abducted in this monumental mêlée, a fact that still plays its part in structuring relationships between the sexes in this part of the sub-continent. The partition was, in brief, a massive catastrophe, one of the several instances in the twentieth century when suffering and death on an inconceivable scale were caused by bureaucratic pen strokes — pen strokes, in this case, of the British government and the governments-in-waiting of India and Pakistan, none of which has ever taken responsibility for its part in uprooting and killing so many.

What caused such an orgy of violence? These are events whose core is difficult to access in any entirely satisfying way. Even the perpetrators find them unintelligible in retrospect, for they were somehow, in that moment, the instruments rather than the authors of the fury; since then, it has released them from its grip and left them as bewildered as anyone else. Certainly, no utilitarian explanation — self-defence, for instance, or struggles over property — can do justice to the extraordinary fervour of Partition violence. For what took over such previously contented, peaceful cities as Amritsar and Lahore was a spontaneous mass fantasy of the sort that eludes such everyday causation. The object of this fantasy, it would seem, was the total annihilation of other religious communities — communities with whom social life had always been intimately shared, but who suddenly seemed, now everything was being shaken out by a border, hideous (the German word ‘unheimlich’, usually translated as ‘uncanny’ but literally ‘un-home-like’, would fit well here). This is what one must conclude from the sterilising bent of the violence — for, as in the similar rampages that have erupted over the political separation of other almost indistinguishable communities, such as in the former Yugoslavia, this was not simply a formless frenzy. It had a specific structure that was targeted not only against a community but also, terribly, against its reproductive potential: not only indiscriminate slaughter, but also the repeated exposure of unborn foetuses, the ceremonial display of castrated penises — and rape on a colossal scale, whose purpose was genetic subjugation: their children will not be their own.

Did these communities simply hate each other? Did the suspension of civility simply allow the emergence of murderous passions that had always existed? Of course, there had always been conflicts and tensions. People understood themselves through their membership of distinct communities of religion and caste, and the resulting divisions and suspicions were exploited by every ruling regime — not only the Mughals and the British but also, later, the various state and federal governments of independent India — with predictably corrosive results. It is perhaps not surprising that the word ‘communal’, which in every other part of the English-speaking world speaks of things harmonious and shared, is in India used to talk of social break-down: because the ‘community’ is thought of as necessarily partial and chauvinistic, its interests always at odds with those of society at large.

But many of these everyday conflicts were just as intense within religious groups as they were between them — Hindus of different castes, for instance, were often embattled. And curiously the overwhelming memory of pre-Partition culture in north India is not one of enmity. It is one rather of inter-religious respect and harmony: people like Colonel Oberoi — and my own father — lived with a sense of expansiveness and plenitude in the mixed religious environment of British India and think back on it with fondness and regret. The culture that existed there had been created by all the religions together, over many centuries, and, whatever the historical conflicts between them, their shared world was richer than the divided one which followed. And that is the point.

It is difficult to express to people who have not known it how shattering is the death of a culture — which is to say the annihilation of everything through which a society comes into being, and therefore of its members’ very selves. The Partition of 1947 killed a culture — an old, shared culture — and the physical-life violence was part of a mad frenzy to survive this psychic death. The new regime of independent nations was narrower than the old culture, and in order for people to squeeze in, a great sacrifice was required: a process of purification and eradication that was essentially infinite because its true theatre was not external but in the self. It was not only Muslims who were afraid of having no place in the new India: Hindus, also, were too Muslim to live there. In their rampages, they killed not Muslims but Islam: the Islam of which they had always been part, the Islam they carried within themselves, the Islam they had to annihilate if they were ever to belong.

Even hatred is not such a powerful cause for violence as is commonly supposed. Love and survival are far more potent forces. The violence of Partition was the violence of people trying to survive — not only physically, but spiritually and politically. And their survival depended on the sacrifice of a love which had become, in the modern world, forbidden.

• • •

For the general mass of people, fear and violence broke out with little warning and there was no time to plan an escape: they locked their houses and set out in cars, buses and trains — but most of all on foot, in great columns hundreds of thousands strong, Muslims one way, Hindus and Sikhs the other, with no idea of what the future would bring, or if they would ever return. With some exceptions, the survivors of this terrible exodus lost everything they could not carry — houses, effects, land, businesses — and their lives after 1947 were begun again from zero.

