Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Abstract

Delhi has a hacked-off parentage, breeding orphans out of its baked land.

Uprooted from the maternal solace of history and tradition, it has grown to abhor its father figures — politicians, bureaucrats, and all those cynical patriarchs of money and the market — and even real-life parents have grown remote with the jolts and ruptures of break-neck change.

Like an orphanage, the city suffers from a bewilderment of origins and direction. It is shaken by tics and tantrums. It cries out for the relief, on its shoulder, of a tender parental hand.

But once in a while, an orphanage produces beings who are preternaturally free. Never having known the corrosion of parental authority and expectation, such individuals assemble a universe for themselves, and dazzle all around them with their originality, curiosity and wisdom. They do not accept the fossilised judgements of others, and they bring wondrous possibility to the staidest of systems.

In this respect, too, Delhi resembles an orphanage. It can spawn people who seem entirely unconstrained by how a particular problem has been dealt with before, people who can imagine a myriad of ways in which the world might be differently organised. People who transcend the general self-involvement and who see immediately, in the adjacent and particular, the planetary extension. It is in these people that I find Delhi’s utopian potential.

One of these resplendent individuals is Anupam Mishra,* with whom I now stand looking out over the Yamuna river.

It is a hot day and we both carry drinking water. I have a litre bottled for me by the Coca-Cola Company and purchased just now from a roadside stall. Anupam has brought a flask from home, which hangs on a strap around his neck. Seventy years old, with a shock of grey hair, he wears a brown kurta, which hangs loosely around his slender frame; on his feet are leather sandals.

We are on the stretch of land where there was, until its demolition before the Commonwealth Games, a large and vibrant township, home to a few hundred thousand people, among them the residents of Bhalswa Colony whom we met earlier. The area is dominated, now, by two enormous sports stadia — and by the new Delhi Secretariat building, which houses the city’s government. This building is in two wedge-shaped halves standing at an angle to each other, whose shining surfaces look out over the river like two glass eyes — and indeed the entire complex could not be more blind to the river estuary that sweeps before it. A few metres away, where the Yamuna’s flood plain begins, there is a hint of Delhi’s primordial landscape: tufted grasses line the water, some three metres high, and cormorants spread wet wings in the sun — but it is as if this suggestion of nature is abhorrent to those who have seized this land for their modern-day forts. High walls surround every building, and the enormous area has been paved with concrete paving bricks, as if someone were worried about some vegetable invasion; these bricks store so much heat on a day like this that pavement dwellers must pour bottled water on them just so they can sit.

The land between these showcase installations and the waterfront is an uncannily dead zone which the city’s managers seem to have designated as a dumping ground. Behind the Secretariat building is a graveyard for retired ambulances, which are piled unceremoniously by the side of the road. There is a huge amount of masonry waste: unused paving slabs, sections of concrete pipe, and entire walls removed from the destroyed township, which are lent against each other like files on a shelf. A few hundred rusting steel chairs have been piled up on one patch of ground, a couple of storeys high.

We are very close to the centre of the city but it as if its consciousness ends just short of the river. Delhi has its back to the water and only the roving underclass seems to come here, whose signs are everywhere: bedding in the bushes, discarded plastic bottles, human excrement, and the charred circles of cooking fires.

“The previous cities of Delhi were built so that rulers could look at the river,” says Anupam. “The Mughals loved the Yamuna, and built their Red Fort on its banks. A few hundred miles downstream they built more grand buildings looking over it: the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. But the British did not like to look at this river, and when they came they turned away from it. I think it’s because they found it unnerving. European rivers flow from gradual glacial melt, and they are the same all year round. You can build walls to contain them and put buildings right on the riverfront. But this is a monsoon river. You have to leave an enormous flood plain on both sides to accommodate the river’s expansion during the monsoon, and for the rest of the year this flood plain is muddy and empty. I think the British found it ugly. They found such a volatile river intimidating.”

I tell Anupam about an old woman I met in Civil Lines who remembered how the river ran along the end of her garden in the 1920s. There was a mud wall keeping the water out: every month the gardener would make a hole in the wall, the river would flow in, irrigating the garden, and the children would chase the enormous silver fish that flapped about on the lawn. She and her siblings learned to swim by jumping off the end of the lawn into the river.

“Civil Lines was the first British encampment,” Anupam says, “outside the walls of the existing Mughal city. But when they came to build their own city they moved away from the river, and for the first time the city had no aesthetic relationship to the Yamuna. It’s more important than it sounds. Looking at a river, swimming in a river — these are the first stages of cherishing it. The Seine can never be ruined as the Yamuna has been, because the whole of Paris is built for people to look at it. In Delhi, there used to be a great amount of life around the river — swimming, religious festivals, water games — but it has all come to an end. Think of religious immersion: it is not just superstition. It is a practice of water preservation. If our prime minister had to immerse himself in the Yamuna every year, it would be a lot cleaner than it is now. But everyone has turned their backs on the river in obedience to the modern city, and so it is filthy and forgotten.”

We walk down to the river’s edge. The water is black and chemically alive: it heaves muddily with bubbles erupting from its depths. Looking across its expanse, however, one can only see the mirror of the sky, and there is a satisfying feeling of riverine peace. Some twenty metres from the bank is a large statue of Shiva, submerged up to its shoulders. Egrets flit over the surface.

