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Delhi, India is a very special city. It is both prosperous and chaotic, full of vitality, and sticks to certain traditions of India. The gap between the rich and the poor is astonishing. Some people become rich overnight, while others fall into the slums. Greed, violence, anxiety and marginalization have become the keywords to understand this city.

“Delhi is obsessed with money, the only language the city understands, and to free yourself from its vulgarity and its fixation on money requires spending a lot of it. It’s a strange, self-defeating logic,” Rana Dasgupta wrote in Capital City: The Beauty and Savagery of Delhi in the 21st Century.

Capital City: The Beauty and Savagery of Delhi in the 21st Century

This also makes Delhi complicated, Dasgupta goes on to write: "People always assume that the inner life of a group that is obviously getting rich should be as smooth as the external economic indicators, but in this emerging world metropolis, the accelerated change often becomes a chaotic storm. The more money people make, the more unreasonable things become."

The face of the people is the face of the city, and Delhi is no exception: "If we once thought that this city could teach the rest of the world how to live in the 21st century, now we are disappointed. Land grabs and habitual corruption have become blatant; the power of the elite has expanded at the expense of the interests of everyone else; all that was once slow, private and unique has become fast, huge and homogeneous - it is difficult to dream of a future that can surprise people... The city is no longer building a paradise that can inspire the world, but trying to pull itself back from the brink of hell."

The old and new Delhi are not just geographical divisions, but also time divisions.

Delhi, with the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges, running through the city, has a history that can be traced back to the 5th century BC. In the 13th century AD, the Turks established the Delhi Sultanate, which lasted for 300 years, and introduced a large number of Central Asian cultural customs. In the early 16th century, the Mughal Empire was established and moved its capital to Delhi in 1638. The arrival of the British in the mid-19th century made Delhi's culture more unique, a mixture of North Indian culture, Persian culture, Arab culture, Islamic culture and even Western culture.

Akshardham Temple

The influence of British culture on Delhi and India has surpassed other cultures that have been rooted in Delhi for a longer time. In his book City of Elves, William Dalrymple describes the complex social structure of Delhi: "The Indians and the British are so proud of their own blood that the 'half-bloods' have never really had a chance to stand out. At least the Skinner family still has some status in Delhi society, but the fate of most other Anglo-Indian half-bloods is getting worse and worse. Their situation is getting more and more difficult. Both Indians and British have serious prejudices against them, which makes them suffer more and more: Indians are unwilling to mix with them and look down on their loyalty to Britain, while British people exclude them from clubs and social living rooms and ridicule them mercilessly behind their backs."

James Skinner in the book is a colonel and a famous early colonist in the 19th century. He is a mixed-race person, and this identity troubles his life. As a soldier, he fought everywhere, was experienced and full of charm, but his skin color made him excluded and prejudiced.

Skinner's father was a Scottish mercenary and his mother was a Rajput princess, so he has both Scottish and Indian ancestry. This ethnic mixture determined his career.

This is because from 1792, it was no longer possible to obtain a position in the East India Company's army if one of the parents was Indian. So, at the age of 18, James Skinner was forced to leave Westernized Bengal to serve in the army of the East India Company's main rival. But even so, "just as Skinner's mixed blood excluded him from the East India Company's army, the same defect hindered his career in the East India Company's rival army; his origin was like a double-edged sword, cutting off his path on both sides."

India is special. In Latin America, the colonies were often ruled by soldiers of mixed race, born of Indians and colonists. Bolivar is a typical example. But in India, "any hint of 'mixed race' would stir up Victorian prejudice, and in Delhi, Skinner's children became the object of ridicule and laughingstock of the British."

If this was the case for a family of a certain social status like Skinner, one can imagine the fate of most Anglo-Indians. Later, they emigrated in large numbers. Those who remained in India were usually optimistic, old, or nostalgic. But what they faced when they stayed was the hostility of some Indians and worsening poverty.

City of Elves: A Year in Delhi

In Delhi, racial divisions are only part of the story. Dalrymple writes about the city's transformation in Indian history.