On the Indian side of the border, refugees settled where they could. Some stayed with members of their extended family. Many were housed in refugee camps, some for as long as five years. A rapidly assembled camp at Kurukshetra in Punjab accommodated 200,000 people, who quickly turned it into a temporary city, bustling with schools, hospitals, markets and religious festivals — festivals, some of them, which commemorated events in the Mahabharata, the ancient epic that described a devastating war fought in that very place, Kurukshetra, between two branches of a single family; the contemporary resonances must have been clear to all.

Over time the greatest number of these refugees settled in Delhi. It was easier to force a way into Delhi than anywhere else: as the capital of the new nation, Delhi displayed the greatest resolve in providing shelter, welfare and business loans to Partition refugees; as a recent city built in the middle of great stretches of open land, it also had the most flexibility to offer permanent housing. During the first half of the twentieth century, which saw the building of the British capital, Delhi’s population had crept up from about 150,000 to just under a million; after Partition, a million new residents were added overnight, and more Partition refugees continued to arrive for many years. The great work of the city after 1947 was the carving up of plots for these new arrivals on land acquired by the state from previous landowners — often the 1911 aristocracy — for the purpose.

As in all moments of great chaos and rupture, there were not only losers. Properties vacated by fleeing Muslims, especially in Old Delhi, were commandeered by Hindu neighbours who had prepared themselves for just such an operation; there are many landowning families in Delhi who cannot cogently explain the origin of their wealth. The state, too, seized a great amount of property from departing refugees, including assets of immense value belonging to the old Muslim aristocracy. In general, however, elites had a better time than everyone else, and not only because they had the money to get out. More than anything else, they had access to information. Most people had no idea what was going to happen and could only follow rumours, but those with access to the political establishment could ascertain much more concretely what the future held and how they might come out on top. People who owned major estates and businesses were particularly motivated to obtain up-to-date intelligence about the gathering Partition rhetoric, and many of them sold early on just to be safe. Such elites were also able to appropriate state resources for their private purposes: it was the army, often, that helped them to move their family members and assets southwards and eastwards into territories that would lie in ‘India’, were a partition to happen. Many of them bought property in Delhi and established a business position before the onslaught, and their descendants are still among the richest people in the city.

By its winners and losers, by the culture of those who arrived and by the absence of those who left, it is Partition, more than anything else, that marks the birth of what can be recognised as contemporary Delhi culture. The contemporary city was born out of trauma on a massive scale, and its culture is a traumatised culture. Even those who were born long after Partition, even those, such as myself, who arrived in Delhi from other places and histories, find themselves, before long, taking on many of the post-traumatic tics which are so prominent in the city’s behaviour. This is why the city seems so emotionally broken — and so threatening — to those who arrive from other Indian cities.

Far more than the Jewish holocaust, whose stories were propagated by a myriad of political, legal and documentary processes, the events of the partition of British India remain, for the most part, locked in silence. The holocaust carried great rallying force for the new state of Israel, but for India and Pakistan, Partition violence was the shame that besmirched their independence, and they did not advertise it. In neither country are there official archives of Partition experiences, state memorials or remembrance ceremonies. In private life, the people who lived through those events typically told no one what they had done or seen. By now, prosthetic memories have taken the place of real recollection, for the chain of experience that leads back to those events is cut off. Every Indian Partition family tells the same stories: the armed Muslims descending in hordes on terrified households, the women jumping into wells rather than be dishonoured, the rivers of blood, the miraculous escapes of babies overlooked in the slaughter, the villages where “they did not leave any girl” — for euphemism speaks more powerfully of horror than direct speech. “They came brandishing naked talwars,” they say, referring to an ornate curved sword associated with medieval Muslim rulers — and thus showing how the specific terror of 1947 collapses in the telling into an eternal, mythical vulnerability. For the Sikh and Hindu families who emerged from that catastrophe, what remains is a sense of transcendental horror, which is identified with Islam itself. The people who were adult at the time of Partition had real-life experience of Muslims, which set limits to their imaginings. Their children did not, and they peopled the void of adult silences with the most terrifying and obscene monsters. They reproduced those silences around their own children, so that even as all facts receded, the residual trauma, like DDT in the food chain, became more concentrated with time. Delhi was tormented by a catastrophe that would not go away, no matter how many years went by.

Fleeing to Delhi from Islam, these families were very conscious of making their new lives on Muslim land, and even as they sought to seal themselves off from the past, the evil continued to seep up from the ground. The new colonies in which they were settled in the 1950s were reclaimed from ancient Muslim graveyards (remember Emma Roberts looking down upon “the sepulchres of one hundred and eighty thousand saints and martyrs, belonging to the faithful”), and Islamic ghosts drifted into their nightmares. Though they brought priests to exorcise these ghosts, though they covered their lintels in charms and talismans, the onslaught of evil was simply too great for them to live at ease. They wore rings and amulets to protect themselves but still they looked upon the ground with horror. They did not dig in this earth: their gardens were full of flowers in pots and trees in concrete tubs, for they did not like the idea of what might emerge if they broke the surface to plant. Fathers told their children not to pick up any stone because it might have been used by a Muslim to perform ‘istibra’ — the ritual cleansing of the penis after urination. The earth was corrupted.

The ‘Punjabi culture’ which Partition refugees brought to Delhi is often satirised for its preoccupation with money, property and outward display. But this is as much a ‘post-traumatic’ culture as a Punjabi culture. It is the diametric opposite, in fact, of the Sufi outlook that so influenced the culture of this part of the world in previous times, for which only the inner life was authentic and everything else — power, money, possessions — was to be treated with detachment. Things had turned upside-down. The population somehow resembled one of those trauma patients who adopts a personality opposite to their own so as not to be susceptible to the same hurt again. That older personality, all that tolerance and eloquence, was effeminate, they seemed to say, and it only got us screwed. Now we will care about nothing that we cannot touch, and we will let nothing stand in the way of us getting more of it.

• • •

Delhi drivers spend much of their time gazing into the stationary back window of the car in front, whose angle is perfect for viewing the patient sky: in those back windows, lone clouds drift and fork-tailed kites circle. But it is also in back windows that people place their signature, as if to fight off the anonymity of the vehicular ocean. Sometimes the words are personable: “Sunita and Rakesh”, for instance. Sometimes verbosely confrontational: “Are you racing past me so you can wait longer at the next red light?” Boys like to seem bad: “I am your worst nightmare”, or “I drive like this to PISS YOU OFF!” Smarter cars project global gravitas: “Duke University” or, sometimes, “My child is at Northwestern”. American universities actually make stickers like that. Often the import is spiritual: “Jesus Loves You” comes along sometimes, pictures of Sai Baba frequently. The sword advertises Sikh martial valour. Once I saw a crescent moon with a scimitar: in a place that has long been convinced — long before 9/11 — of Islam’s inherent bellicosity, it struck me as an invitation to trouble, and I realised why I had never seen such a thing before.

The most common signature of all, however, is “Rama” — the single word accompanied, sometimes, by a bow strung with fierce-topped arrows.

Rama was an avatar of the god Vishnu, who took on human form to save the world from the demon Ravana, whose power had swelled to cosmic dimensions as a result of his many thousands of years of meditation, self-denial and physical discipline. Ultimately, Rama destroyed Ravana and was crowned emperor of the world, which he purified and ruled over for 11,000 years. Rama’s triumphant return to his capital of Ayodhya after the defeat of Ravana is remembered every year in the festival of Diwali, possibly the most significant and popular of all mainstream Hindu festivals, and the millennia of his reign are remembered as the blissful time of the earth, when there was universal virtue, when the emperor was attentive to all complaints, and there was peace and justice for all.

This idea of Hindu power and virtue has obviously acquired an additional edge with centuries of rule by non-Hindu invaders. There exists a Hindu melancholy, which finds in Rama an image of what life could have been in this part of the world if the last millennium had been different: to put the name of Rama on the back of your car is, in part, to protest against everything that has gone wrong in those thousand years, which includes the corrupt and unresponsive governments of today. Traumatised places dream of transcendental heroes who can reverse the assaults of history.

But it is possible that Rama appeals to Delhi drivers not only because of his martial power, and the fantasy he holds out of Hindu recovery. Perhaps he also holds a more intimate appeal.

The cliché about Rama is that he is the perfect man, the incarnation of all virtues. So much so that pregnant women read aloud the epic of his life — the Ramayana — to teach his perfection to their unborn children — sons, they hope. What is striking about this wisdom is that it seems, on first sight, to fit so poorly with the stories we actually know about Rama, in which he seems like a deeply flawed and fragile man.

