British Indian writer Rana Dasgupta's 'Capital Mistake'

It's received rave reviews in the Western press, but British Indian writer Rana Dasgupta "exposes" Delhi with a typically patronising slant in Capital.

Capital stems from a strange encounter with a city catching up with the times. A socialite disguised as a socialist, Rana Dasgupta is a consummate outsider with Indian links who desperately tries to fit into the grand scheme of things in the teeming city. He has friends, but no company in the metropolis. Home is calling in India, but there's no warm hearth to go to at the end of his exertions.
When Delhi turns her back on him, he's lost in a state of transition, his pride hurt. The vibrant city affords him opportunity (and material) to at least write a book. Yet, he's ungrateful to her open invitation and to the hardy people who live in its many enclaves and shantytowns, who have taken him in without asking anything in return.
For those who know Delhi or live in the country of which she is the capital, this book offers no new insights. Rana runs the down the city, plunders it, and exposes its innards for his Western audience and masters. His trashy attitude in place, he comes out looking like a fallen hero, not the saviour of a lost world that he makes himself out to be.
He's patronising to a fault. But when the patronising turns preachy, he sounds like a proselyte, a Pharisee of Biblical proportions. In this book, there's little doubt that he's is on a muckraking mission. A major letdown when you write a serious tome on India's capital, which he says is erupting, leaking and waiting to go down the drain, literally.
The chaotic capital of modern India is a city that has risen from successive ruins of conquests. Delhi has held her own and done her own thing, which deserves plaudits. But the author holds back from lauding the city that has survived many storms - for its resilience, for its ability to innovate and stay alive. He portrays a city with no heart because he claims the soul was spirited away by the demons of the past.
Delhi for him is a wasteland, that was exploited and sucked dry by the Mughals, British, the Gandhis, the Kalmadis and everyone in between. Not untrue, but what his narrative lacks is a historical perspective about the conditions in which this exploitation was allowed to take place. The switch from a socialist economy to a capitalistic structure may have been painful, but it gave rise to merit.
He writes without feeling about the poor after talking to a few activists and makes up his mind about Delhi's middle-class after conversations with middlemen and touts. Rana deserves no sympathy for this shoddy, half-hearted portrayal of a city coming to grips with the times. He writes dispassionately about partition, displacement, corruption, red tape and political skulduggery. Those who have made it always have a stark story to tell; there's some inexplicable yearning, which will not be fulfilled because this is Delhi. You survive or thrive. Damn the system, if at all it exists.
The author shows withdrawal symptoms from the city towards the latter part of the book, yet won't mock her in the face. He will not look her in the eye because it could scorch his lack of belonging. His sense of weariness, loneliness, perhaps failure as a Non-resident Indian is hard to miss. The West has given up on him; it wants nothing of him, and for surviving in his country of origin and city of his choice, he realises he must evolve to become an original.
Rana loathes Delhi, but will not leave her yet, because he has not made peace with himself. For all its flaws, Capital clicks and comes to life when the people of the city speak. The author deserves a pat for his patience, for listening to them as he writes their unfinished stories. That's small consolation because he fails to experience his city of residence. He often sees it in yellow, with jaundiced eyes. The prose flows: it's peppered with anecdotes and historical strains, which sometimes puts things in perspective. This, however, becomes a drag at the fag end of the book when Rana doesn't find closure to his angst.
There's nothing new about Delhi because Rana has bound one big newspaper account into a book. That's a shame because the city deserves a better portrayal from an expat who flaunts his Indian roots when it suits his style.
allan@khaleejtimes.com

• India