Thursday, August 10, 2023

From ‘Delhi. Mostly Harmless. One women's vision of the city’ by Elizabeth Chatterjee

  

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody who lives there, nobody at all, has much good to say about Delhi. ……it is one of the world’s great unloved destinations. Its inhabitants, Dilliwallas, take a perverse pride in complaining about it. At best they tolerate it. At worse, some despise it with the fire of a thousand June suns. In his novel Delhi (1990), the irascible Khushwant Singh describes how the city appears to a stranger:

a gangrenous accretion of noisy bazaars and mean-looking hovels growing round a few tumble-down forts and mosques along a dead river … [T]he stench of raw sewage may bring vomit to his throat.

- and he’s a fan.

Sure, there have been writers who praise the city’s magnificent imperial past as the heart of Mughal civilization. But they lament its subsequent decline into Punjabi aggression and consumerist bling. Others damn it with faint praise …………..

Delhi’s inhabitants are scarcely more popular…..According to stereotype….New Yorkers are foulmouthed, over-caffeinated snobs. Parisians are viciously rude and dipsomaniacal sexual deviants (if exquisitely dressed). Londoners are famously grumpy, as territorial and hostile to eye contact as feral dogs ………Other Indians are just as brutal in stereotyping Dilliwallas. In this bitchy vision……it is a city of touts, thugs, gluttons, brats, voyeurs, hustlers, crooked politicians, suits, pencil-pushers, pimps, perverts – every kind of sinner. Khushwant Singh again:

They spit….; they urinate and defecate whenever and wherever the urge overtakes them; they are loud-mouthed, express familiarity with incestuous abuse and scratch their privates while they talk.

 

Many migrants……can become more Indian than the Indians, militantly committed to a very particular idea of India. And ordinarily, no community is more militant about this cultural preservation than the Bengalis.

In India, the ‘Bongs’ are stereotyped as braining dweebs……Bengalis are bespectacled, soft-handed and sweet-toothed intellectuals, most often to be found spouting leftwing political philosophy late into the night. The only thing they love more than fish is arguing, and the only thing they don’t argue about is Bengali culture: they are utterly convinced that their language, literature and brains are the greatest in all world history.

But in London my grandfather’s plucky Bengali spermatozoa encountered my grandmother. In this formidable Finnish ice-hockey player with a taste for bespectacled brown men half her height, he met his match. The two nationalities could not be more different. Bengal is muggy, filled with mangrove swamps at one end and the hilly tea plantations of Darjeeling at the other; Finland is flat and icy. The population of the Kolkata metropolitan area alone is almost three times the entire population of Finland; its population density is a thousand times greater. The Bengalis chatter and eat sweets and dodge sport; the Finns ski in grumpy silence. The two share only a depressing handful of things: the aforementioned love of fish, the ability to survive sauna conditions, and a disproportionate propensity to commit suicide.

 

But we never visited India. My father had been, and assured us it wasn’t worth it. He told tales of despotic relatives, diarrhoea and magpie-sized cockroaches………

 

…….there is a lot of money in Delhi – and I mean a lot. You can almost smell it in the air: the warm and faintly sweaty vegetable smell of old paper money.

 

…….its frontier town reputation: that beneath the veneer of universities and galleries lurks a semi-wilderness of casual violence, opportunism, machismo, and enormous self-made fortunes.

 

The upshot of this moneyed ferment is that house prices, and increasingly rents, are becoming more and more expensively bubbly, hitting Manhattan or even Moscow levels.

 

………..Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) advises, China leads India on all metrics,

except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.

 

……….a 2011 Credit Suisse survey suggested Indians typically spend 7.5 percent of their income on education, ahead of the Chinese, Russians and Brazilians.

 

……….India has only 1 percent of the world cars, and 10 percent of the world’s road deaths.

 

The toilets of the French, Britain’s historical enemy, are mere holes in the ground, which emit a terrible stench of cheese and surrender. Japanese toilets sing and vibrate and spurt unexpected jets of water; German toilets contain a sinister tray to catch and inspect turds; all Australian toilets are rusty outside dunnies full of poisonous animals.