In Dalrymple's view, "Delhi is a city full of spirits. Although it has been burned down by invaders time and time again, the city will be rebuilt every time, like a firebird, rising from the fire. Just like the reincarnation that Hindus believe in, the body will reincarnate again and again until it becomes perfect, Delhi seems destined to appear in a new reincarnation every hundred years."

In terms of timeline, Dalrymple's narrative goes from the recent to the distant past, from the Sikh massacre triggered by the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, the religious and ethnic migration caused by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the conquest of India by the British Empire, the history of the Mughal Empire and the Delhi Sultanate, and even the epic "Mahabharata". Violence is always present in each successive period, especially the massacre during the partition of India and Pakistan, which destroyed not only lives, but also the initial fantasies of many Indians about autonomy - they once thought that everything would change automatically when the British left, but this was not the case.

In the decades after independence, the Indian economy has always been under the framework designed by Nehru. In contrast to the free capitalism of the colonial period, Nehru learned from the rapid industrial development in Japan and the Soviet Union and felt that only the state had the ability to promote economic expansion to a sufficient degree. He designed a closed and nationalized planned economic system. However, this system can only become a tool for vested interests to seek rent and monopolize power. Corruption is rampant, and the quality of products and services is extremely poor, and there is a serious shortage of materials. In the early 1990s, the Indian economy was on the verge of collapse.

In the early 1990s, the Indian government was unable to solve its economic problems and had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for help. The International Monetary Fund provided emergency loans on the condition that the Indian government must carry out thorough free market reforms. In the subsequent reforms, foreign capital was able to enter India, and this ancient country, which had been closed for decades, started the process of privatization and globalization, and also started the "South Asian Miracle". Delhi's transformation began from then on.

The book Capital City states that the first industry to drive Delhi's economic take-off was business process outsourcing, which is also a symbol of India's globalization. Business process outsourcing, or BPO, is based on modern communications. Different functions of a company do not need to be performed in one place, but can be distributed around the world, so many non-core businesses will be transferred to places with lower salaries, saving a lot of costs. This redistribution of functions has already appeared in other countries, but it was Indian entrepreneurs who first turned this theory into a reality that changed the world after market liberalization.

India's BPO industry originated in the 1990s, when Indian companies began providing data processing and customer service support to clients in the United States and Europe in a variety of sectors, including banking, healthcare, retail, telecommunications and aviation.

Outsourcing has sprung up in Delhi as the city has a large number of highly educated, English-speaking young people who are unable to find jobs.

Delhi is full of opportunities, but also full of insecurity

In Capital, Rana Dasgupta describes the scene of Delhi residents crossing the traffic lights:

"The horns are constantly honking, because traffic is not a stream that you can just flow through, but a jungle where you have to carve out a path. People drive as if everyone else is the enemy, and that's exactly what happens: Any space or opportunity that isn't seized at full speed will be immediately seized by someone else. You'll see here that when the light is red, everyone is looking around to make sure that someone else can't get ahead of them. Some cars in front just drive straight through the intersection, through the oncoming traffic - these people want to maintain their freedom within restrictions on ordinary people like traffic lights. Other cars are also focused on moving forward, occupying every inch of the road they can, trying to block the cars next to them and prevent others from overtaking them when the light goes out."

This kind of "chaos" has long been a label for Delhi, and violence and sexual crimes have also caused people to panic and reflect. The deeper problem lies in the underlying color of Delhi's economic structure. It is certainly a city full of opportunities, but most opportunities are still born in a social form that is not market-oriented enough and power is not constrained.

Because marketization is not thorough and is always constrained by political and racial factors, any industry in Delhi is essentially dominated by privilege and relationships, which has led to Delhi's inability to extricate itself from corruption. At the same time, because wealth comes from privilege, the rich cannot have any respect for the lower classes, which has instead solidified India's original class problems.

It is precisely because wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few that the infrastructure of Delhi and even India has never been considered for the poor. It is also common for the poor to be evicted from their homes, accompanied by new apartments and office buildings. "Capital City" explains in great detail the fact that part of the driving force of India's economy comes from the encroachment of corporate land on rural areas.