A great warrior and son of the king’s first wife, Rama grows up as heir to the Ayodhya throne. The second wife, however, gets the king to grant her an unconditional request, which she redeems thus: Rama should be sent into exile so that her own son, Bharata, might take the throne. The promise may not be withdrawn but Rama raises no protest: he departs with his wife, Sita, and his brother, Lakshmana, to endure years of unhappiness and hardship in the forest. During this time, Rama meets a wandering widow, Surpanakha, who falls in love with his beauty. She approaches him amorously but he tells her he is married to Sita and rejects her; he and Lakshmana then begin to make fun of her for her ugliness. Surpanakha attacks Sita out of jealousy and Lakshmana cuts off her nose.

Surpanakha, however, is the sister of the great demon, Ravana, whose wrath is aroused by this disfiguring of his sister. He abducts Sita and takes her away to his spectacular palace in Lanka. Ravana, who has acquired his power through scholarship and devotion to Shiva, attempts to seduce Sita with promises of wealth and luxury, but she rejects all his advances. Eventually Rama and Lakshmana invade Lanka with the help of the monkey god Hanuman, kill Ravana and rescue Sita.

But Rama is plagued by doubts as to what might have happened between Ravana and Sita while she has been away, and he refuses to take her back. Weeping, Sita decides to demonstrate her purity by plunging into fire. She emerges from the fire unharmed, Rama is overjoyed and returns with Sita to Ayodhya where he is given his rightful throne and the era of virtue begins.

The people of Ayodhya, however, are unnerved by the example Rama has set: they feel that the women of the kingdom will be corrupted if they see their king welcome back a wife who has lived with a demon. Having not the confidence of his own independent judgement, Rama exiles Sita to the forest, where she gives birth to his twin boys and is taken in by a sage. When Rama later encounters the sage and hears news of Sita and their children, he is moved by the memory of his wife, and he asks her to come to him and prove, once again, her virtue. The sage swears that she has been true to him, and all the gods descend from heaven to say the same, but Rama still requires more assurance. Sita says, “As truly as I have never, even with one thought, contemplated another man than Rama, may Goddess Earth open her arms to me!” — and with that the earth opens and she is swallowed up. Nothing short of Sita’s death can convince Rama, apparently, that she is pure: now his love floods out of him unrestrainedly and he prays for her to be restored to him, but it is too late.

Rama is a character of extraordinary drives, no doubt: his willingness to abandon his political ambition to subsist in the forest demonstrates a startling commitment to the word of his father. But one cannot help feeling that there is something missing from Rama, even in this: is his obedience not rather obsessive, as if he lacks vision and is looking for some cause, even a negative one, so as not to be lost? Does he not seem like someone empty of values who therefore becomes brittle and loveless, and an extremist of rules? He is a severe character, Rama, who leaves one rather cold: he says little, and almost nothing that might inspire or warm. He is most content in self-denial: it is not amid the adversity of the forest but precisely when everything is restored to Rama — his wife, his city and his throne — that he begins to fall apart. Though he will fight fanatically for the recovery of his wife — because he understands the offence of a broken rule — when she comes home to him he hates her, not for what she has done but what has been done to her. It is dangerous to be loved by a man like this: he may raise armies for you when you are stolen away, but when you are by his side he is plagued by suspicions and spite. He is haunted by the idea that others may not have denied themselves as he has, by visions of the extravagant pleasures that they might enjoy.

It is interesting that one hardly ever sees the name of Krishna written up in the back window of a car, for the eighth avatar of Vishnu would seem, on the face of it, a far more attractive ego ideal than the seventh. Where Rama is perfect according to custom, Krishna is theoretically and theologically so: he is the ‘perfect incarnation’, incorporating all sixteen attributes of human perfection. Rama displays only thirteen; the three he lacks are: an unparalleled capacity for romantic love, an irresistible skill in music, and an extraordinary sweetness and sensuousness of personality.²⁵ Like Rama, Krishna is a warrior and a man of wisdom and moral seriousness, but he also has all the humour, eloquence and breadth of spirit that Rama lacks. He is unabashed about his sensuousness and his desires: his love for women is erotic and overpowering, and he knows the poetic ache of yearning for a lover far away. Like Rama, Krishna is beautiful, but women who desire him end up not with their noses cut off but loved and serenaded by the music of his flute.

