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.
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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.