Originally, the land in India was concentrated in the hands of farmers. Individuals owned little land and were unwilling to sell it. The possibility for companies to legally acquire large tracts of land was zero. Therefore, corrupt governments and oligarchs trampled on the interests of farmers through trickery and extortion, creating a large number of conflicts and causing many farmers to fall into poverty and have no choice but to flee to urban slums. The rapid increase in Delhi's population is precisely because of these landless people.

"Delhi is dominated by a very special kind of wealth, real estate. Real estate is a scramble, and it is almost impossible to operate on a large scale without building a broad network of politicians, bureaucrats and police in a paid manner... Crime and violence have generally escalated, and those who have gone through all this and gained new wealth are powerful and terrifying. They know how to hijack state power for their own selfish interests, and they have the support of the police and terrible extortion gangs."

The Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in 2010 were originally seen as an opportunity for India to show the world the modern side of Delhi, but in fact it was a climax of engineering corruption. The Indian government's transformation and upgrading of urban infrastructure is full of various power-for-money transactions. Rich families obtain projects through political connections and bribes, and then subcontract them at high prices. After paying huge prices for the contracts, contractors will of course only carry out the projects at the lowest cost and with the most perfunctory attitude. Two years after the Games, these projects were already in disrepair. This is not an isolated case. Dilapidated infrastructure can be seen everywhere in Delhi, and they are the product of corruption.

The corruption of the medical service system has even affected the middle class. After the 1990s, private hospitals became the mainstream in Delhi. They are controlled by the wealthy families in Delhi. From land acquisition to hospital construction, there are power-for-money transactions between them and government officials. These hospitals have poached a large number of doctors from public hospitals and put profits above saving lives. Patients have to endure all kinds of unnecessary repeated examinations and treatments, use expensive equipment and drugs, and go bankrupt after getting sick, which has become a nightmare for the middle class.

Rich or poor, everyone is vying for resources with the mentality of "if I don't take advantage, others will take it away from me." Money has become "the only language this city understands," to the point that "to free yourself from its vulgarity and obsession with money, you need to spend a lot of money."

Delhi residents know very well that "half of India's chaos is a deliberate strategy of the bureaucratic system. If things were efficient, there would be no reason to pay bribes", so the lower classes hate the corruption of the system, but they are scrambling to enter the system to satisfy their desire for privileges. This even leads to a strange paradox: "Corrupt politics is a correction to the cruel inertia of the rest of society, so for many people, this is not a reason for despair, but a major source of hope."

Along with this profit-seeking mentality is the absurdity of South Asian culture caused by conservatism. For example, many Indians blame the pollution of water resources on the tap water system established by the British. They believe that before that, Indians took water from wells and rivers, could see the water source, and knew that they would have to rely on the water source in the future, so they would protect it. However, after the British established the tap water system in Delhi, people had the illusion that "there is water at the turn of a switch, and it is inexhaustible", and then they became more and more indifferent to the environment, which also made Delhi and water resources dirty.

This way of thinking of shirking responsibility actually exists in the genes of South Asian culture. Rana Dasgupta agrees with this to some extent, as he said: "Delhi's cynicism comes from its history and the ancient feeling it exudes - making you feel that the existence of the human world is to steal, destroy and desecrate what you have."

However, Rana Dasgupta still tried to combine "modernization" with traditional Indian culture, so he lamented that "in many ways, the process of entering the global system has been a shameful defeat for all the great foundations of this country and has produced a paradoxical sequelae."

Is moral decay really directly related to economic development? From a global perspective, this statement may not be true. But it is undeniable that in Delhi, the ultimate force acting on the Indian workforce is the logic of global consumerism: new, fast, cheap, and this logic is ruthless.

Women face an even more difficult situation, with the media dubbing Delhi India's "rape capital" because of its alarmingly high rates of sexual assault. Moreover, "the rapes of the early 21st century are different from those of the past in that they take place in public places and are combined with a horrific combination of abuse. Each rape case seems to be straining to exploit the possibility of cruelty, while sensational sexual violence increasingly dominates the conversations of the city's media and residents... Women's newfound freedom of movement has made them not only icons of India's social and economic transformation, but also scapegoats for it."

