Capital

By Rana Dasgupta

About the book

Winner of the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award and the Prix Emile Guimet de Litterature Asiatique Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger It is said of Indian cities that Calcutta, the former British capital, owned the nineteenth century, Bombay, centre of films and corporations, possessed the twentieth, while Delhi, seat of politics, has the twenty-first.The boom following the opening up of India’s economy in the early 1990s plunged its capital city into a tumult of destruction and creation: slums and markets were bulldozed or burnt down, and shopping malls and apartment blocks erupted from the ruins – or upon agricultural land taken over in the interests of business and modernization. Immense fortunes were made, and in the glassy stores lining the new highways, customers paid for global luxury with bags of cash. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people from the rural hinterland streamed into the newly formed ‘National Capital Region’ looking for work, which they often found constructing, cleaning or guarding the homes of the increasingly affluent middle class.The transformation of the city was stern, abrupt and unequal, and it gave rise to new and bewildering feelings. Delhi brimmed with ambition and rage. Bizarre crimes stole the headlines.In his first work of non-fiction, Rana Dasgupta shows us this new Delhi through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, he takes us through a series of encounters – with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts – which plunge us into the city’s intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation.