City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  Long after the colonizers have left, their language of power remains safely protected inside our best institutions and inside the hearts and minds of the best students produced in independent India. That’s why the recent ‘abolishment’ of the ‘licence/quota’ Raj and the programme of liberalization may not meet the high hopes generated. It’s easy to substitute one set of papers with another but ideologies are harder to reverse. Why should the elite care to re-frame rules that, on balance, protect them? If decolonization were so easy, we’d have decolonized long ago, but as Alvares argues, it is precisely among those who are trained in cutting-edge technologies that the colonial mentality goes deepest.

  Let’s ask ourselves again—why was it the Duke of Edinburgh who laid the foundation stone of IIT, Delhi? It wasn’t just that IIT, Delhi, was initiated with British aid, or that the Duke was a distinguished friend of India, cousin of Lord Mountbatten, who happened to be here for the Republic Day parade. It was because he was logically the most appropriate person. The Duke’s foundation stone, as I’ve mentioned before, is placed, with amazing metaphoric felicity, right next to the IIT lifts—which brings us to the matter of upward mobility.

  Upward mobility: a beloved phrase in the lexicon of the Delhiite, as it was once in that of the energetic colonizer. But what is the current state of the IIT, Delhi, lifts? Short answer: overcrowded, badly maintained, slow. They symbolize, I believe, the nature of governmental rewards. A technocrat would no doubt rise in government service but the ride would not be particularly cushy or comfortable. For in India, as in many post-colonial states, the system was simply overburdened.

  Clearly, then, staying within the system is a bad bet, if meteoric rise is what one is after. The canny IITian has already worked this one out. Like the earliest colonizing forces in India, the mercenaries, he is ready to sell his undoubted skills wherever they are most rewarded. It follows that there is, and always was, very little chance that the average go-ahead IIT graduate would be masochistic enough to choose to utilize his techno-managerial talents in low-paid government jobs, so why bother at all to tangle with governmental rules? A far more viable alternative to ‘challenging’ these rules had presented itself long ago to the sharp brain of the IIT engineer: namely, removing himself literally, body and soul, from India and its limitations and taking NRI routes to America, UK, Europe. Failing which, the next best thing is place oneself with a private company, preferably an internationally based one. A professional recognizes no boundaries.

  Fourteen out of seventeen students in his hostel wing, Ramnik informed me blithely, were planning to leave India; the remaining three would probably do the IAS. What about our economic programme of liberalization and a changed work culture, I asked. Wouldn’t that act as an incentive for them to stay behind, be with their families and still make big money? Ramnik was sceptical. That’s just another avenue for being able to leave, he said, smiling indulgently at my naïvete. The word ‘wing’ had a double meaning, he reminded me!

  Images of flight superimposed on images of architectural containment: how did these two ‘wings’ cohere? One learns from one’s students. It occurred to me from Ramnik’s sign-posting that living in a walled city like IIT enables one a sort of ‘escape’ from the pressures of the world outside, but it also mentally prepares one for a greater escape—this time from a utopia with a small ‘u’ to a bigger Utopia. The flight paths from Delhi to Dallas, from IIT to MIT are charted, as it were, from the moment students entered the hallowed gates of the institution. Delhi is a city of immigrants and the post-colonial engineer from IIT just embodies its latest and most gifted immigrant strain. He is Delhi facing westwards …

  ‘Something is Rotten’8

  Of all the western cities I have been to, Odense seems to me most unlike Delhi. I cannot for a moment imagine an IIT Delhi graduate migrating to it! The city Delhi most resembles, on the other hand, is Athens—with its monumental, crumbling history strewn all around, its ramshackle, seething present. Athens, possessed of a stunning museum of antiquities, and casually laying on son et lumiere shows for its visitors at the Parthenon—just as we do at the Red Fort; Athens, whose citizens feasted on the creamiest yoghurt and drank the hottest tea—a city just as unselfconscious about its epic past as is Delhi. Yet I could not imagine an IITian leaving his walled enclosure for Athens either! What the IITian wanted was a utopia of the future, unburdened by too much memory, a country like America where not a single building is more than four centuries old—most, less.

