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Literary Review
Wah Dilli!
RUMINA SETHI
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The portrait of a city where class distinctions are visible everywhere.
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Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City, Ranjana Sengupta, Penguin, p.248, Rs. 250.
The New Delhi of today is a far cry from the days we used to visit CP for an evening out, enjoy a coffee in Volga or saunter to Kwality’s to listen to jazz. Remote from such times, we have now moved into a city where the metro weaves its speedy tracks across the city’s entrails and in which little townships like Gurgaon have evolved into modern Manhattans. However, in Darya Ganj the artisan and the trader still labour on, and in Khan Market the tailor is seen bending over his sewing machine. Present-day tenements and ruins from the Mughal period juxtapose in a topography where homogeneity is an incongruity and ever absent. CP, nonetheless, is now a homogenous space of multiplexes and commercial high-rises, a destination with a “global address”.
Everyday lives
Ranjana Sengupta is the artistic sociologist behind the depiction of the city of New Delhi, her chief interest being the common citizen endeavouring to make a living, though intermittently the ancient history of the city seeps into her narrative. It is a living history, engaging and well researched, evoking contrary feelings of nausea and love, of nostalgia for the uncrowded past and a foreboding feeling of a future that might someday culminate in the city coming to a standstill under the pressure of its teeming millions.
The resource and the talent of this city has come from the refugees, those who are here for making a new beginning or those who arrive here with wealth and plans for further advancement. Class distinctions are loudly visible not only in the architecture of the city but in the pursuits of its inhabitants. Sengupta evokes in her gripping account of New Delhi a world of migrants who have settled here over the years and have transformed it into a fearsome city of noise and struggle. They reside in the ghettoes that have sprung up on the basis of their common bonds with their places of origin. On the metaphysical level it represents a habitation where people are seen moving in a nightmare from nothingness to nothingness, their dreams turning into a confrontation with a life devoid of dignity or peace.
And still the dream that life in this city will finally bring some change remains the only hope for a diverse population. Vulgarity of wealth sits cheek by jowl with poverty of the most inhuman kind. While the rich drive their BMWs, the outside world of desolation and poverty, visible in the corpse-like figures asleep on footpaths and under flyovers, screams for attention. Indeed, life seen from different perspectives appears to be a stupid joke, an invalidation of life and yet struggling on in search of a meaningful existence that gives a tempo to the throbbing life of this city seen in up market hotels, fast-food chains and the ever-present intellectual hub of the India International Centre.
Sengupta’s book is not about all of Delhi’s people or places, but the selection of one keen-eyed visitor whose “understanding of this ferocious, restless, relentless metropolis is that each of us who lives in this city carries a unique, if virtual, Delhi inside our heads: the life we have in it, the parts we are familiar with, and the parts we do not know, but nonetheless have a notion of, however inexact.”
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Literary Review
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