Over our heads is one of the river’s road bridges. A young couple have parked their car on the bridge and are now clambering down to the water. It is not easy. The concrete slopes are steep and fifteen metres high. The husband is carrying some kind of package; the wife wears a sari and sandals. Eventually they make it down to where we are standing. The package, it turns out, is a framed photograph of a dead male ancestor — a father, perhaps — decked in flowers. They throw it into the viscous water, watch it sink, and begin to climb back up to the highway above.

The edge of the water is choked with other similar offerings. Flower garlands, broken coconuts, photographs of Sai Baba, mats of shaved baby hair — and all the plastic bags in which these things have been brought — hug the lapping edge in a broad floating carpet.

“I don’t think I would place a photograph of my father in this water,” I say.

“No one is looking at the water,” says Anupam. “They are acting automatically, without looking.”

We begin to walk upstream. We pass the grave of a Muslim saint, around which is a spotless clearing furnished with elegant shelters made of sheaves of long river grasses. We cross stinking canals flowing into the river. No one is around: one would think we were far from any city even though we are now walking parallel to the new overhead highway that runs along the Yamuna bank.

We have set ourselves a long walk, but we have started in the hottest part of the day, and before long we withdraw under the shadow of this highway. The road is like a giant awning overhead, and it is cool here and curiously quiet. Hundreds of cycle rickshaws are parked in rows, and boys are working on repairs. Men go down to the river to wash their hands; they return to eat lunch next to us. Laundry is slung over rickshaws. Birds sing. Pylons carry cables across the river from the power station just a little upstream.

“Why do you think people have always built cities in this place?” Anupam says as we look at the flowing water. “It is because this stretch of the west Yamuna bank has the richest groundwater for hundreds of miles around. Delhi marks the point where the Yamuna comes closest to the Aravalli Hills, which end just to the south-west of us. Seventeen streams used to flow over this plain from the Aravallis into the Yamuna, making the ground abundant in clean water. For the first thousand years of Delhi’s history, every city drew its water from this rich underground supply. Every large house had a well in the courtyard. Each locality had fifty or so wells. Large communal wells were built for people to gather water and also to socialise in the presence of water.

“There were always new invasions and new cities. But those dynasties all came from the plains, and though they had different visions of religion and government, they had the same vision of water. Each conqueror inherited the infrastructure of the last and added to it, so that for 1,000 years Delhi evolved a continuous and sophisticated water system. The philosophy was simple: if you take, you must put back. Whenever they sank new wells they also built new tanks. These tanks captured monsoon rain so that it did not run off into the river, and they allowed this water to gradually seep down and recharge the water table. By the Mughal period, Delhi had 800 of these water bodies. Some were small, some as big as lakes. Many of them had religious and spiritual associations, because it is with the sacred that people protect their water systems. Today, people call these systems ‘traditional’ but this word is condescending, and implies that they are obsolete. They are not. In the entire history of technology nothing has improved on them, and they will still be around in many centuries when electric pumps and dams have long run dry.

“The Mughals were the first to use the river to supplement groundwater supplies. Their metropolis had greater water needs than anything previously built here so they needed to take from the Yamuna. But the river flowed under the walls of their city: there was no way to lift it to the city level. So they went 125 kilometres upstream to where the river was flowing at a higher altitude than their city, and they built a canal from that point which brought water into Shahjahanabad by gravity.”

This was the same canal we saw a few chapters ago, in Shalimar Bagh, where Jimmy’s mastiff ran so exuberantly along its banks.

“The elegance of their system was that the canal entered the walled city from the west and travelled through it to the Red Fort in the east. Ordinary citizens therefore got water from this canal first and the king got it last. Even in democratic societies the president is not usually on the tail end of essential resources. But these people understood the politics of water. Their system guaranteed that water would be clean all along its course because the king was the final user: no one could pollute the water that he would drink. It does not matter that this was not a democracy: they built their system around an understanding of water, and the needs of water are democratic needs. Only if you are democratic in your heart can you sanction this kind of water system. Otherwise you will reject it.”

We begin to walk again. The river bends away from us, and between us and it are the flats of the floodplain where crops are grown at this time of the year. The terrain is difficult and we decide to take the road. We climb on our hands and knees up the steep incline leading up to the highway, holding onto each other for stability. The concrete is burning hot. Finally we get up to the level of the highway, whose black surface is like a radiator. We climb over the barrier and cross eight lanes in front of the speeding traffic.

On the other side is a human-sized road with sidewalks. It leads through another zone of industrial refuse. There are abandoned buildings with broken windows. Any people here are foragers, collecting bits of plastic and cardboard for sale. There is the most enormous pile of shoes caught up in some twisted barbed wire. An old water tower overgrown with vines; the banisters have fallen away from the staircase that once spiralled up around its stem, and the steps jut out like rusty teeth. We pass a waterworks outside which hangs a banner saying, “Water is life”. The trees along the road are dead and desiccated. Here and there are rusty observation towers with broken spotlights. They look as if they have been lifted from a labour camp: I can’t imagine what they were here for.

“It was the British who ultimately broke with Delhi’s 1,000 years of water knowledge. Their rule was different from that of previous kingdoms, which had ruled without interfering in how people lived. The British wanted total rule, which would extend to education, morality, everything. And of course water too. But they had no experience of this landscape and they could not understand its water system. So though they did not set out to destroy it, destroy it they did.