  The character of a city is determined by the behaviour and ambitions of its citizens. In this essay, I have attempted to look closely at a low-profile but high-achievement segment of such citizens. Young and dynamic as these info-warriors are, my observations imply that they too subscribe to that immigrant psychology of flight that is Delhi’s destiny. From within their walled city, they too seem eternally committed to hatching further plots of escape.

  Like Athens or Rome, Delhi is careless of its history, but the fact that it, like them, has been a threshold of civilization for millennia inevitably haunts it. I remember reading, with Ramnik’s class, Umberto Eco’s disquisition on how the limen (or, in our context, dehli) was conceptualized in Western history. An extract from that text:

  The Latin obsession with spatial limits goes right back to legend of the foundation of Rome. Romulus draws a boundary line and kills his brother for failing to respect it. If boundaries are not recognized, there can be no civitas … The ideology of the Pax Romana … the force of the empire, is in knowing on which borderland, between which limen or threshold, the defensive line would be set up. If the time ever comes when there is no longer a clear definition of boundaries, and the barbarians (nomads who have abandoned their original territory, and move about on any territory as if it was their own, ready to abandon that too) succeed in imposing their nomadic view, then Rome will be finished … Julius Caesar, in crossing the Rubicon, not only knows that he is committing sacrilege but knows that, once he has committed it, there is no turning back. Alea iacta est … What has been done can never be erased. [Even] God cannot violate the logical principle whereby ‘p has occurred’ and ‘p has not occurred’ would appear to be in contradiction … This model of Greek and Latin rationalism is the one that still dominates mathematics, logic, science and computer programming.

  Just as I had written earlier of the significance of the Duke’s foundation stone embedded in the heart of IIT, Delhi, Eco writes of the founding of another walled city—Rome. Obligingly, he makes it even easier for me by mentioning ‘mathematics, logic, science and computer programming’ in connection with the setting up of intellectual as well as physical boundaries. For the walled city constructed for the modern monastic order of the students of IIT, pride of India’s youth, specializes in exactly this aspect of learning—a learning which will take them as far as they want to go in fulfillment of their immigrant destinies. As Eco emphasizes, however, always on the other side of a boundary—whether we call it a seema, a lakshman rekha or kalapani, as in our myths, or simply a wall—lies fear and danger.

  Most disturbing of all are the boundary-crossers, Eco’s ‘nomads’ or barbarians—who make their home on both sides of the boundary but belong to neither. With these nomad adventurers, Delhi has had a long acquaintance. Take Timur, sweeping through Delhi in 1398, leaving behind him mounds of skulls and the reek of conquest. Today, Delhi still boasts of the Turkman Gate, named for Timur.

  IIT Gate already exists—a modernist equivalent of an earlier site of kingly ambition and aspiration; and it is, I suspect, just a matter of time before we put up a Bureaucrats’ Gate, a Civil Servants’ Gate or a Parliament Gate, for they would surely be Delhi’s answer to Watergate! Delhi’s way of commemorating her nomad hordes, her settlers and the enterprise of her immigrants, in short, is consistent. She furiously erects walls and gates. As with many ancient kingdoms, including Rome, she retains this mode as one of her chief strategies for spatially marking her history, her visible contribu
tion to the culture of India and the world. With post-colonial groups like the IITians, whose dwelling place I have depicted in so much excruciating detail here, Delhi is now going further and producing her own cosmopolitan nomads, her brand-label boundary-crossers. This, too, is part of her destiny.

  Edward Braithwaite, the African poet, wrote of yet another legendary city, Timbuktu, his birthplace, whose walls rose ‘so certain, so secure’. Delhi’s walls are the opposite—insecure, uncertain and under threat of deadly danger. It was this open secret about Delhi that Ajit Singh of Malviya Nagar learnt to his sorrow and it is this insidious worry that causes even its gifted contemporary princes, the IIT graduates, to persuade themselves into aspiring to a permanent absence from the city. Delhi is, in this sense, true Hamlet territory. Incidentally, I should point out here that the only journal in the world devoted exclusively to this single text, entitled Hamlet Studies and edited devotedly by Rupin Desai of Delhi University, emanates from Delhi! The journal has sustained itself for over two decades now, and in my view, not entirely without reason. For, it could be maintained with some truth that a Polonius lurks behind every arras in Delhi and the sad, revengeful ghosts of long-dead kings still haunt the city’s streets. Indeed, at the beginning of this essay I had mentioned Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, Ramchandra Gandhi’s derivation for Delhi; now, towards its end, I refer to him again for his celebration of just this unreliable, myth-haunted aspect of Delhi’s gated city:

