In praise of Delhi
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
August 28, 2005

So what, if it is — and this includes its modern face — as the intelligentsia claim, a parvenu city?

PHOTO: S. SUBRAMANIUM

URBAN OPENNESS: Delhi, a symbol of a better tomorrow.

MOST of us are, I suppose, ambivalent about our capital city. Its broad avenues, late-colonial architecture, and a general air of well-ordered self-importance goes well with popular notions of what the nation's premier city and seat of government should be like. When Lutyens' ageing model was given a multi-crore-rupee facelift before the 1982 Asian Games, the new highways, flyovers and tourist hotels made our Rajdhani presentable as well as patrician. New Delhi, its inhabitants tended to assure impressed visitors, wasn't like the rest of India. And they meant it as a compliment.

But, at the same time, another stereotype also existed. The chattering classes lament that Delhi typifies an India that has lost its soul, that it's the epitome of a new concrete culture of "black money", five-star hotels and shopping malls divorced from tradition, the arts or the refinements of the higher life. All that was worth cherishing in old Delhi, they moan, has now given way to the flyover and the fast-food counter, both occupied by hustling Punjabis who feel no real sense of belonging to the city and don't even know the history behind the addresses on their visiting cards.

A city recreated

But so what if New Delhi is, as the intelligentsia claim, a parvenu city? It was recreated by those who had lost everything in the partition of the sub-continent — men and women of the Punjab, Sikhs and Hindus uprooted from the land which had been the home of their ancestors for countless generations, rejects of history who had to carve out their own futures. They worked and struggled and sweated to make it. They were unencumbered by the baggage of the past, for the past had betrayed them. They succeeded; and as a result of their efforts, they created the first truly post-colonial Indian city.

So families that had trudged across the frontier as refugees today drive shining Suzukis across flyovers; people whose parents had lost their houses now sip imported wine in fancy restaurants. But instead of applauding them, educated Indians from Kolkata or Chennai tend to curl their refined lips in scorn. The crass materialism of the archetypal Delhiite is sniffed at, his lack of culture ridiculed, his ignorance of history deplored. Literate North India, for its part, laments the transformation of a Delhi that was once a byword for elegant poetry, Mughal manners and courtly civilisation.

Old Delhi may indeed have had its attractions, but it was also a moribund place steeped in decay and disease, ossified in communal and caste divisions, exploitative and unjust. Today's New Delhi — not the musty bureaucratic edifices of government, but the throbbing thriving agglomeration of factories and TV studios, industrial fairgrounds and software consultancies, night clubs and restaurants — is a city that reflects the vigour and vitality of those who have made it. It is far and away India's richest city; it provides and reflects a stimulus, unfamiliar to the Indian intelligentsia, of enterprise and risk-taking; its people are open and outward-looking. They may have forgotten their history but they remember their politics. They may not know why but they know how.

New Delhi has enshrined performance and effectiveness as more important measures of human worth than family name or pedigree. If, in the process, it has also placed a premium on vulgar ostentation rather than discreet opulence, so be it. The new rich could not have run the old clubs, so they built the new hotels and restaurants. The "five-star culture", for all its vulgarity, is more authentically Indian than the club culture it has supplanted, a musty relic of proto-colonial dress codes and insipid English menus.

It is true, of course, that New Delhi lacks a coherent cultural focus. Its physical sprawl, its disaggregated "colonies", ensures that the capital is really 20 townships in search of a city. But as the ambitious new Metro railway proves, it is not a city indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens. Nor is it lacking in creative endeavour. Today, fuelled by the money and the people that have poured into the city, there are more plays, exhibitions and concerts on any single day in New Delhi, than anywhere else in India.

Cosmopolitan society

New Delhi is also, uniquely, a cosmopolitan society in the international sense. We have always been an overly self-obsessed people; our decades of protectionist policies also drastically reduced, in most other Indian cities, the frequency of routine contact and interchange between Indians and foreigners. Thanks to the diplomats and journalists based there, New Delhi is the one place where Indians of every class benefit from relating to, and seeing themselves in the eyes of, the outside world. (Bangalore is getting there, of course, but not on the same scale.)

In its urban openness and economic energy, Delhi reminds me, in fact, of the bustling coastal ports of a bygone era. With the advent of jet travel, you don't need port cities as your principal contacts with the outside world: the "coast" can move inland. New Delhi is India's contemporary equivalent — bustling, heterodox, anti-ritual, prosperous. For all its inadequacies, it is a symbol of a country on the move, the urban flagship of a better tomorrow. It will lead India into the 21st Century, even at the price of forgetting all that happened in the other 20.