“The British took no notice of the groundwater, which was the reason there had been cities in this place for 1,000 years. They were only interested in the river. They imported modern water practices from Europe, damming the Yamuna to the north of the city, in a place called Wazirabad, and running pipelines into the city from which they delivered water directly into houses. Sewage was then collected in drains which let it out into the river downstream. This is why it is ironic that the British chose not to look at the river. Previous kingdoms had not used the river, but they loved to look at it. The British lived off the river, but they could not bear to look at it.

“The British were used to getting water from taps and that is the system they wished to implement here. They also liked how this monopolistic system boosted their imperial hold on the place: they could make people dependent on them, and they could choose to deliver water to one social group and not another. But it was a total break with local water customs, and many in this city resisted water from taps. It was never considered auspicious. There is an old song which says something like, ‘Do anything to us, do whatever kind of harm you want to us, but don’t put taps in our houses. Keep your tapped water for your bungalows. Don’t bring it to where we live.’ Delhi people did not like the smell of piped water: they were used to taking water directly from wells. Before drawing water they would clean their utensils and rope, and then they would dip their vessels directly into the water source, which they could see and maintain for themselves. With piped water they could not see the source. It was far away, they did not know who was supplying it, how clean it was, or what kind of chemicals they were putting in. Even today you hear rumours of poison in the water system: people have not forgotten the paranoia unleashed when the British brought piped water.

“But gradually the British system extended everywhere. People opened a faucet and water came out and the water issue seemed to be ‘solved’. Delhi residents no longer had to think about a water ‘system’. And gradually the age-old system broke apart. There was no longer any need to maintain the channels and reservoirs. People demolished them because now the population of the city was growing: water tanks were taking up land which could be used as real estate. It did not hurt people to demolish them because they had forgotten what their function was, so they accorded them no prestige. It is the prestige of a system that directs you to conserve it and honour it; if that prestige disappears people cease to care. Of the seventeen rivers and 800 water bodies we had when the British came, hardly any are left.”

We are walking through strangely idyllic scenery, with trees and cultivated flats on both sides. In this city of 20 million people, there is no one around. The sun is on our heads, and we drink frequently.

“We still use the British system, which by now has turned into a disaster. It is a disaster because it has been taken out of the hands of people, who have therefore lost all their sense of water as a system. Now people think that water is just a wet substance that comes out of a tap, and if you need more you just turn on more taps. Which is why we now have such enormous problems. Delhi has water, it has lots of water. That is why the city came to be here in the first place. But water needs a system. And whereas Delhi once had an intelligent, scientific system, it now has no system at all.

“It is funny that we think ‘democracy’ is about voting. We are a democracy in the sense that we vote, but everything else, everything that constitutes our actual lives, has moved in the opposite direction. Water systems used to be entirely democratic: knowledge of the system was distributed to everyone, and everyone played their part in taking care of it. Now water provision is centralised, only a few people know how it works, and for everyone else there is only a vague sense of valves and pipes. And even the people who are running it have no deep knowledge of how water functions in this place.

“As soon as the water tanks were lost, Delhi began to have severe flooding. In our own time, everything that could once absorb monsoon water has disappeared. The tanks have gone and so has all of Delhi’s agricultural land. But the monsoon is still with us. The entire city is now one hard surface so there is nowhere for this sudden rush of water to go. Delhi is submerged every year by floods. This is an entirely modern phenomenon.

“But we also began to have severe water shortages. This place that drew conquerors from all over the continent because of the richness of its water is now in a water crisis. The river rapidly ceased to be adequate for the city’s water needs: Delhi’s population is fifty times larger now than when the British built their system, while the Yamuna is the same size. So Delhi began to take water from other places. Now we have pipelines bringing water from the Ganges and Bhagirathi rivers and from the Renuka lake. We can do this because compared to our predecessors we have acquired some small quantum of technological power. But it is a completely immature solution. First of all because we are close to exhausting these supplies too, and there is no other water we can use that we can bring to Delhi with gravity. Can you imagine if we had to use electricity to raise water to the city? And secondly because it pays no attention at all to the wider economy of water. Thousands of farmers have protested against Delhi taking their water, they have tried to smash the dams that stop their rivers’ traditional flow — but so what? Delhi wants water, and Delhi is powerful. Delhi is drying out the country for hundreds of kilometres around, which creates more refugees from the land, who come to Delhi, who require more water, so Delhi takes even more — and so it goes on.

“Not only this, but we do not have the capacity to treat such large quantities of sewage. Our sewage systems were built to treat one river. Now three times this volume is coming into the system. This is why our sewage plants treat a smaller and smaller proportion every year. Most sewage now flows directly into the river. It is a poisonous brew, full of industrial effluent, and Delhi produces it on a monumental scale. And what happens when you pour all this into a single river basin? Look how high the Yamuna is now. It is summer: we are a month away from the monsoon. The Yamuna is a seasonal river, and at this time of year it used to be a trickle. But what you see flowing there is not only the Yamuna. It is also the Ganges and the Bhagirathi and the Renuka lake. We take from all those places but when we have used it we pour it all into one river basin. That is why the river is running so high, and that is why we will at some point soon have a disastrous flood. The river will break its banks.”

We interrupt our northwards march to have some lunch. Anupam has brought some daal, roti and cooked vegetables, and we sit under a tree to eat. The landscape is uplifting, and birds sing on every side. Anupam continues.