 

‘………It’s a formality. Paperwork. Just like a buffalo needs grass, the government needs paper.’

-      -   Tarun J. Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins

 

…………transfer of the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi, during the spectacular imperial coronation durbar of 1911…………. Delhi was in the boondocks, deprived of water and full of fever. Former viceroy Lord Curzon, a Calcutta fan, felt moved to condemn it in London’s House of Lords as ‘a mass of deserted ruins and graves.’………..Delhi presented to visitors ‘the most sorrowful picture you can conceive of the mutability of human fortunes.’

 

Like the elephant India is, in the words of a longstanding foreign correspondent on his way out, ‘a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.’

 

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect

-        - Paul Theroux

 

….there’s a venerable tradition of not doing a whole lot in India. Its no accident that one of India’s most famous exports, meditation, is basically about boredom. It means taking that grey husk of frustration and tedium and repetition, and enclosing yourself in it, exploring its corners, until its something like bliss.

 

Clumps of bored young men – they are almost always men – are ubiquitous. They ‘hang out’, smoke bidis, snack, drink tea, drink booze, piss on walls, do odd jobs, wander around, mutter and whistle and sing to one another. At college they are loud and lascivious and obnoxious. In the parks they blast cellphone love songs and hold hands and lie in each other’s laps (macho Indian behavior is more overtly homoerotic than its English equivalent). They stand around watching their friends work, lounging against walls, sprawled over the city.

I watch them sidelong, they stare at me. These sleazy and occasionally aggressive young men, purveyors of sexual harassment, are flippantly termed ‘roadside Romeos.’ They are everywhere and they are threatening. Often they leer and catcall at passers-by………Everywhere they seek to dominate space. Boredom, anger, fear. It shapes the city’s psychogeography.

 

……….as in so many countries, is a dangerously large and disaffected group who are really, really bored with the status quo. And prices are rising. There are considerably more young men than women around. Cities everywhere tend to attract more men, and in North India’s patriarchal rural regions women are scarcer still. And all the time, Delhi’s wealth is in their face……….India’s population may be surprisingly unrevolutionary – but as The Economist wrote recently, perhaps the country’s rich ‘might want to pay their security guards a little more, though. Just in case.’

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

 

In the same way that Spain has a handy way with bulls and America with portion sizes, Indians excel at festivals.

 

Admittedly in my Indian travels around I have encountered a crocodile, cobras (twice), giant venomous spiders, moonshine, wild dogs, a scorpion, a convicted stalker, homemade guns, angry monkeys, angry bulls, angry camels, a Mach 6 earthquake, and a short circuit that exploded a lightbulb and sent fan blades whirling at my head. I have been escorted by the military through an armed uprising, and drunk tea with a group of opium-addled headhunters – skull-collectors rather than especially extreme corporate recruiters – who had facial tattoos to show they’d succeeded in carrying off a head or two.  (They were friendly enough, but their children threw rocks at me.) I’ve also been given warnings of varying degrees of plausibility about the dangers presented by to me personally by black bears, Islamist terrorists, tigers, fake gurus, wildfires, striking transport workers, leopards, bandits, corrupt policemen, bull sharks, wild elephants, Maoists, tsunamis, Pakistan, disgruntled cricket fans, and the metre-long flesh-eating turtles released into the Ganges to help dispose of half-burned corpses.

I have encountered precisely one of these in Delhi: the earthquake.

 

…….murder. Other countries challenging India as new emergent powers on the global scene include Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Nigeria. Big cities in all four of these are far more dangerous than Delhi. Latin American cities are in an entirely different league of violence. A widely covered study published in early 2013 showed that five of the ten cities with the world’s highest murder rates are Mexican, and fourteen of the fifty worst are in Brazil. Four cities in South Africa and the United States also feature in the top fifty, but not a single Indian city. In 2011, the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in Delhi was 2.7, versus 20.7 in Philadelphia and 58 in New Orleans. That’s a rate not so different to London. Reassuring conclusion: you’re extremely unlikely to be murdered.

