Delhi: Capital gains

So you live in Delhi? But do you belong? Thank heavens you don't! It's a city essentially of migrants – of 'outsiders' who call it home and do so without having to look over their shoulders. Delhi belongs to everybody though not everybody who lives here belongs to Delhi.   


The process began exactly 100 years ago – on December 12, 1911 – when the British shifted their capital from Calcutta to Delhi and King George V held a royal durbar in Red Fort. Since then, the city has embraced everybody and everything that has been swept to its doors by the inexorable processes of social, political and economic history.


So let’s celebrate Delhi for its remarkable cultural diversity and not lament the erosion of the homogeneity that it had pre-1911.


The denizens of Delhi know all too well the huge advantages of living in a megalopolis that calls the political shots in a nation as vast and diverse as India. It breeds a level confidence and tolerance that residents of no other Indian metropolis can boast.


But aren’t we just as acutely aware of the price that must be paid for playing ball with the powers that be, elements that are rather slithery at the best of times? That is perhaps just a small blip on the larger urban radar on which we see a tableau that captures the plurality of our land in all its splendour.


In a city as syncretic as Delhi, inconsistencies are inevitable. It has been home as much to steadfast conformists as it has been to intrepid rebels. But it has been victim to avaricious exploiters no more than it has been a beneficiary of the work of farsighted reformers. The Kalmadis and the Sreedharans have co-existed in Delhi, if only in an uneasy sort of way. Just as well.


So for every statement that is true of this city, the exact opposite is just as likely to be accurate. Delhi’s Metro railway may have given large swathes of commuters much cause for joy. But at the same time it has saddened the hearts of urban planners who feel that the intrusive Metro pillars have defaced the city’s historic skyline forever.


That is Delhi for you. It’s a city beset with contradictions: messy yet magnetic, enervating yet energetic, bursting with life yet wallowing in lethargy, always in danger of getting ahead of itself. It’s a city that is predictable yet full of surprises. And it might not be bad thing at all for a city marching into the next one hundred years to look at the brighter side of existence.


There was a time when Delhi was a city with a clearly delineated identity of its own. Today, it’s a chaotic melting pot forever on the boil. So what? Its amorphous quality gives Delhi a rare degree of flexibility that most great cities of the world thrive on.


So what or where exactly is Delhi? Those who live here and even those that don’t are probably aware that India’s capital city is actually many cities rolled into one. If Mumbai is Maximum City, Delhi is Multiplying City. Amoeba-like, it keeps changing shape.


No urban sprawl in the world has probably grown as much and as rapidly as Delhi has in the last 100 years. When the city was made the political capital of India, Delhi’s population was no more than about 100,000.


One hundred years on, the city is home to 22 million people and has overtaken Mumbai as India’s largest metropolis both in terms of area and population. The character of Delhi has changed beyond recognition as it has, over the decades, attracted varied linguistic communities and professional groups to its municipal limits and its vicinity.


The city’s critics never tire of pointing out that the power ethos is what dominates Delhi and, therefore, who one is and who one knows in the political pecking order defines an individual’s worth.


They might actually be right. Power brokers and realtors run the show in Delhi, whose appetite for space is insatiable as it grows on all sides and ingests villages along the way and drags them into its urban expanse.

New Delhi was envisaged as a leafy, laid-back city from where free India’s netas and babus would rule the nation, but the dominance of that class has been gradually diminished as new money fuelled by rapid economic growth has completely altered the original sociopolitical structure on which the city was built.


The power of old money and inherited status has given way to the authority acquired through entrepreneurial aggression and the wealth that has been brought to new segments of the city as a consequence. The city has seen many political and social upheavals in the past hundred years – but natural for a national capital – and it has, in the bargain, lost some of its links with the past.


No worries. The future is probably the best place for Delhi to begin its next hundred years!