“Now do you think our middle classes wish to pay the price of our present water shortage? Of course not. They wish to live free of any environmental context. That is the reward they expect from capitalism! They want to turn on their taps at any time and have water. The municipal supply, however, is heavily rationed, and provides water only for a few hours a day. So what do the middle classes do? They remember — they are good at history when they need to be! — that there is a rich supply of water under their feet. Over the last thirty years they have all dug private wells so they can pump out as much as they need. Every middle-class house has such a well, even though it is illegal. This water is completely unmonitored so of course the city’s water authorities now have no idea how much sewage they need to build capacity for. And all this additional water also floods out into the Yamuna, raising the level still further.

“But of course by now no one remembers the basic knowledge that governed Delhi’s water management for a millennium: if you take water from the ground you have to replenish it. People are pumping water out of the ground for their baths and washing machines and swimming pools but they have not built a single water tank to recharge the ground supply. So Delhi’s groundwater is also running dry. But let them not think about it! While it still comes out of the tap, let them pump away!

“As a result of this, many areas of Delhi are now completely dry. Whole sectors of the city have run out of groundwater and are supplied only by water trucks. There is a new five-star hotel that has no water: its water needs — baths, laundry, swimming pool, sauna — are all supplied by trucks which come at night in lines of a hundred or more. But while there is a way to spend oneself out of a problem, this city is curiously indifferent to that problem. Real-estate prices continue to rise even in areas where there is no water.

“Where does this trucked water come from? It comes from water entrepreneurs who buy a plot of land and pump out the water to distribute around the city. According to the law, owning a piece of land also means that you own the water beneath it. But water is a liquid! If you put a pump in a piece of land and start extracting water, you do not simply take it from your own land. You take water from everywhere. Even if your land is the size of a handkerchief you can pump out water for miles around, and the water table falls for everyone. So these trucks are not a magic solution. And even those entrepreneurs are running out of water, so they have to move further and further from the city to find it. How much are people willing to pay for water? If we run out of oil, we can adjust our lifestyles accordingly. But if we run out of water there is no life.

“You have seen these new water parks they have built in Gurgaon and Noida? Where thousands of litres are pumped out of the rock so families can splash around in swimming pools and water slides? I like this phrase, ‘water park’, but I use it in a different sense. I use it like a ‘car park’. Every time I meet a politician I say, ‘You can allocate land for people to park their cars. If you want your city to have any future you also need to allocate land for us to park water. Every great ruler of Delhi has been remembered for the water tanks and lakes they built to capture the rain and recharge the groundwater. You could be a great ruler too.’ But they don’t know what I am talking about, because they have forgotten where Delhi’s water comes from. They have forgotten that Delhi’s history is full of cities that have been evacuated because they have run out of water.

“We often think that recent centuries have produced a lot of new knowledge. But this is because we are no longer equipped to recognise the knowledge of the past. I see modern times as one long history of forgetting. Even the kings are ignorant now of what every person who used to live in this place once knew.”

• • •

It may seem surprising, in this place much concerned with physical security and survival, that water, that most essential of material resources, might be so neglected. Anupam’s picture of a failed government system bypassed by a middle class which builds private micro-systems of its own and thereby pushes the system much faster towards collapse, seems apocalyptic — and it is. It produces a fatally short-term, marauding mentality: when water is running out and no one is doing anything to replenish it, the rational strategy is just to take as much as you can possibly get before everyone else does.

For some, it might prompt the question: when will Delhi ‘grow up’? When will politics finally subjugate these anti-social, insubordinate energies and channel them into an objective system that works in the long-term interests of all?

That this is a tourist’s question, which very few people in Delhi ask, says something about the difference between the history of the Western city and the future of ‘emerging’ cities such as this. For the question derives not from any sense of developments in this city, but from an imported memory of how other cities have evolved. This memory is rapidly changing, however, in our time, from universal to parochial.

It is most excellently exemplified by the case of New York, icon of the century past. We still remember, somehow, the titanic struggles between order and chaos out of which that city emerged; images flicker in our heads of the scheming robber barons of the rising years, the gangs, the corrupt politicians, the slums filled with the gaunt and dispossessed. Great fists descend from the sky: the dogged mayors who took on these rogue forces, strangling gangsterism, breaking up the comfortable cartels of politicians and tycoons, securing the condition of the poor, and building the most ambitious urban infrastructure ever conceived. The battle theme turns lyric as centralised authority looks out over a city subjugated, as it grasps the reins of its varied energies and channels them into that single, glorious urban achievement that all of us know because it is our shared global mythology.

Nor have we forgotten the immense quantity of destruction that happened along the way. We know what once lay beneath: how neighbourhoods were ripped down for highways and parks, how languages sank without trace, how so much life was buried: the spontaneous energies of the street, the animals, the folk variety, the languor, the vice. At every point along the way, New York was in some sense less, and there were always New Yorkers who lamented the loss of mystery, the shrinking of horizons, the rationalisation of life. The great film-poets such as Scorsese and Coppola, through whom so many people around the world became citizens of New York without ever going there, created elegies to the older, more shadowy metropolis that was spot-lit into oblivion. The Godfather movies, for instance, brought to life this quintessential back-and-forth of New York feeling: the dark grandeur of the lost worlds that produced the modern city, but also, and essentially, the necessity of their passing. They were films about the inexorability of twentieth-century process: the loss of human grandeur and variety in the name of the serene and productive metropolis. The tale of the modern city was that of the absolute inevitability of the victory of unified, centralised administrative power over everything else. The accompanying fear — that all vitality would eventually be lost and human beings would no longer know or love anything except the mechanisms of their own control — was never sufficient to put the brakes on this unidirectional expansion.

