Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Note to the Reader

This book would not exist were it not for the generosity of several Delhi residents who agreed to discuss with me their lives, thoughts and experiences. These were often intimate discussions, which is why I have changed all names (except of public figures), and, in some cases, other identifying details. I request readers to respect the candour of these people — who sometimes took personal risks to speak to me — and not to attempt either to identify them or, where it is known, to reveal their identity.

In a place — and a world — where a person’s intellectual power is judged so much on the basis of their facility with the English language, I have chosen to make all characters in this book speak the same, standard, English so that their widely differing relationships to this language do not themselves become the issue. In reality, English was the second or third language for many of these individuals, and they did not speak it in this standard way; others did not speak English at all, and our interviews were carried out in Hindi. (In these latter cases I had the assistance of an interpreter.)

In Indian parlance, large amounts of money are measured in ‘lakhs’ and ‘crores’. A lakh is 100,000 rupees (Rs), or approximately US$2,000. A crore is 100 lakhs, or 10 million rupees: US$200,000. I have preserved these terms, which carry so much of the flavour of Indian financial discussion.

In certain places in the world, a ‘bungalow’ is a modest, even derisory, single-storey dwelling. In their colonial possessions, the British used this word to apply to the self-contained houses they built for their administrators, which were often, contrastingly, generous and grand. This is the usage that persists in modern Delhi — whose British-era centre is full of such houses — and in this book.

Capital is about the members of that rising, moneyed section of the Indian urban population who see themselves as the primary agents — and beneficiaries — of globalisation. It has become common to refer to these people as ‘the new Indian middle class’, and I, too, employ this phrase. But while their lifestyle has come to bear some resemblance to that of the ‘middle classes’ in Europe or America, the phrase sits uncomfortably with the Indian situation. At the time of writing, those Indians whose families earned more than Rs 500,000 [$10,000] per year represented less than 10 per cent of the population, which meant that ‘middle-class’ accoutrements and ideas belonged, in the Indian context, to the elite. Since the Indian economy was being restructured around the spending power of this emerging class, and since this entailed conflicts over land and resources which often punished the much greater number of the country’s rural poor — many of whom earned closer to $500 per year — it is important to retain this sense that the interests of the Indian middle classes were not lowly or innocent. The phrase ‘bourgeoisie’, in fact, which I also sometimes use, more accurately described their condition. At the same time, however, many of those who thought of themselves as ‘middle class’ did so because they identified with the hard-working, socially constructive overtones of the phrase, and because they wished to differentiate themselves from another, even smaller, elite — far richer and more powerful than they: moguls from the political and business classes, many of whom they regarded as selfish, reckless and fundamentally destructive to society. This distinction is also significant, which is why I generally follow the conventional terminology of ‘middle classes’ and ‘elites’ — even though the ‘middle classes’ are not really in the ‘middle’ at all.