[Reader-list] Sam Miller on Delhi

[sam miller]

Dear Naeem - thanks for posting this very positive and thoughtful review of my book, which I hadn't seen. I don't quite understand Siddhartha's final point about Gurgaon. Can anyone elucidate?

 

Sam 



 

> Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 11:19:31 -0400
> From: naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Subject: [Reader-list] Sam Miller on Delhi
> 
> "Twelve of India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority
> of its citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in
> India, Nepal and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in
> India for women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in
> public more widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of
> expensive ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some
> 24,000 female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio
> of 820 girls to every 1,000 boys."
> 
> 
> The National (UAE)
> In his new book, Sam Miller tackles Delhi’s disparities by walking
> through it, eschewing its new arterial roads and flyovers for back
> streets and slums. Siddhartha Deb considers the city he discovers.
> 
> Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity
> Sam Miller
> Jonathan Cape
> Dh94
> 
> On October 31, 1984, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was
> gunned down in her Delhi bungalow by two Sikh bodyguards. There was a
> bloody war going on between Sikh separatists and the Indian state, and
> the assassins were said to have been outraged by Gandhi’s decision to
> send soldiers into the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines, to
> capture a separatist leader. After a brief period of calm, a process
> of savage retribution began in many parts of the country, directed at
> Sikhs who had nothing to do with the killing or the separatist
> movement. Delhi, despite being the most heavily policed city in the
> country, saw the worst of such violence. Leaders of the Congress
> party, then in power, led mobs through the alleyways of poor
> neighbourhoods like Trilokpuri, where they pillaged and murdered,
> often setting people on fire after dousing them with kerosene. By the
> time the army took control, nearly 3,000 people were dead.
> 
> Twenty-five years later, none of the senior Congress functionaries who
> directed the mobs – and whose names are well known – have been
> punished. The killings of 1984 have instead become one more incident
> relegated to the past by an elite singularly obsessed with entering
> the future. As for Delhi, it has been busy transforming itself for the
> past decade, embracing the market economy of the West and furiously
> erecting shopping malls, five-star hotels and flyovers. The upper
> classes of Delhi talk about plans to remake it into a futuristic
> “world city” (a goal usually proclaimed by posters on the walls of
> public restrooms), and gesture with pride at the new train system
> whose steel-coloured cars can be seen racing across the skyline.
> 
> But millennial Delhi remains an unequal, violent place. Twelve of
> India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority of its
> citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in India, Nepal
> and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in India for
> women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in public more
> widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of expensive
> ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some 24,000
> female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio of 820
> girls to every 1,000 boys. As for the new train system, it is an
> exception in a city where public transportation is erratic and unsafe
> and the roads are resolutely hostile to pedestrians. In every way, the
> high-rises and slums of Delhi are filled with so many stories of
> disparity that the city demands the kind of muckraking attention that
> Upton Sinclair, for instance, brought to a similarly corrupt Chicago a
> century ago. But even within India, there are few books on Delhi that
> compare to recent writing on Bombay, from Suketu Mehta’s nonfiction
> account, Maximum City, to Vikram Chandra’s thriller, Sacred Games. In
> spite of the city’s energetic publishing scene, its best writers,
> usually people who have migrated there from other parts of India, seem
> uncertain about how to engage their new home.
> 
> This invisibility of Delhi, the way its most significant stories flare
> briefly into headlines before being rapidly extinguished, is something
> I think about every time I return there. So when I started reading Sam
> Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity in a local bookstore, I was
> intrigued to find that he had tackled Delhi’s disparities head on by
> walking through it. Miller, a BBC journalist who has lived in the city
> for seven years, writes: “If you don’t walk in Delhi, large parts of
> the city will be invisible to you. Its slums are mainly situated away
> from the main roads, hidden from the upmarket residential areas.” He
> knows his project is dangerous – pavements and pedestrian crossings
> are rare, and speeding vehicles are known to run people over – but he
> thinks the effort worthwhile, not only for the narrative frisson it
> yields, but also because it increases the possibility of sudden,
> serendipitous encounters, especially with the hidden poor.
> 
> A writer walking through the madness of Delhi needs a method, not
> least because the route one chooses determines the story. Miller is
> aware of his literary precedents: Baudelaire, whose flâneur strolled
> the boulevards of 19th-century Paris at night, thereby encountering
> pimps, prostitutes and police agents; WG Sebald, whose walks along the
> Norfolk coast of England in The Rings of Saturn offered a slow,
> melancholic consideration of the once-frenetic energy of the mansions
> and hotels of the region, now fallen into ruin; and Ian Sinclair,
> whose “psychogeographical” approach of walking along a route suggested
> by an arbitrary letter drawn on a London map helped create a portrait
> of a city unknown to tourists or gentrifiers.
> 
> After reading about the concentric circles used to build Muslim cities
> in India, Miller chooses a spiralling circuit for himself. It was an
> astute decision, ensuring not only that he would cross tightly
> segregated demographic zones, but also that he would follow the
> circular layout of the old Connaught Circle and the two Ring Roads,
> once central to the city’s layout, but now obscured by the hauteur of
> straight arterial roads and looping overpasses.
> 
> Miller starts his tour in the concentric circles of the British-built
> area of Connaught Place, then takes in the chowks of the Mughal city