Such histories instruct many Westerners, and not just them, that the future of today’s ‘immature’ cities will follow the Western past. We were just like them, goes the logic, before we became like us. And — since modernity moves inexorably, inevitably in one well-known direction — they will become like us too. It is only a matter of time. But as investment advisers are fond of pointing out, the past is no guide to the future. And there are many reasons to doubt that Delhi will follow a course mapped out by other cities in different eras and far away. It is more likely that the emerging places of the world will follow quite different paths and produce different realities. It is probable, in such places, that the formal will never defeat or even rival the informal. Large portions of their cities will continue to be self-administered by communities who are little known to authorities or to each other. They will continue to build architectural and social systems that are both ingenious and unknown. In the grip of ‘globalisation’ they will remain quite foreign and untamed.

Even the idea of the centralised authority that produced Paris and New York seems difficult to imagine in the place where I write. It must be remembered that this authority had already been in preparation for centuries in the West before it was activated as a political principle, because everything it was imagined to be — benign, omnipotent, omniscient and, above all, singular — was borrowed from the Judeo-Christian idea of God. This model of government was therefore already familiar to Christian societies before it existed: it was a secular translation of widely held spiritual assumptions, and no metaphysical U-turn was required to embrace an authority of that sort. This is not the case where I am: many even of the most Westernised of my co-citizens find the singular eye of the Western state excessively pedantic and tiring, and find relief in India’s more paradoxical multitude of authorities.

But perhaps these theological concerns are insignificant beside the much more basic fact that Delhi enters the zone of Western globalisation at a moment when the era of state authority is on the wane everywhere, even in the West. The rise of New York coincided with the intensification of centralised authority in all rich countries. But now there are signs that this is over. Impoverished Western administrations increasingly fail to collect revenues from corporations and financial elites, which can easily out-manoeuvre them in this transnational age. They surrender more and more of their earlier functions and they ride increasingly off the investments made in their days of greater authority and surplus. This is the tenor of the day. And indeed, in Delhi, things seem to be moving in the opposite direction. The story of contemporary Delhi is one of the gradual breaking away of various groups from their historical relationships with centralised authority. Hardly anyone, from any stratum of society, lives as if they believed that governments will solve their problems. The poor have the most direct and necessary relationship with the state, but in the cities many of them have been battling with administrators for many years, and want nothing from them except to be left alone to build their own streets and houses and communities. The middle classes have little taste for what the state does: they do not wish to give to it and they do not wish to receive from it. Ideally they would seal themselves off from the broad currents of this country and exist in as privatised a way as possible; so they run to ‘corporate cities’ where they pay corporations to provide them with roads, parks and physical security. Many of the very rich, meanwhile, have taken control of politicians and political processes for their own ends, not the other way round. They have engineered a commercial system whose speed and efficiency derives from bypassing and subduing the state’s mastery and independence.

What of these rich, some will ask? Can they not use their extraordinary influence to build institutions and infrastructure to organise Delhi’s tumultuous energies that they might better nourish the future? In these oligarchic times, indeed, many have begun to feel that only the super-rich possess requisite the power and dynamism, anymore, to build anything of enduring significance. But somewhere in the back of this question, too, is twentieth-century New York. People remember the concert halls, libraries, museums, universities, public housing and all the rest built by the members of New York’s gilded-age elite, and wonder when their upstart Delhi peers will take on this role. But that surprising impulse on the part of heedless capitalists to nurture their city and society is unlikely to be reproduced by the Delhi rich. And this is in part because they constitute — like the rich everywhere today — a deterritorialised elite. If the barons of early twentieth-century New York built libraries and opera houses with their own money because it was essential to their idea of success that their city resemble and surpass the great cities of Europe. New York was not only where they derived their income: it was the theatre of their lives and the signature of their arrival. They would create a ‘New World’ that would better the old: they would not send their sons to study on the other side of the world, in musty Oxford and Cambridge, they would build new, superior, American institutions. They were preoccupied by ‘backwardness’ in their local infrastructure and population because it was a slight on their own selves. But today’s global elite is much less invested in local and even national spaces than the American elite of a century ago. Delhi does not hold the overwhelming significance for its super-rich that New York did for those earlier masters: it is just the place where they accumulate income, and they have rather little inclination to turn it into an urban masterpiece. They have no personal need of such an enterprise because they have become used to seeing the world’s existing resources as their own: they do not need to build great universities for themselves because they have already been built for them — in the United States.

Such a feeling is not confined to Delhi. It applies to elites everywhere. Members of the Delhi elite are identical to their peers from Paris, Moscow or São Paulo — in that they possess houses in London, educate their children in the United States, holiday in St Tropez, use clinics in Lausanne, and keep their money — offshore, nowhere. That circumstance in which great quantities of private wealth were ploughed back into the needs and concerns of one place, which was ‘our place’, no longer pertains. Not here, not elsewhere.

Perhaps, too, we can talk of changes in the sense not only of space but of time. To build great works requires supreme confidence in future time, and this has everywhere diminished. Though capitalism’s cycles of investment and return have always clamped down on eternity, somehow its very cruellest phase — during American slavery, for instance, or European imperialism — was able to sustain a more generous sense of the future, delivering to the world schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, universities, parks, public spaces and vital systems which continue to shape our existence today. But then in Europe and America it is difficult to find institutions of culture or learning built now that are imagined to last till, say, the year 2500. Contemporary Delhi, in this respect again, falls in with the general case.

