Capital: A Portrait of 21st Century Delhi by Rana Dasgupta (Canongate, £16.99)
Visitors to India’s capital city will be struck by the beauty of the ruins—tombs, forts, water tanks—that spangle the old city. They will also notice the aggression of its inhabitants, who seem to be on a permanent rampage, either to enable their survival or to assert their wealth and power. In Capital, Rana Dasgupta—a fine novelist and short story writer whose Solo won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in 2010—gives the city a literary imagining in English such as Mumbai, its much younger rival, has had for many years.
Dasgupta’s approach is anecdotal and engagingly personal—the book is informed by history and journalistic reporting, but has few endnotes and little interest in statistics. Instead, and with a novelist’s skill, it is organised into a series of images. We encounter a gay businessman from a macho north Indian family; meet bereaved relatives of patients killed by criminal negligence at hospitals across the city; wander through the relentlessly difficult lives of slum-dwellers, forced to move on and start again several times over; and glimpse the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, the architect of economic deregulation in India over the past decade, helplessly kept awake at night by rich men racing their sports cars through the empty city centre. Dasgupta’s eye is keen, and his sensitivity to small moments makes this extraordinary, tender book linger in the mind like a series of striking short stories. In Delhi, ruined, embattled, and alarmingly mutant, he sees the globalised city of the future.
Visitors to India’s capital city will be struck by the beauty of the ruins—tombs, forts, water tanks—that spangle the old city. They will also notice the aggression of its inhabitants, who seem to be on a permanent rampage, either to enable their survival or to assert their wealth and power. In Capital, Rana Dasgupta—a fine novelist and short story writer whose Solo won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in 2010—gives the city a literary imagining in English such as Mumbai, its much younger rival, has had for many years.
Dasgupta’s approach is anecdotal and engagingly personal—the book is informed by history and journalistic reporting, but has few endnotes and little interest in statistics. Instead, and with a novelist’s skill, it is organised into a series of images. We encounter a gay businessman from a macho north Indian family; meet bereaved relatives of patients killed by criminal negligence at hospitals across the city; wander through the relentlessly difficult lives of slum-dwellers, forced to move on and start again several times over; and glimpse the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, the architect of economic deregulation in India over the past decade, helplessly kept awake at night by rich men racing their sports cars through the empty city centre. Dasgupta’s eye is keen, and his sensitivity to small moments makes this extraordinary, tender book linger in the mind like a series of striking short stories. In Delhi, ruined, embattled, and alarmingly mutant, he sees the globalised city of the future.