  ‘Delhi is ‘Dehali’, i.e. ‘threshold’, ‘gateway’, glorious etymological truth of the capital of India, deeply embedded in its samsaric imperial heart and trivial bureaucratic self-images and centrist complacency, likely to be quite drowned in the flood of five-star freebooting now overtaking it. But in its occult and occasional unfallenness, what is Delhi, a threshold, a gateway, to? Let us supplicate its ancient King and Queen, Yudhishtira and Draupadi for an answer. The Delhi (all right, Indraprastha) that they had fought for and won … was certainly a gateway to samrajya, imperial power. But Delhi … is also a threshold to Himalaya … the samrajya of eternal wisdom … Dehali ki jai!

  Whatever happens, Dehali be praised! It is no accident, after all, that the Delhiite’s favourite twin phrases are: chalo, thik hai and sab chalta hai (‘never mind’ and ‘everything goes’). I have heard these words again and again from Haryanvi mechanics, Punjabi matrons, Sindhi salesmen. Any spill of disaster, it appears, can be countered by Delhiites invoking these karmic, talismanic words!

  As a threshold city, systems of morality and permanent value are in general subservient to rules of expedience and immediate commerce in Delhi. The clamorous language of ‘import-export’ is privileged by Delhiites, whether the goods consist of market products or human capital. Seasonal travellers from Bhutan, silver-ankled Rajasthanis, vegetable farmers depositing their stocks in sabzi mandi, ambitious academics from the deep south, itinerant labourers from Bihar—everyone can come and pitch his tent here. This is both the source of the city’s banyan-tree greatness and its appalling record of apathy. With a population of thirteen million or thereabouts, Delhi is possibly the fastest growing city in India, which strains its resources beyond belief. And it has probably been heading this way from the time Delhi was Yudhishtir’s mythic Indraprastha! Hence, the endless fantasies of ‘the walled city’ in Delhi, the desire for a place of escape in a city of no escape.

  It is true that I appear to have escaped to a kind of timeless zone in Odense for the time being, but the respite is only temporary. The rest is not silence. Delhi follows me even here; and in my quiet Danish hostelry—where night magically mimics afternoon—the mills of memory tumble in my head. I cannot help but recall that other ‘midnight hour’ when Jawaharlal Nehru—the same hopeless dreamer who saw the ‘IIT system’ as one that would produce not just world-class technologists but caring citizens—delivered his unforgettable speech from the walls of the Red Fort.

  On that 15 August 1947, Delhi was the historic location where India’s entry into a world of ‘light and freedom’ was celebrated, and its ‘tryst with destiny’ ratified during ‘the dead vast and middle of night’9, as the prescient text of Hamlet terms it. Delhi was the city to which all of India looked. But have the walls closed in since then, have the gates swung shut? This to be or not to be question, practical as well as moral, confronts each benighted citizen of Delhi today: Ajit Singh, Ramnik, myself. Far from the madding crowds of the city, however—my perspective no doubt distorted by distance—a sudden, epiphanic hope for us all seems to suffuse my thoughts as the clear Danish sunlight seeps into my room at midnight …

  Across the River: Noida

  SAM MILLER

  This extract is taken from Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity.