In places where historical ruptures have been few or lenient, and where institutions have been allowed to flourish for many centuries, those institutions have often risen to global significance, in part because the expanse of time they hold within has become so exquisitely rare. Even in aggressively contemporary places like Delhi, people with resources and ambition send their children to universities that have often taken four centuries (Harvard) or even eight centuries (Oxford and Cambridge) to evolve. This is not just about ‘brand names’: it derives from an understanding that there are aspects of the development of an individual that require him or her to be immersed in much greater currents of time than are available in most of contemporary life. Learning is one of those areas: we understand, intuitively, that it is not possible to build up overnight what ancient institutions of learning possess. But we also know this about our own time: that we are able to use what our predecessors built far better than we are able to build for those to come. In this sense the short-termism of Delhi, the hyper-accelerated existence where everyone is trying to draw out whatever they can get before the whole resource is exhausted, is not just Delhi’s problem. It is true that the ramifications of the problem are revealed most starkly in places like Delhi, whose own pre-modern institutions were laid bare, and so cannot block the view of twenty-first-century landscapes. But it is a problem of the global system, and one that may only be avoided if we can recover our sense of eternity — in disobedience to all accepted processes of contemporary thought and feeling.

If the city of Delhi is globally interesting, it is not because it is an example of a city on its way to maturity. It is interesting because it is already mature, and its maturity looks nothing like what we were led to expect, in times past, that mature global cities looked like. This city, with its broken public space, with its densely packed poor living close to some of the most sweeping, most sparsely populated areas of any big city anywhere in the world, with its aspiring classes desperately trying to lift themselves out of the pathetic condition of the city into a more dependable and self-sufficient world of private electricity supplies and private security — this is not some backward stage of world history. It is the world’s future.

To look at contemporary Delhi is to look at the symptoms of the global twenty-first century in their most glaring and advanced form. We understand here, as we cannot in the centres of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism, which will continue for some time with their old momentum, what a strange and disquieting reality it is, this one we are all heading towards.

• • •

The river along whose banks we walk, Anupam and I, is epic. Rising in the Himalayas, near the roof of the world, it flows south-east for more than 1,000 kilometres, passing Delhi and Agra, before pouring into its parallel sister, that other great Himalayan river, the Ganges, which carries its waters the rest of the way across the sub-continent to flood out, finally, into the Bay of Bengal.

The fertile alluvial plain between these two rivers nurtured the ancient Vedic culture which produced such achievements as the Mahabharata; the battle of Kurukshetra at the centre of this epic is said to have taken place on the Yamuna banks a couple of hundred kilometres north of Delhi. The place where the two rivers meet, just outside Allahabad, is a place of affecting natural grandeur: the Yamuna’s dark waters run up against the light waters of the Ganges, and for kilometres they flow alongside each other in the basin, two unmixed strands, until finally their shades become one. Every twelve years, tens of millions of people gather at this site for the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering, whose centrepiece consists of spiritual purification through immersion in the waters of the two sacred rivers.

Of the two, it is the Yamuna that has the more delicate and beautiful mythology. The name ‘Yamuna’ is a cognate of ‘Yami’; Yama and Yami were, according to the Rig Veda, the first mortals: twins born of the sun god. Yami was filled with desire for her brother and tried to convince him that they should produce children together for the population of the earth; Yama was filled with horror and chose to die rather than to commit incest. Lacking offspring, he could never be freed from the realm of the dead. He became the god of death, keeping account of the life-time of all mortals. In some accounts he is a terrible, vengeful figure; in others a tragic one, weeping eternally over his painful duty of cutting beings from their lives.

Yami wept too: for the brother who had spurned her and whom she now would never see — and it was from these sisterly tears that the Yamuna river flowed. Born of grief, these waters had the power to absorb the sin and sorrow of the world, and gods and mortals alike swam in them to cleanse themselves of ill: this is how they turned so much darker than the cheerful Ganges. And Yamuna’s sadness continued, for she fell in love with Krishna, who was born by her side, who played in her waters as a child, whose love affairs unfolded on her wooded banks, and whose great philosophic discourse — recounted in the Bhagavad Gita — was delivered by her side; but Krishna left her behind and continued his dance elsewhere. So the Yamuna speaks of feminine melancholy: of the frustrated desire for love, fulfilment and male perfection.

Anupam and I have walked a long way, and the heat of the day has subsided. We have taken the route of the highway, and the river disappears from view for long periods at a time. Over our head a flyover is being constructed: cranes lift immense concrete sections into place.

“Now we are north of the city,” says Anupam, “and you will see Wazirabad, where the British dammed the river.”

We climb over the barrier at the side of the road and walk towards the river. There’s a small shanty town on the banks and some strips of farmland. We come to the edge of a large, stinking channel.

“This is the largest sewage drain flowing into the river. All the sewage from north Delhi comes through here. This channel carries enormous volume. I would say it is six or seven metres deep.”

The waters of this channel are like fast-flowing tar. Where they meet the banks, the earth is scorched of vegetation. Anupam and I are both coughing with the fumes. The smell is particular: it is not simply that of human excrement, though this is the base. It has also a vegetable richness, and notes of chemical pique.