But despite the immense numbers of his erotic conquests, there is something almost effeminate about Krishna’s sentimental plenitude, his flute playing in the woods. Is this why he fails to be a satisfying mascot for our go-getting age? Or at least for its men? Go to celebrations of the major Krishna festivals and you will be surrounded by women and children looking at images of a playful infant and a flute-playing, sensitive man. It is at the festivals of Rama that you will find men in the lead, setting their flames, for instance, to the effigies of Ravana set up for the night of Dussehra. It occurs to me that, if ‘Rama’ is written up in the back of so many car windows in Delhi, it may not only be because he is a remote and unattainable hero. It may be also because he is someone very close, someone touchingly flawed, someone whose outbursts of spasmodic violence, precisely, make him a reassuringly familiar role model.

• • •

Colonised countries often imagine their liberation in terms of phallic recovery. Excluded from the government of their country under the British, campaigners for India’s self-rule complained of the Indian male’s political emasculation and infantilisation, and longed for a time when he could be made complete again. At just the moment when the dreamed-of recovery arrived, however, and Indians assumed political control of their own nation, they were, in this northern part of the country, unmanned forever, and in far more lurid and unforgettable ways. Some were literally castrated in the violence of Partition; many more had their male mastery outrageously mocked as their women were raped, murdered, disfigured and carried away. The gnawing emasculation of colonialism had proved to be temporary, but it had ended in a violent carnage whose genital mutilations, real and figurative, were impossible to reverse. It is the memory of these wounds that provides historical depth to everything we have seen about the fragility of north Indian men, who leave their women pining for the emotional completeness of men from Bombay — or other, more far-flung locales.

For many north Indian families, the abduction of women, especially, is not merely a mythological tale. Tens of thousands of women were seized during the partition, and they remained with their captors while the rest of their families travelled to the other side of the new border.

If the new state of India was so concerned to recover abducted Sikh and Hindu women from Pakistan it was because Indian manhood depended on it: as mythology made clear, there was no male duty more essential than the rescue of a stolen woman. Just as each individual abduction was an insult to a father or a husband, the totality of abductions was seen as an insult to the authority of the state; and it was essential for the new nation’s sense of its own virility that the lost women be brought home. The Congress declared in November 1947:

… during these disorders large numbers of women have been abducted on either side and there have been forcible conversions on a large scale. No civilized people can recognize such conversions and there is nothing more heinous than abduction of women. Every effort, therefore, must be made to restore women to their original homes, with the co-operation of the Governments concerned.²⁶

Thousands of women were located and transported to their parental families in the ensuing process, which involved large-scale investigations on both sides. What it did not take account of, however, was the wishes of the women themselves, many of whom did not want to be removed. In many cases, after all, years had gone by, and life had moved on. When the agents of the state came to uproot them, they often said they were content with their new religion, they were happy with their new husbands, they now had children, they did not want to lose everything again — but they were carted over the border anyway. This despite the real terror that returning ‘home’ inspired in many of these women. As social workers reported to the government from their interactions with abducted women:

Sir, we the social workers who are closely associated with the work are confronted with many questions when we approach a woman. The women say, ‘You have come to save us; you say you have come to take us back to our relatives. You tell us that our relatives are eagerly waiting to receive us. You do not know our society. It is hell. They will kill us. Therefore, do not send us back.’²⁷

These women were entirely justified in their fears. Among Hindu families, in the stories that people told of Partition horrors, ‘pure’ women had jumped into wells rather than allow Muslims to dishonour them — they had, like Sita, allowed the earth to swallow them up, and demonstrated their virtue with their death. That was the way the epic was supposed to end. These women who sought a place back in their own families after years in the demon’s palace caused immense consternation. Many of these women had experienced the love of Muslim men — whose sexual potency appeared, in Hindu nightmares, demonic — and there was no way to recognise them anymore as legitimate Hindu women. They were worse than dead: they were alive, and they presented to their fathers, brothers and husbands an unbearable reminder of their own masculine failure. While some remained as outcasts, many more were turned away and some were indeed murdered. Nearly all were cut out of memory. Countless numbers of women from that time disappeared from family stories: children grew up with fleeting impressions of aunts and older sisters who were never seen or spoken of again.