Behind this is the nationalist responsibility that Indian women bear. "Capital" writes that in the 19th century, the gender roles of men and women began to diverge. Business and politics were controlled by colonization, which meant that men had to compromise and change their Indian lifestyle in order to conduct their own affairs-submitting to British laws, language, dress, technology and social customs. So the responsibility of nationalism fell on women, who had to maintain the pure existence of India on behalf of others, which meant staying out of the corrupted public sphere. "Women should stay at home and maintain the home as a spiritually pure fortress that can resist the colonization of the soul and become a refuge for married men to be reborn."

The idea of ​​"spiritual purity" then formed a web of emotions and history that imprisoned Indian women. This is how the image of women was sacralized in Indian popular culture throughout the 20th century. For some, it was the foundation of India itself. If women gave up their roles in the home, then Indian culture would be indistinguishable from other cultures in the world without religious beliefs.

It is precisely because of this sanctification that countless men cannot accept women entering society. Rana Dasgupta wrote: "Indian culture's worship of the image of the perfect housewife, because this worship to some extent implies hatred of "public" women, and when the two meanings of "public" (in public places and public) are applied to women, they are inevitably confused. The emergence of violence does not come from men without culture or values, but from men who care about these things the most."

As a result, violence against women comes not only from uneducated marginalized groups, but also from mainstream society and any social class. After the economic opening up, the idea that "women should adhere to Indian traditions and should not work outside the home" has gained more and more support in Delhi.

Can Delhiites find happiness?

The lower classes are having a hard time, and the middle class is also in trouble. Rana Dasgupta wrote in Capital: "For India's rising middle class, the simplistic and rigid materialistic narrative holds that their current income is many times what it was 20 years ago, and their happiness must have increased many times. But many things that take away happiness from life have also expanded accordingly during that time. In fact, many people have not benefited at all spiritually. People can indeed make and spend money happily and freely, but there is little corresponding security - if something bad happens, they can only deal with it themselves."

Some people will "find joy in adversity" and find the charm of Delhi. In "City of Elves: A Year in Delhi", Dalrymple is not shy about the not-so-good side of Delhi. When he was 17 years old, he was in Delhi and was immediately fascinated by it: "It is completely different from anything I have seen before. At first glance, Delhi is full of wealth but uncomfortable: it is a maze and a city of palaces; it has both open-air gutters and delicate carved windows that filter light, and a landscape full of domes; there are also chaotic politics, crowded crowds, choking smoke, and a mixture of spices."

What attracted him most were the ruins of different times, "suddenly there appeared dilapidated urns, ancient mosques or ancient Islamic schools". These ruins proved the different cultures over thousands of years, as well as the people with different consciousness, "walking on the same sidewalks, drinking the same water, and then returning to the same dust".

Many people, like Dalrymple, have sought spiritual refuge in Delhi and even India. Pankaj Mishra, who was born in India in 1969, is one of them. Today, he is a thinker who has long been concerned with the cultural conflict between the East and the West and postcolonial issues. He is known for his eloquent writing style and sharp views, and is hailed by The Economist as "Said's successor."

Pankaj Mishra's childhood was full of misfortunes. His father was born in a small village in northwestern India in the 1930s. His family was relatively wealthy, but his elders had little ambition. They only invested their money in real estate and jewelry, or sponsored one or two temples. Apart from that, they were completely swallowed up by extremely heavy daily labor. Mishra admitted that according to Nietzsche, at best they had a kind of "slave's joy, not having to be responsible for the consequences of anything, and not thinking that anything in the past or future is more worthy of cherishing than the present."

Although India was under colonial rule at the time, this was not felt at all in the small village where Mishra lived. Institutions such as the court, police station, and tax bureau, which represented modern society and colonial rule, could only be seen in the town closest to the village, and even taking a bullock cart would take several hours to get there. When Mishra's father really saw the world outside the village, India had already gotten rid of colonial rule, but in the process, due to the transformation of the economic structure and various other factors, Mishra's family became impoverished and was forced to leave the village where they had lived for generations.