“Do you want to hear something about this drain? The canal the Mughals built now empties into here. That canal, which brings crystal clear water from more than 100 kilometres away, which the Mughal emperor used to drink in his palace — the modern water administrators could not think what to do with it. So they just dumped that water into this drain so it could flow back into the Yamuna. Recently I was at a meeting with the Water Board and I told them this, and the head of the Water Board said, ‘It is impossible.’ I insisted, and he asked his staff to check, and they came back to him and said, ‘It’s true, Sir.’ This is madness, because we are starved here not for water but for clean water. And the clean water we have, we mix with effluent without anyone ever using it.”

I remember a line from the eighteenth-century poet, Mir: “My weeping eyes are like a canal, my ruined heart like the city of Delhi.”

We climb up on a wall to look down at the sewage flowing into the river. The two water streams are of equal size just like, downriver, where the dark Yamuna meets the light Ganges, they are wary of each other for a while. Here it is the Yamuna that is light and the city’s effluent that is dark: the two colours flow next to each other beneath us.

“Over there, on the other side, you can see the dam. Upstream from here. You can see all the pipelines taking clean water into the city, where it will be treated and distributed. Sewage comes out of the city back into the river, mostly untreated. This is the first sewage channel — as you can see it’s just a couple of hundred metres south of the dam. There are many more such channels feeding into the river as you go southwards. There is a lot of solid waste in this sewage, which is another reason why the water level is constantly rising. The river is getting silted up.”

It is difficult to breathe here, and we head back to the road.

“Now you understand why the river looks as it does,” he says, climbing back over the fence. We have been walking for hours, and he is as strong and nimble as when we set out. “This is the mess that Delhi sends into the river, and this is what the river looks like to all the cities south of here. Mathura, where Krishna was born and where everyone goes to bathe in the river as he did, is foul. Agra too, where the Taj Mahal was built on the banks of this river. Only after Agra, where the Chambal river flows into the Yamuna, does the water get clean again. The Chambal is another huge river, and flushes out all this effluent from Delhi.”

Anupam can see that I am shocked by what we have just seen, and he begins to laugh.

“You should not get depressed,” he says. “Human beings have been on the planet for a very short time. Not more than 100,000 years. They have only been in this place for a few thousand years. Their own lives are extremely short. It is true that with technology we have gathered the power to damage this river very quickly. It hurts that it has been done in our lifetime. It should not have been done. But this damage will not last for long. The city is fighting a battle with the river, but the river is millions of years old and Delhi cannot win this battle. When there is no more Delhi the Yamuna will still flow, and it will be clean once more. It hurts to see this damage of course, but it never depresses me. It will be taken care of later. Of course that will not happen in my lifetime, but I do not have the ego to imagine that everything must happen during the short period I am on the earth. It will happen, and that is good enough. History is very long, and we are only a small part of it.”

• • •

For the greater part of the world’s population, the twentieth century was a period of immiseration and lost direction, and it supplies rather few sources of strength or inspiration for their condition today. The reason many of them have seized hold of the twenty-first century with such staggering energy is precisely because they are projected into it with ballistic force by their woeful experience of the twentieth, which, unlike in Europe and America, produces rather little nostalgia. Global capitalism is today stormed by warriors from many places, people for whom the past is cut off and who must therefore, in order to find a home, conquer the future.

The story we have told in this book, in which a place of dazzling wealth and cultural sophistication was taken over by a colonial power, in which that wealth and culture were shaken up and overturned, where a titanic power struggle led to a genocidal catastrophe, and where a post-colonial government undertook a massive project of economic engineering that ultimately exhausted itself and gave way to an energetic free-market backlash — this is, with some variations, the recent history of very much of the world. Of today’s two hundred-odd independent nations, roughly one hundred and forty came into being after 1900; most emanated after the Second World War from Western European empires — as India did — or, after 1989, from the agglomeration of the Soviet Union — and most would find something of their own history in these pages. Mine is a local story, but it is also the story of the global majority. It is not extraordinary. It is the normal story of our age.

Until recently, the fully fledged market society continued to exist mainly in those regions — America and Western Europe — that had played the greatest role in inventing modern capitalism in the first place, and over the centuries these regions had been able to come to some sort of truce between society and their volatile progeny. They had overcome their moral repugnance towards its promotion of materialism and greed, and they had developed a philosophical infrastructure which brought to the market society some sense of right and meaningful existence. They had built extra-market social mechanisms to mitigate some of its more terrible human ravages, and they had set up limits to the market’s dominion — to ensure the well-being of the poor and sick, for instance, or to maintain the integrity of leisure time and culture. Though they all went through enormous social violence and suffering as the waves of capitalist development passed through their peoples — Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens provide enduring parables of these trials — these societies continued to ‘own’ capitalism, to believe in its benign potential, and to feel that it could always be turned to new and better ends.

The billions who were abruptly ushered into global capitalism towards the end of the twentieth century had never reached this historical accommodation with it. Most of them, in fact, had spent the better part of the twentieth century being told that global capitalism was the source of all evil and that they should never succumb to it. It was not their system to shape or direct: it was built by foreigners who were traditionally thought of as heartless, spiritless imperialists — and they had a completely different sense of what it was, how it should be used and what it could do for them. They entered it, often, with enormous exhilaration and fervour, certainly, but also with great anxieties: that it would bring only unhappiness, that it would destroy too much, that it would make them resemble those Westerners whose greed and lack of values used to be such an important moral reassurance. The fact that, in the face of capitalism, they chose both to give and to deny themselves more totally than Westerners, the fact that they came to it with very different religious and philosophical histories, made it impossible to read their future out of the Western past. It was clear that they would find very different ways of accommodating capitalism into their social fabric, and that in so doing they would change the nature of the capitalist system itself.