  I was, for the first time in Delhi, part of a huge crowd of walkers. There were mainly Bihari migrants, many thousands of them, of all ages, heading towards the Yamuna river for the religious festival of Chhath. They had reclaimed the roads, bringing all traffic to a halt, swarming around the stationary cars, peering in through the tinted windows at discontented businessmen trying to reach the satellite city of Noida across the river. The walkers veered off down a dust track towards the river bank and I pushed forward, sidestepping the amblers, trying to get to the front. I spotted a gap in the crowd, and moved stealthily into it, imagining myself to be waif-like. But I tripped over a leg, and went sprawling in the dust, next to a near-naked man who was lying on his stomach and seemed even more surprised to see me than I was to see him. The gap I had spotted was not in fact a gap, but the space the crowd had given to the man I was now lying next to. He jumped to his feet, in one lithe movement, and moved forward two paces. Then, to my further consternation, he threw himself to the ground again, raising a spectacular cloud of dust that briefly concealed him. He was like a human yo-yo, spending alternate periods of five seconds lying on the floor, before leaping to his feet, and then plunging back down to the ground. And each time he lay on his stomach, he would move his arms forwards, and mark the Delhi dust with an outstretched finger, and then, when upright, would move his feet to this mark, before diving, like a footballer trying to win a penalty, to the ground again. He was, unsurprisingly, making slow progress, and was far too busy prostrating himself to talk to me. A fellow pedestrian, carrying a large basket of fruit and vegetables on her head, and trying to stop her children from imitating the human yo-yo, told me that he must have committed a serious sin and had been told by a priest to do penance in this way. We began to talk. She told me she was new to Delhi, though her husband had lived in the city for several years, working on construction sites. She had left her village in Bihar because her husband now earned enough to rent a small room for them and their three children. She told me she wanted to leave the village because the schools were better in Delhi; but she’d had problems getting her children into school. The head-teacher had wanted a bribe. Today was a holiday, but her husband’s employer wouldn’t give him time off work. Each member of the family had a new set of clothes, and at sunset they would make offerings of fruit and vegetables to the sun-god on the banks of the Yamuna.

  I forged ahead and stepping out from behind some trees was startled to see a truly extraordinary scene, as if from a Hollywood version of a Biblical epic. The river banks were invisible; they had disappeared beneath waves of humanity; hordes of people as far as I could see, brightly dressed in crimsons and saffrons and turquoises, and all facing in the same direction. I could not see any land at all, and very little water. Many worshippers were standing up to their chests in the shallows of the chill autumn river, holding coconuts and garlands of marigolds, and staring at the setting sun. But strangest of all were what appeared to be huge snowdrifts floating on the surface of the river, as if a melting Antarctic ice-shelf had drifted up the Yamuna. It has never snowed in Delhi, and the snowdrifts, I later learned, were a poisonous bubble-bath of blinding-white froth, created by pollutants spilled into the river at a nearby weir. Small rowing boats sliced their way through the froth,
delivering worshippers to an invisible island in the middle of the river, entirely hidden from view by the crowds that were standing on dry land and in the water.

  Chhath is Delhi’s largest outdoor gathering. But because it is a festival celebrated mainly by poor migrant workers, the affluent Anglophones of south Delhi (except those stuck in their cars) are almost entirely unaware of it. Migration is changing this city, though, and Chhathcelebrants are now part of what is probably Delhi’s largest community, the people of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh who refer to themselves as Poorvanchalis. * Delhi’s politicians do know the electoral importance of the Poorvanchalis and will try to visit as many stretches of the river bank as possible, and pay for huge advertising hoardings, featuring their own photograph and obsequious declarations of their deep reverence for the festival of Chhath.

  A gerrymandering tongue of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, crosses the river by road bridge, and surreptitiously licks the eastern banks of the Yamuna. By looking over my shoulder, at the battered, faded ‘Welcome to Delhi’ signs, I know that I have left the capital. The bridge goes to Noida, a new urban centre, officially outside Delhi’s city limits, but contiguous with the capital, and part of what’s known as the National Capital Region. Noida has a population of more than half a million—and is probably the world’s most populous acronym. It was born in 1976 as the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority, a largely greenfield site, parcelled up into 168 sectors, many of which are still being developed. It briefly captured the attention of the international media in 2005, with the proposed construction of the world’s tallest building, to a design that bore a striking resemblance to the Disney version of Cinderella’s castle. ‘Penis envy’ was the scathing headline in one of India’s best-known blogs. When it was pointed out that the area is earthquake-prone, and that its soil is sandy, the glory-seekers of Noida quietly shelved this attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records (there is no category for populous acronyms).