Mishra wrote in The End of Misery that in India at the time, "millions of people had the experience of being forced from their native environment to a strange land, where they were thrown into the midst of freedom and suffering with nothing in their hands."

The End of Misery

Of course, this upheaval also meant opportunity. For Mishra’s father and his generation, the choice based on survival was clear: “He had to go to Western institutions of higher learning, such as medical and engineering schools, where thousands of young people like him received degrees and were ready to join the handful of jobs available in newly independent India. If he failed, it would mean returning to a poor village life; if he succeeded, he could obtain and enjoy many things - electric fans, running water, even bungalows, servants and cars - the material life that the British had enjoyed here before.”

Thus, steam trains set off from various places and eventually arrived at Mumbai and Delhi, the largest bureaucratic and financial cities in India. Afterwards, India ushered in rapid economic development, but in this process, the winners were very few, and most Indians could not find their place, let alone their inner belonging.

Faced with this situation, Pankaj Mishra embarked on a ten-year journey. He set out from a village at the foot of the Himalayas to visit Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, which was no longer glorious; went to Delhi, where commercial buildings and open drainage ditches coexisted, to listen to the dissatisfaction of young people with ancient ideas such as Buddhism; in Kashmir, where riots continued, he met dissidents who could only vent their anger and cry in closed and cold rooms; and finally returned to the village at the foot of the Himalayas. In this world full of violence and confusion, he read a lot of historical materials, shuttled through the works of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and others, and rewrote the Buddha.

He tries to answer the question: Can the Buddha's thoughts alleviate the suffering of people today caused by the political incompetence in today's world? From the perspective of individuals, is it possible to end this ongoing suffering for a moment?

Buddhism is extremely important to Indians. But Mishra's perspective clearly goes beyond India and turns to the confusion and future of all mankind. Can Buddhism and the Western world be "compatible"? He also tries to give an answer.

Mishra cites Nietzsche’s prediction in the late 19th century: “When science and progress destroy the transcendental world, God, and God-given values ​​that Westerners once believed in, and when they have a clear understanding of the great achievements they are proud of, Buddhism will come to their attention in due time.”

Nietzsche also pointed out that people of his time were obsessed with rapid economic growth, not realizing that such a mentality would only cover up the truth that life was futility and erode people's original values. Utilitarianism was one of the many alternatives to empty religions in the 19th century.

This view is also true in modern society, where people can only struggle hard for so-called achievements, and they have to pay a huge price to maintain a lifestyle. Mishra is rebelling against this economic optimism. He does not believe that as everyone's expenses continue to increase, everyone's benefits will inevitably increase. He even believes that the opposite is true. Everyone's expenses will accumulate into an overall loss: people will become smaller.

This is the problem that Delhi and even India are facing. Capital Capital believes that: "India 'inherited' globalization just like someone inherited a legacy - full of new economic possibilities and full of tearing bereavement."

But the entry of capital is obviously not the whole problem. The more "Capital City" emphasizes the side effects of capital, the more it reveals a cruel fact: India's own traditional culture and deep-rooted hierarchy have made it impossible to establish supporting social mechanisms (such as welfare protection for the poor) to restrain the profit-seeking side of capital. On the contrary, because of the existence of the hierarchy, power has eroded the market and power rent-seeking has become "standard."

Rana Dasgupta therefore lamented: "Some people may think that a place like Delhi, where inequality is deeply rooted, will breed a desire for democracy, but this is not the case. The fantasy of Delhi people is feudal. Even those who have almost no social rights respect the privileges of the powerful class. They may hope that one day they will also be able to enjoy the privileges that are above laws and customs."

This is not a fate unique to Delhi or even India. Capital City illustrates the fact that a place with dazzling wealth and complex culture was taken over by a colonial regime, and that wealth and culture were shaken and overthrown, and a huge power struggle led to a genocidal disaster. There is also a post-colonial government that embarked on a massive economic engineering project, but eventually exhausted itself and gave way to the dynamic free market rebound. This story, with a few changes, is the modern history of the world.