Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Notes

1. Vivek Narayanan, ‘In the Early Days of the Delhi Metro’, 2005, in Sudeep Sen (ed), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012), p. 528

2. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2002), pp. 9–21

3. Jawarharlal Nehru, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1928), p. 3

4. New York Times, 29 June 1991

5. Indeed $10 million was loose change to Gary Wendt, who was one of America’s highest-paid executives. The year after his meeting with Raman Roy, he paid $20 million to his ex-wife, Lorna, as a divorce settlement. In 2000 he became one of the small group of American executives to earn over $100 million a year when he became chairman and CEO of the financial services giant Conseco. One of the first things he did when he joined the new company was to outsource all Conseco’s back-office operations to India.

6. Some months after this interview it was announced that Manish Arora and Paco Rabanne were parting ways for undisclosed mutual reasons.

7. See The Hindu, 12 April 2011

8. Akash Kapur, ‘How India Became America’, New York Times, 9 March 2012

9. Quoted in ‘Clinton Urges Indian High-Tech Leaders to Help Poor’, Washington Post, 25 March 2000

10. ‘Obama’s Passage to India: What He Needs to Do’, Time, 2 November 2010

11. ‘The Prize is India’, Newsweek, 20 November 2009

12. See for instance the 1966 novel Mitro Marjani (translated from Hindi into English as To Hell With You Mitro) by Krishna Sobti, which portrays a sensual young woman whose greed for experience causes many disruptions in her husband’s household; it is her mother-in-law who stands by her and defends her, in a kind of female solidarity, from the aggression of the family’s men, including her own son.

13. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 237–9

14. My thanks to Anand Vivek Taneja for this translation.

15. Compiled from Emma Roberts’ parallel accounts of Delhi in Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society (1835) and Views in India, China and on the Shores of the Red Sea (1835); spellings modernised.

16. Thanks to Basharat Peer for both introducing me to and translating this poem.

17. Letter from 1857 quoted in Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam (eds), Ghalib 1797–1869: Life and Letters (Oxford University Press India, 1997), p. 148

18. Letter from 1861 quoted in Russell & Islam, Ghalib, p. 252

19. Quoted in Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee, New Delhi: Making of a Capital (Lustre Press, 2009), p. 22.

20. Guido Gozzano, Journey Toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1913 (reprinted Marlboro Press, 1996), pp. 124–30.

21. Quoted in Singh & Mukherjee, New Delhi, p. 22

22. Khushwant Singh, ‘My Father the Builder’ in Maya Dayal (ed), Celebrating Delhi (Penguin, 2010), pp. 2–11

23. My thanks to Basharat Peer for this English translation of Colonel Oberoi’s poem.

24. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (Penguin, 1998), p. 3; I am indebted to this book, too, for the historical summary which follows.

25. See Pavan K. Varma, Krishna: The Playful Divine (Penguin India, 1995), pp. 61, 206 and note 19

26. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of California Press, 2007), p. 23

27. Das, Life and Words, p. 29

28. ‘What Makes Delhiites Kill?’, Hindustan Times, 10 January 2010

29. ‘Confession of Vikas Before Cops’, Times of India, 29 May 2008

30. In the interests of protecting identities, this section is compiled from two separate interviews.

31. Quoted in Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Verso, 1983), p. 88

32. The fortunes of the Indian Coffee House declined with the advent of corporate café chains, and in 2011 it was announced that it was unable to cover its rental payments to the city, and would shut down. The Hindustan Times understated the institution’s age by more than a decade in its report, ‘After 42 Years, Sun to Finally Set on Indian Coffee House’, Hindustan Times, 14 July 2011.

33. Philip Bowring, ‘Maoists Who Menace India’, New York Times, 17 April 2006

34. Delhi Human Development Report, Oxford University Press New Delhi, 2006

35. ‘Parents of Nithari Kids Claim to Have Seen Dr Amit Kumar at the Infamous D-5 House of Pandher’, Midday, 11 February 2008

36. Dr N. Rangarajan, quoted in teesutalk.blogspot.in

37. Quoted in ‘Inside Nithari Killer’s Mind: “Would Watch Girls Come In, Even I Felt the Urge”’, The Indian Express, 12 October 2009

38. Quoted in ‘Nithari Murder: SC Upholds Death Sentence for Koli’, The Indian Express, 16 February 2011

39. ‘Portrait of Evil’, India Today, 22 January 2007; I owe to this article the majority of my detail about the Nithari crimes.

40. Quoted in ‘Portrait of Evil’, India Today, 22 January 2007

41. I am grateful to Raghu Karnad for this anecdote.

42. S. Mulgaokar, ‘The Grimmest Situation in 19 Years’, Hindustan Times, 3 November 1966, quoted in Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (Pan Macmillan Delhi, 2008), p. 415

43. Guha, India After Gandhi, p. 569

44. Das, Life and Words, pp. 113–4

45. Das, Life and Words, p. 168

46. ‘Key Players in Bofors Scandal’, India Today, 28 April 2009

47. Michael Walton and Aditi Gandhi, ‘Where Do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6 October 2012, pp. 10–14

48. ‘Lok Sabha Polls to Cost More than US Presidential Election’, Mint, 1 March 2009

49. Dev Kar, ‘The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948–2008’ (Global Financial Integrity, Washington DC, 2010)

50. Pranab Mukherjee, ‘Black Money: White Paper’ (Ministry of Finance, New Delhi, 2012)

51. This conversation took place in 2010, when Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was living in exile in England. In March 2013, he was discovered dead in his Berkshire home following his probable suicide.

52. From an account given on the DLF corporate website (2010).

53. ‘Guptas in Spotlight over South African Dealings’, The National, 19 March 2011

54. ‘Guptas’, The National

55. ‘The Gupta Interview: A Peek Behind the Sahara Curtain into the “Gupta Desert”’, Business Day, 4 March 2011

56. ‘The State of the World’s Children’ (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2013); and ‘Delhi Development Report’ (Planning Commission, Government of India, 2013)

57. ‘Sprinting to Disaster’, India Today, 25 September 2010