Delhi (34 page)

Don't mistake the prevalence of such symbols for unalloyed confidence, though. India's new middle classes believe in their own hype, in love with their own newness and potential and the promise of the great global marketplace. But this is a fragile ego. It is deeply sensitive to the fraught relationship with ‘Westernization', to perceived slights, and to the threat posed by scapegoats. In Indian politics, cultural pride is obsessively sought and must be defended at all costs. Symbols are a key battleground, from political statues to the razing of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. In fact the cultural sphere is sublime, versus the corrupting realities of the political world.

The state, collaborating in the reinvention of India as an emergent world power for all that the middle classes dislike it, feels this insecurity too. It takes some of India's icons very seriously. The country's unity has always been problematic and so fetishized. Nobody must interfere with the icon of India itself, that fat-hipped diamond with one scrawny arm slung over Bangladesh. Its borders are vigilantly guarded in the visual media. Somewhere in South Block, deep in the bowels of the Secretariat building, there must be an officer employed full-time to complain about the maps used by Google and British magazines.

Or take the Indian national flag, Ashoka's wheel of law—originally a Gandhian spinning wheel—in the centre of a saffron, white and green tricolour (representing courage/ renunciation, truth/peace, and the soil/prosperity, though saffron is also the traditional colour of Hinduism and green of Islam). Only one company may legally manufacture flags, and the symbol is heavily protected under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. In 2007 Sachin Tendulkar, cricket's ‘little master', incurred wrath by cutting a celebratory cake decorated with the national flag—thereby irrevocably slashing Mother India. The law got involved, while protestors set fire to Tendulkar posters and beat them with cricket bats.

This last was not unusual. Icons are made for punishment as well as veneration. Britain's
Daily Telegraph
put it with typical sensitivity: burning effigies of powerful people—politicians, Bollywood stars, and especially cricket players—is ‘such a common event in India that it more or less doubles the smog levels'.

The very accusation of kitschiness is a snobbish one, of course, and indeed kitsch lies at the centre of a quiet culture war. I say ‘war', but this is at best a guerrilla scrap, in which the battle lines are blurred, and the rivals are quite content to stay in their own cushy bastions and take potshots at the others.

‘Class,' a woman explained one evening over beers. ‘There is no substitute for it.'

The word is everywhere in certain circles, pronounced with the sigh of the British upper crust:
‘klahhhss'
. It doesn't refer to the class system so much as some ineffable quality of good taste. This is the social grouping that Jan Morris in 1975 found ‘stupendously British still'. They may be more distant from Britain now, but they still preserve a certain distance from the hoi polloi.

She continued: ‘We have education, we have,
this thing
'—that little filler phrase beloved of some Dilliwallas, the equivalent of the Americanized ‘um, like'—‘we have cultural capital. Money cannot buy this.'

Class, good taste, is a key defence of the old-school elites against the arrivistes. Their reference points are an idealized period of noble scarcity, primarily under Nehru, back when men were real men, etc. In contrast, they castigate India's cash-splurging, kitsch-loving new middle classes as materialistic, self-interested, rude and ideologically barren.

The other side retorts with an accusation of elitism—not unfairly, given some of the old-school Anglophone lot are fond of provocation. As one Oxbridge-educated politico quipped: ‘I cannot believe he wrote that letter himself. It contains words like “dichotomous” which I cannot believe that a BA Pass from Hansraj College [one of Delhi University's seventy-seven colleges] would know.'

The battle is ongoing. Definitions of ‘good taste' will always be contested, and their boundaries will always change with the times, on one hand to exclude upstarts, and on the other to expand in the name of nationalist pride. Bollywood, for example, has changed from ‘a medium that was considered infra dig'—
infra dignitatem
, beneath one's dignity, says Amitabh Bachchan; imagine a Hollywood star dropping Latin into his tweets—into a respectable form. Conversely, certain credentials are becoming devalued, as too many business graduates and MBAs enter the workplace. It is through such tastes that social groups define themselves. Given the ferment within the middle classes, permanently aspiring, permanently afraid of falling, these internal conflicts can only intensify.

At least these competing groups take themselves seriously. With my Taj Mahal snowglobe I am in a guilty outside set. The alternative to nationalist kitsch and nostalgic snobbery is a new elitism that embraces kitsch—
ironically
. Transnational elite youngsters make memes, laugh (bitterly), buy up kitschy cushions, make ironic mix tapes of Punjabi farmhouse tunes. For them, as for me, braving the dirt of sprawling Old Delhi is a touristy adventure—dare we gobble a real kebab? (Answer: yes, because Delhi Belly is surely ironic and self-referential.) It cannot be long before the dictatorial moustaches of its power elites are colonised by Hauz Khas wannabe hipsters. This is a generation that knows that countries are brands but are no less important for that.

Rather than offering a solution to the dichotomy, the ironic stance is permanently ‘disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical'. Through such mementos my memories are made trivial, sanitary and entirely odourless. What potential can revolution have in such circumstances? The new leftwing May Day Cafe even sells latte mugs with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on them in an (unwitting?) pastiche of coffeehouse revolution.

I bought one of those too.

15

B
ACK

Such, then, was the anthropologist's return—only a shade more dismal than the ceremony which had marked his departure.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques

W
hen I arrived back in Oxford, I submitted the manuscript of this book as my PhD dissertation, and we all lived happily ever after.

Just kidding!

The end was rushed, as ever. Packing up was a dismal affair. A sense of relief and sadness and something like defeat mingled. I said my au revoirs, handed over various possessions to Kamala, and forlornly counted my remaining business cards: 84. There was no room for sleep before the taxi came at 5 am. I made aimless bluebottle polygons around the airport, alighting on a final nostalgic
masala dosa
, and boarded the plane. Just like that: over.