The sense of historical castration did not disappear from north Indian society. Quite the opposite. One of the first rules that people who moved to Delhi learned was that you did not insult a man in public, or remind him of his shortcomings, for the consequences could be improbably severe. Almost every week someone died in the city because they confronted a man about his bad driving, or his loud behaviour, or his lewd remarks to a woman. As the Hindustan Times commented at the beginning of 2010, looking back at the murders of the previous year:

A man murdered his neighbour for kicking his dog at Ranhola village in Outer Delhi. Another was killed for breaking the queue at a public toilet in Civil Lines, north Delhi. New Friends Colony in south Delhi witnessed murder when a man refused to let another make a call from his cell phone.

The Delhi Police registered 523 cases of murder last year against 528 in 2008. Of these, 15 per cent were due to ‘sudden provocation’, legalese for Delhi’s infamous bad temper, while 17 per cent were passion-related. Only 16 per cent were committed with criminal intent.

“Last year saw some of the most bizarre murders as far as motive was concerned,” Y.S. Dadwal, commissioner of police, said at the Annual Police Conference on January 2.

Psychiatrists believe lack of a proper outlet for anger, as well as the absence of basic information on anger management is to blame. “Many things — from machismo to impulsiveness, part of every metro’s culture — are behind such cases,” said Dr Rajesh Sagar, senior psychiatrist, AIIMS.

“People in the city are changing with it. They are finding it difficult to control emotion,” said Dr Rajat Mitra of the NGO Swanchetan, which works with the Delhi Police. ²⁸

The capital was defined, increasingly, by a hyper-aggressive masculinity, which seemed to lose all constraint in the years after 1991. Who are you to tell me what to do? was what a man shouted as he hit another in the face: because with this age of global markets came an end to all limits on behaviour, and now no one, least of all a stranger, could tell you what to do. People used the word ‘slave’ a lot to describe the history that was no more: “We have been slaves for too long; now no one can order us around.” Delhi, where a rising breed of politician — businessman embodied most perfectly this new Indian brawn, became the stage for a new, psychotic model of manhood which jettisoned all social and even legal constraint in its concern for phallic prestige. The stories which dominated the city pages of the newspapers either side of the year 2000 concerned scions of powerful families who seemed to feel that the principal benefit that came with their social position was the free expression of furious masculine power. In 1999, for instance, Manu Sharma, son of a Congress member of parliament whose political position had helped him assemble a multibillion dollar empire of hotels, entertainment, sugar mills and agriculture, shot dead a well-known model, Jessica Lal, because she refused him a drink at the bar where she was serving in a celebrity party. Sharma had turned up with a group of friends which included Vikas Yadav, the son of another rich politician whose perennial success in evading prosecution for his gangsterism must have contributed to the young men’s sense of invulnerability. Lal told the young men that they had come too late and the bar was closed. Sharma offered her 1,000 rupees [$20] and she replied that he still could not have even a sip of alcohol. “I could have a sip of you for a thousand rupees,” replied Sharma, and took out a gun to threaten her. He fired a shot into the air and then a second shot into her head. He and his friends then left the bar.

The restaurant was crowded with witnesses, and Sharma himself told the TV cameras that he had shot her — “It was embarrassing to hear that even if I paid a thousand bucks I would not get a sip of drink.” But in the trial that followed, he was acquitted of the murder, mainly because thirty-two witnesses withdrew their initial testimony. The trial was later opened, partly as a result of a sting operation by a critical newspaper, Tehelka, which produced evidence of coercion and bribery of witnesses by Manu Sharma’s family, including his politician father, and Sharma was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Manu’s friend Vikas Yadav later had his own turn in the headlines. In 2002, Vikas and his brother, Vishal, apparently marched their sister’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend out of a wedding party, loaded him into their Tata SUV and murdered him. They did not like the relationship between their sister and this man and, as we know, losing control of the family’s women was one of those things most likely to inflame north Indian masculine rage.