In addition to all this, many of these places brought to the global table the legacy of immense historical traumas which had not been much processed in their societies. Since many of these traumas had had a profound effect on economic identities — on trust and suspicion with regard to strangers and contracts, on notions of wealth and poverty, private and common property — there was every reason to believe that this legacy would flood out into the functioning of the global system. We have become used to accepting the global force of the Jewish holocaust, which began to shape world politics, economy and culture from the moment it happened; but many of these other events, such as the partition of India, were ‘global’ events too, even if for a long time their effects were mostly confined to the place where they happened, and their inner contours remained obscure to the rest of the world. There was not only India’s Partition: there were also the mass famines of Stalin’s Soviet Union; Mao’s Cultural Revolution; the destruction of rural life in Brazil under the military dictatorship, and the accompanying shock urbanisation. Who could tell what residue remained of the 1950s famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese under Mao’s Great Leap Forward? — for even its most basic facts were still so unclear that it was impossible to tell how it might shape those survivors and their descendants who were now engaging with capitalism’s very different economy of scarcity and abundance. As these old events detonated belatedly into global space they would become part of universal history. Like the holocaust they would be taught in schools everywhere as ‘our’ history. The entire world would inherit their shock.

The dramatic expansion of the reach of global capitalism would change it profoundly. It was clear that things would get a lot wilder. Many new centres entered global capitalism ready to wage not peace but war. Many of them had had their faith in the idea of ‘society’ badly damaged, and, at a time when many of the world’s most pressing problems required the action of a collective global society, it was uncertain what role these warriors would play. It was clear that the creation of this ‘global society’ would require enormous empathy between world peoples and cultures. Only so could the vast bulk of newcomers feel any sense of investment in the system itself, or any faith that it was anything but a winner-take-all racket, in which the only reasonable objective was to belong to the small class of exploiters rather than the much larger mass of the exploited.

But it was clear also that the system’s experiential and philosophical base would be greatly broadened with the advent of these new members, who had not lost their sense of capitalism’s strangeness. It was certain that that this alone would produce radical new insights and visions. It was possible indeed that it might lead to an epochal efflorescence of world civilisation — the creativity and sophistication of which were the preconditions, anyway, for the system to realise its utopian, and not its apocalyptic, potential.

• • •

There is one last spot that Anupam wants to show me on the river. We have walked on, upstream from the dam at Wazirabad, and we have lost sight of the water. Anupam asks people how to get to the spot he is looking for; everyone gives contradictory directions. It is bizarre just how difficult it is to find this great river.

“I have not been here for twenty years,” he says, “and everything has changed. None of this was built last time I was here.”

We start walking down a busy road that is supposed to lead where he wants to go. The potholed road is being re-laid. A water truck pours water into a cement mixer; like all water trucks it is also leaking from every corner, so that the road is flooded. We get to the end of the road and climb over a wall. A boy is burning a foam mattress in order to retrieve the steel from the springs inside; the foam burns with a fierce flame which fills the place with toxic black smoke. Anupam covers his mouth with his handkerchief.

We are in a sort of wasteland where a row of brick houses is being built. Construction work seems to have been abandoned for months, and three-metre-tall golden grasses grow rapturously out of the unfinished brick rectangles. Washing lines are slung between trees, and the ground is covered with unused bricks.

“This entire area is in the flood plain,” says Anupam. “All these houses will be flooded in the monsoon. That is why no one built here until now. But land has become so valuable that people will even build in places that are not habitable for part of the year.”

We can see the river in the distance. We cross the hard soil. Bits of ancient pillars are lying half buried in the ground. We reach a cluster of small temples. And then, before us, is the Yamuna: blue, tranquil, magnificent.

I gasp with the sight of it.

“Yes,” says Anupam sympathetically. “One can never believe that the river can be like this.”

This is not the black, sludgy channel we have been following all day. This is the primordial river, clear and fecund.

We are in every sense, ‘before’ Delhi. Before the river meets the city. Before the city was ever here.

Boys paddle gleefully in the water. Families of moorhens glide across its surface. Rowing boats are moored at the river’s edge, where you can see two metres to the bottom. In the middle of the river is a belt of golden reeds; the opposite bank must be a couple of kilometres away. Bright blue kingfishers chirp shrilly in the trees, which lean desirously over the water. A woman collects river water in a plastic canister.

We sit down on the steps to look at the river. Nearby a group of men is playing cards under a peepul tree. One of them is a naked sadhu.

“I don’t know why they have to put up these temples,” says Anupam. “This is pure encroachment: some businessman who thinks he needs a shrine to himself next to the Yamuna and pays some bureaucrat to let him build here. I would be surprised if God would feel like visiting such ugly things.”

And he adds, “But they too will pass away. The river will do the work.”

We are in that altered soundscape of a river estuary, the sounds clear over the surface of the water. Birds call out across large distances.

The horizon is open, and it is a relief. I realise how consumed my being has become by the internal drama of my dense adopted city. I have forgotten expansiveness. This megalopolis, where everything is vast, somehow offers little opportunity to see further than across the street. Everything is blocked off. Your eyes forget how to focus on the infinite.

“I’m glad you could see this,” says Anupam. “Now you realise why Delhi is here. It is one of the beautiful places of the earth.”