> to the north known as Old Delhi, and wanders past the five-star hotels
> and high-walled bungalows of Luyten’s Delhi, a neighbourhood of
> politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists. As his spiral widens, he
> also navigates the affluent neighbourhoods of the south, the arriviste
> settlements of the west, and, just across the toxic strip of water
> that was once the Yamuna rivers, the middle-class clusters of the
> east. It is telling that he finds no fixed address, no set
> neighbourhood, for the poor. Instead, he encounters them in the
> interstices of the metropolis, sleeping on the streets and under
> flyovers, in blue plastic tents next to construction sites, or in
> slums that can be cleared away at a moment’s notice. Walking along the
> banks of the Yamuna, Miller sees on its east side the Akshardham
> temple complex, a sprawling monument of Hindu kitsch approved by the
> courts despite concerns that it would impede the river’s flow of
> water. Almost directly across from it, he finds a police barracks on
> the site of what was, until recently, Delhi’s largest slum, housing
> some 300,000 people.
> 
> Such scenes are depicted with empathy by Miller, who uses the
> privileged eccentricity of his whiteness to engage in conversations
> that reveal much about lives usually relegated to the margins of the
> city’s consciousness. He meets butchers who interrupt their slaughter
> of buffaloes to threaten him with knives but who shake his hand before
> he leaves; a young woman who, slightly sick from the smell of
> industrial glue, offers the author a soda before returning to her job
> demonstrating a 10-foot long printer; and a man on a bicycle who uses
> a speaker magnet to collect traces of iron from vehicle emissions that
> he plans to sell for 30 cents a kilo. Miller’s prose has none of the
> baroque texture to be found in Baudelaire, Sebald and Sinclair, but he
> blends anecdotes and details well. His decision to emulate Sebald in
> placing small black-and-white photographs within the text is
> particularly successful, lending the book a kaleidoscopic feel that
> captures something of the ad hoc nature of the city.
> 
> In a chapter on Old Delhi, we see a grainy picture of a suspected
> heroin dealer being beaten by two policemen against a
> dystopian-seeming backdrop of a crumbling mansion, a dead tree, piles
> of trash, and an audience of ragged children:
> 
> “The violent policeman slapped him across the face. He recoiled in
> slow motion, his shoulder hunching up as if waiting for the next blow.
> Instead, the policemen began emptying his pockets. A piece of string,
> some tinfoil, some matches, a few coins, and what looked like a
> tightly folded empty crisp packet, secured with a rubber band.
> ‘Evidence,’ said the violent policeman, speaking a word of English for
> the first time, as he placed the little package in his pocket without
> opening it. And then his second world of English, just a little
> threateningly, a word of closure and command: ‘Goodbye,’ he said and
> waved me away.”
> 
> There are many similar passages in the recent fiction anthology Delhi
> Noir, whose 14 contributors use noir conventions to offer scathing
> indictments of the brutality of the city’s police, the vulgarity of
> its upper classes, and the desperation of the poor (the first story,
> by Omair Ahmad, even reconstructs one of the killings of 1984).
> Unfortunately, the stories rarely achieve the intensity on display in
> Miller’s book. Often, their accounts of corrupt policeman and
> resentful servants merely expand on headlines without offering a fresh
> perspective or allowing for full immersion into the lives or city
> being depicted. Those that succeed – Siddharth Chowdhury’s Hostel,
> Hartosh Singh Bal’s Just Another Death, and the Hindi writer Uday
> Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi – do so because they are alert not just
> to the horrible things that happen in Delhi, but also to how it feels
> to observe and write about them. In Bal’s story, for instance, the
> idealistic narrator, an ambitous journalist who has investigated a
> random, insignificant killing ends his account abruptly, on a cynical
> note that captures the numbing effect of the city by borrowing the
> hard-boiled tone of the noir detective who, ultimately, cannot make a
> difference:
> 
> “What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler –
> either the police or the councillor and his men were capable of such
> brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t matter. No one in this
> city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to
> realise neither did I.”
> 
> Miller, too, has to come to some form of reckoning. At the end of his
> walk, he finds himself in the suburb of Gurgaon, surrounded by
> shopping malls and condominiums whose names (“Malibu Towne,”
> “Belvedere Park,” “Maple Heights”) have been copied from suburban
> America. Just a few pages earlier, he had visited similar housing
> developments expanding through fields of mustard, with former farmers
> doubtfully counting the cash they have made from selling their land,
> hoping their children will find service jobs in Gurgaon. Miller
> doesn’t like Gurgaon, but he repeats the conventional wisdom that
> “Gurgaon is probably the future, and Delhi, and other Indian cities,
> will become more and more like Gurgaon.”
> 
> This is a false note in what is otherwise a remarkably perceptive
> book, for Gurgaon’s modernity is just as skin deep as Delhi’s, even if
> it has been laid on by more competent cosmetic surgeons. Its apartment
> blocks may be newer and cleaner, but they play out the same stories of
> disparity and its discontents. Gurgaon represents not a solution to
> the city’s problems, but an attempt to evade them in the manner
> characteristic of India’s elite in recent years. Such an evasion can
> work for only so long. There are already signs that the lopsided
> economic growth that made such subterfuge possible is beginning to
> give way to national slowdown. And in Delhi, one sees a return of the
> repressed. In April a Sikh journalist outraged at a government report
> absolving a Congress leader of responsibility in the killings of 1984
> threw his shoe at the home minister. Meanwhile, there are biker gangs
> on the streets, carrying out petty muggings and the occasional murder.
> The perpetrators are thought to be the children of victims of the
> anti-Sikh riots of 1984, survivors who have decided that what prevails
> in Delhi is might, not justice.
> 
> 
> Siddhartha Deb is a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe
> Institute, and he teaches creative writing at the New School. He is
> currently working on a nonfiction book about contemporary India.
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