When I saw Nitish at the party, Vishal and I decided this was a great opportunity to fix things, a chance we would not get again… I told Vishal to take Nitish outside. It was midnight. Vishal and I made Nitish sit in the front seat of our Tata Safari. Vishal and Sukhdev Pehalwan were sitting at the back. I was driving. We reached Balwant Rai Mehta Lane at around 1.30 a.m., and stopped. We made Nitish move to the back seat, now Vishal and Pehlwan held him tight. I drove again and stopped somewhere between Bulandsher and Khurja. Using all my strength, I hit Nitish’s head with a hammer. He fainted and after a while he died. We drove one kilometre and then we threw his body onto the road. Vishal removed Nitish’s cell phone from his kurta pocket. He also took Nitish’s wristwatch and hid both these in the bushes that were nearby. I took the hammer that I used to murder Nitish and we hid that in the bushes too. Then we took the diesel from our car’s tank, poured it on Nitish’s body and we set it on fire. Then we drove to Delhi.²⁹

Vikas Yadav had evaded conviction for murder in the past, but this time even his family’s prowess in this domain was not enough to get him off, and both brothers were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment (though appeals are still underway). But many other violent deaths in the proximity of Delhi’s power youths, however, somehow disappeared abruptly from the newspapers or were tied up in some far-fetched resolution.

At the core of the city’s soul was something dark and fatal. Like all dark things, however, Delhi held a powerful attraction. It promised terrible, forbidden pleasures. It was not only the families of 1947 refugees who manifested its cracked and volatile personality: newcomers too sensed the violence under the ground and quickly adopted the city’s ways. Delhi’s grip was nauseating and yet secretly delicious: you gave yourself to it, and you did not realise until you spoke to outsiders just how corrupt you had become. If people flocked to the city it was not because it held some promise of New York-style grandeur — “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” — even though “making it”, in the financial sense, was of course critical. It was more than that. Delhi whispered promises, even to the purest souls, of violent and demonic pleasures. Come to me, all ye who have been fucked, it told them, and I will show you how you can fuck others.

• • •

One evening, I go to a qawwali concert in the gardens of the India International Centre, a well-known cultural institution in central Delhi. A group of musicians has come from Pakistan. They take their places as the day ends. Far above, bands of shrieking parakeets, which rediscover their sense of direction when the sun touches the horizon, fly home in straight lines across the sky. The first bats are flickering among the trees.

It is a weekday and the audience members have come from offices. Tight-lipped Hindu bureaucrats in blazers and ties shuffle around in the rows of plastic seats, hassled, and not yet present to the music.

The musicians take no account of the unrest around. Their music lifts off straight away to an extraordinary pitch of ecstasy and yearning, the voices soaring one after another to the yawning sky, drums filling the static garden with dance, hands clasping at heaven. The head qawwal is a man of extra-terrestrial magnetism: portly and jowled, his fingers dart weightlessly, drawing sound in the air, and his voice is abundant with every kind of desire, spiritual and carnal. He wears a brilliant white kurta, embroidered around the neck, and a scarf which he tosses like a mane of golden hair.

Over the course of the first forty minutes or so, something amazing happens in the audience. The men begin to make twitches of enjoyment — but they are embarrassed at first, and they look around them quickly after each full-arm gesticulation, fearful of censure. But the spirit spreads and soon everyone is touched by it: their restraint leaves them and they leap from their chairs in elation, they are full-heartedly clapping, swaying and crying out. Something has entered them from the outside: their bodies are making unaccustomed movements and they are moaning with words from elsewhere. They are going to the stage to give money! — and the Hindu women cover their heads and bow before the foreigners, Salaam! Islam is pouring out of these people who lie awake at night terrified that their daughter might marry a Muslim. These people who were not even born in the days when these gestures were de rigueur, know them nonetheless.

Look at the men in the audience, these unimaginative men who love rules, who fast on Tuesdays and believe they are virtuous because they deny themselves pleasures; these suspicious men whose Brahminical anxieties keep them from eating out, mixing with strangers, or walking in the street, these dutiful men who work hard but speak poorly; look at these men who are so conditioned to murder the feminine within them that they cannot keep themselves from stamping on girls and women without — look at how they desire this Sufi on stage, the weeping tuneful beautiful Muslim whose passions overflow, the man of poetry and eloquence, the man of universal desire, the man who has not sacrificed his feeling, who has never learned that ecstasy and song are effeminate — look at how they take him into themselves and try to fill themselves with him. How his gestures infect their own, how his passion lights up their faces. Look how this Muslim can set a fire in the hearts of these Hindus and set them free — look how he can restore them to everything they have been.