But the anticipation of those years had a much larger scope than the city itself. It sprang from a universal sense: What will happen here will change the entire world.
The people I met were cosmopolitans, and they were delighted to see walls coming down around India. They disdained nationalism and loved the new riches that reached them via the internet. But true to their own scepticism — and to the history of anti-imperial thought in this part of the world — they were also critical of the economic and social bases of Western societies — and the last thing they wanted from this moment of India’s opening-up was that a similar society be established here. Much of their intellectual inspiration came from Western capitalism’s internal critics: from American free software theorists, from the squatter movement in the Netherlands, from artists in Britain who challenged corporate food and property cultures, from Harvard and Oxford legal scholars who imagined alternative possibilities for the ownership of seeds, images and ideas. These areas of inquiry could not have been more relevant to post-liberalisation India, where the big question, precisely, was ownership. There were so many areas of Indian life in which fundamental resources — certain kinds of land, knowledge and culture, for instance — had always been kept free of ownership, but as India signed up to international trade agreements, things tended towards the privatisation of these previously ‘common’ goods. Among my Delhi peers, there was a sense that corporate culture, which advertised itself as a recipe for plenty, would herald a new kind of scarcity if it were not fundamentally adapted for this place.
And there was a feeling that through such adaptation it would be possible to imagine new, hybrid forms of capitalism that provide inspiration not just here but everywhere. It was during this period, after all, that New York was struck by the devastation of 9/11 and, as Western societies began to feel the pressure of anxieties about Islam, their multiculturalism — and indeed their sense of superiority — seemed brittle. This multiculturalism might have embraced people from many backgrounds and beliefs, but it also expected them to adopt a deep level of homogeneity: everyone was supposed to abide by a single legal system, for instance, and to put away all practices inconsistent with the state’s ethos of efficiency and sobriety. Delhi, where all 15 million people were accustomed to living alongside others whose lives bore absolutely no points of contact with their own, offered a spectacle of life immeasurably more varied and paradoxical than this — and yet it felt fluid and functional. This ability of the Third-World city to embrace utter unintelligibility within its own population, to say not, “Let me understand you so I may live alongside you,” but “I will live alongside you without condition, for I will never understand you,” seemed not only more profoundly humane but also more promising as a general ethos of globalisation, since it was clear, in these times of global interconnections, that we were all implicated in relationships with people we would never know or understand. Perhaps the Third-World city, long thought of as a place of desolation and despair, might actually contain implicit forms of knowledge that all places could benefit from.
It was not all talk; for Delhi was erupting, too, with new culture. Even as I sat down to write my first book, realising that Delhi was a far more inspiring place than New York to do so, I was surrounded on every side by people doing similar things. One Delhi writer, Arundhati Roy, who was the first member of this scene to achieve international visibility, had recently won the Booker Prize; and suddenly it seemed that all over this unliterary city young people were writing books and movies. Other twenty- and thirty-somethings were starting publishing houses, magazines and newspapers. Cafés and bars decided they would attract more customers with poetry readings and film screenings.
Most dynamic of all was the nascent art scene, which brought together a motley collection of people attracted to Delhi by the quality of its universities or by the cheapness of its studio space — or simply by the city’s whispered promise, so tangible in those days, that it could reveal to you your new self. I remember an experimental show in those early years in an abandoned house: there were pools of water on the floor, and the rigged-up lighting left one groping through the corridors. People were talking in the bathtub. Artworks were drawn on the walls of bathrooms or hidden in kitchen drawers. The show captured something of the city’s disintegration in those days, and the new reality, uncanny and wonderful, that would emerge. The show was undeniably cool, and it did not seem outlandish to see Bianca Jagger there, picking her way through those damp rooms in a pristine white suit. People still talk about that evening, when we witnessed something of what was to come — for, within a few years, several of those artists had become darlings of the international art world. Art collectors everywhere wanted to own a piece of India’s rise — something that would make tangible the rumours of eastern emergence, the soaring abstractions of the Bombay Stock Exchange — and they bought up steel and marble sculptures whose massive scale seemed to speak of the epic circumstances from which they sprang. Artists moved into studios like aircraft hangars, they became multinational in their own right — they began to manufacture, like all good twenty-first-century enterprises, in China — and they sold their works for $1 million a piece. Their rapid journey from marginal pranksters to wealthy powerhouses could not fail to impress even a society as artistically disinclined as this one, and artists were quickly welcomed into the pantheon of Indian celebrity. But people assumed, because they had become rich, that they had never thought of anything else. I had seen them before, however, when money was not yet on the horizon, when their only thought was how to give form to that great voice whose roar so many of us could hear, here, in the early days of the Delhi Metro.
• • •
A decade later, this utopian clamour was no more.
Those astonishing early years already seemed remote. The future had arrived and it was not very impressive. The city had been taken over by more dismal energies, and Delhi once again seemed peripheral and irrelevant. If we had ever thought that this city could teach the rest of the world something about twenty-first-century living, we were disappointed. The land grabs and corruption-as-usual that became so blatant in those later years, the extension of the power of elites at the cost of everyone else, the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic — it made it difficult to dream of surprising futures any more. Money ruled this place as it did not even the ‘materialistic’ West, and the new lifestyle that we saw emerging around us was a spiritless, degraded copy of what Western societies had developed: office blocks, apartment blocks, shopping malls and, all around, the millions who never entered any of them except, perhaps, to sweep the floors.
An upsurge in urban violence, moreover, which displayed itself most sensationally in a depressingly repetitive series of ghoulish sexual crimes, led to widespread consternation about the kind of society that was taking shape in this rapidly changing metropolis. As thousands took to the streets to demonstrate both their sympathy for the victims and their indignation at the vulnerability that everyone now felt in the streets of their city, Delhi became a place of bewildered introspection. Some had hoped, in these days of India’s economic rise, that it would be possible to lay to rest forever those attitudes, dating from colonial times and affecting Indian and foreigner alike, which held that India’s was an inferior and atavistic culture; the brutal reports in the city page of Delhi’s newspapers gave many of them profound doubts as to the legitimacy of this hope. No longer was the city building a paradise to inspire the world; now it was trying to pull itself back from the brink of hell.