There had been no dramatic rite of passage, no academic
Eureka!
moment, no silver bullet to ‘cure' Indian electricity. I hadn't found any easy answers. I hadn't had a spiritual revelation. My Hindi was still ignored by most of the world, though I'd finally reached page 26 of
Harry Potter aur Paras Patthar
and learnt such useful words as ‘wand' and ‘broom'. I hadn't mastered interviewing, though now I approached books containing the dry phrase ‘based on semi-structured interviews' with a healthy new suspicion. I avoided ice bars at all costs. The doctorate still stretched out endlessly. In any case, as an anonymous wag wrote, ‘A PhD is like a heavily spicy meal—it doesn't matter how much you enjoy it, once you're finished, half of the pain is still ahead.'

Instead there had been a quiet replacement of certain cells. Hidden in my notebooks were a few modest spools of knowledge, ready to open with a little teasing as bright new ferns unfurl to the light. Within them, like pearls in seaweed, glinted hints of self-understanding. I had my smells and souvenirs and friends. It was enough.

And looming large over my memories was the heavy-set silhouette of Delhi.

Delhi: delirious city, city of the tense present, future imperfect. Yes, it's easy to criticize. It is sprawling, aggressive, authoritarian, water-starved, paranoid, and has had so many facelifts that you can get lost on your own street. Like the ice bar, it's frequently tasteless, materialistic, immensely inegalitarian, environmentally destructive, and full of faintly lecherous men. Its weather is diabolical, it can be ludicrously expensive, and often it smells. Oh, and its monkeys occasionally carry out savage and unprovoked attacks, just to liven things up. (In perhaps a microcosm of Delhi society at large, wealthy Dilliwallas' solution has naturally been to pay even larger, scarier monkeys to piss on their property.)

If my rite of passage came to the humblest of ends, Delhi's is barely beginning. In its current form it is, after all, a gangling adolescent of a city, with all the overconfidence and painful attempts at self-assertion that entails. It combines the hallmarks of the global twenty-first century: an increasingly wealthy elite, a precariously employed majority, an obsession with security, and looming environmental crisis. Inequality, corruption, violence, greed, fear, boredom, lust, smog: these are the snakes and ladders of modernity. It is impossible to be purely optimistic about the city's future.

But Delhi is a sophisticated cougar next to plain-Jane Chennai and glossy Bangalore. Even compared with its nemesis Mumbai, it has history, nightlife, internal diversity, flashes of green, and the sort of insecure desire to please that's hard to refuse. And Delhi boasts power, the electric pulse at the city's heart, reviled and ineffectual as India's rulers often are. If it seems to lack an overarching identity or the great chroniclers of its rivals, it is only a matter of time.

Still, what do I know? Can you ever step into the same city twice?

And then
just like that
—too fast—
too easy
—I was back Home. The coach ride from Heathrow was unsettlingly smooth. Barely a pothole or a leer, not a haggle or a horn blast. The weather and the faces were all lettuce-cool. The only thing I could smell was my own familiar foreignness.

Outside my Oxford window, the blue statue of the boy still winked his buttocks. My map of India grew yellowish in the patient sun. Here I was free to do all sorts of things, to walk and queue and drink straight out of the taps. To be drunk and immodest and nocturnal. To eat Cheddar whenever I felt like it.

I put on my shortest shorts and picked up a block of cheese. Suddenly, everything seemed very quiet.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As the old chestnut goes, people make the city. I am deeply grateful to all the friends, relatives, acquaintances, colleagues, students, diplomats, barflies, auto drivers, cricket fans, politicos, chatty strangers, and miscellaneous others who helped shape my time in Delhi. Particular thanks must go to my doctoral interviewees for their wit and generosity.

Mrs Rita Roy, my newfound cousin-brothers Indrajit and Prithvijit, Melodika Sadri, Tashiya Mirando and Suranga Rajapakse, Harsh Vardhan Sahni, and Anika Gupta all provided memorable conversation and places to rest my head. My thanks go too to the ever-entertaining Sweta Adhikari, Cecilia Allegra, David Chatterjee, Ujjwal Chattopadhyay, Jean-Nicolas Dangelser, Suparna Dubey, Neha Gupta, Raghu Karnad, Neela Majumdar, Nithiyananthan Muthusamy, Divya Nambiar, Ashleigh O'Mahony, Shreya Sarawgi, Puja Singhal, Aayush Soni, and the Delhi Hurricanes Rugby Club.

Several wonderful women have helped me along the way. Early on Anna Ruddock made invaluable comments. Trisha Bora was an unfailingly patient editor. But my biggest debt by far is to Danielle Yardy, for providing everything: encouragement, curiosity, advice, self-improvement, and snacks. All errors, flaws, idiosyncrasies, and lapses of memory and judgment are, of course, mine alone.

I owe many things to my strange and wonderful family, including my original itch to explore India. This book is dedicated to the memories of

Santosh Hari Chatterjee (1915–1995)

Sveja ‘Eija' Gunvor Chatterjee (1924–2009)

Charles Byrne (1918–2004)

Agnes Byrne (1921–2013)

and

Jitendra ‘Milan' Hari Chatterjee (1926–2013)

A N
OTE ON THE
A
UTHOR

Born and raised in Yorkshire, Elizabeth Chatterjee is a perpetual student. After a history degree, she moved on to study contemporary Indian politics. She is currently working on her doctorate. In 2008, she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she eats alarming amounts of cheese in between visits to Delhi.