 

Indian men – and, dare I say it, especially Delhi men – are notorious for their stalkerish tendencies. Rare is the woman, Western or Indian, who has not been pestered far, far beyond the point of flattery.

 

…..estimated 23,000 rape cases are stuck in the judicial system. In 2011 its chief justice reported that of the Delhi High Court was lagging 466 years behind schedule, despite the fact that it considers each case for an average of only four minutes and 55 seconds. ‘It’s a completely collapsed system,’ the prominent advocate Prashant Bhushan was quoted as saying. ‘This country only lives under the illusion that there is a judicial system.’

 

‘Hinduism respects women,’ one of my interviewees said, in yet another of those answers that seems puzzling in retrospect, given our interview was about pylons.

 

…….Indians do not distribute pleases and thank-yous with the same wantonness (and insincerity) as the British.

 

……..Mark Twain, I ‘never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.’

 

…….visually India is a graffiti wall. Across the country different languages have different alphabets. Gujarati is crimped and hatless, Bengali has gnarled runes, while the east coast’s Oriya (Odia) appears to made up of cartoon Cubist faces…………Southern scripts have more curves ………Tamil is all jalebi whorls, Kannada whorls with eyebrows, Malayalam McDonalds logos……..

 

India might just be the one big place where the internet has yet to vanquish the power of print.

 

Nizamuddin is one of the Delhi’s more schizophrenic neighbourhoods. It is named after the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and simultaneously manages to host a urine-tinged railway station, a rather covetable residential area, and a series of grubby chattering alleys of staring eyes and pirate DVDs………at the end of these alleys is the saint’s shrine, and a host of other tombs – including that of Inayat Khan, bearer of Sufism to London and the father of a glamorous British spy.

Sufism is a mystical, ascetic brand of Islam, which over the centuries fused bits and bobs of magic and other devotional traditions with Quranic meditation ………..It welcomes all faiths; people of all religions visit to pray for favours……The dargah is an oddly welcoming mausoleum, an onion-domed and pillared shelter for the coloured tomb inside.

 

At a conference in Delhi I met a Nigerian who was studying in Pune (near Mumbai – even more famous for its intolerance to migrants). She spoke of insults in the street, of strangers touching her hair uninvited, and how no Indian student would be seen hanging out with her. Nepalis are stereotyped; Tibetan refugees are put in preventive detention……Nor is racism confined to foreigners. Migrants from Bihar are mocked as crude, alien and endlessly breeding……….Poor Muslims are accused of being ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators,’ Kashmiris suspected of being terrorists, and everyone is judged by how dark they are. All this is complicated by caste……Northeasterners face particular discrimination, the beautiful Nagamese wife of a rugby player told me: constantly asked for ID, called ‘chinki’ – an insult recently made punishable with imprisonment – and treated as outsiders. In 2007, the Delhi police produced the infamous Security Tips for Northeast Students/Visitors in Delhi. ‘Dress code: When in rooms do as Roman does,’ it instructs, cryptically. It goes on to warn Northeasterners against ‘creating ruckus’ by cooking their ‘smelly dishes.’ Boy does Delhi know how to win over the already disenchanted margins…… The Nagas have become justly famous for their linguistic skills – ‘the air is full of them!’ a middle-aged man told me, glaring at the plane’s stewardesses – and all spoke four or five languages. But in the village there was little employment, crap roads, no electricity …………

 

That India smells is a motif almost as classic as its spirituality………..Blogs burst with horrified ramblings of travellers who have forgotten their nose pegs. They complain about the smell of urine-soaked walls and beaches covered in (human) turds. They complain about garlicky body odour on public transport and rotting garbage in the heat. They complain about the smell of cow dung, rivers of raw sewage, and offal around the Old Delhi butchers………… But I think India’s stinkiness is seriously overplayed………the first condition of understanding a foreign place is to smell it……….The problem is that modernity is anti-smell. It might even be anti-nose entirely………’Civilisation’ means freeing us from streams of shit in the street, oniony dinner-table burps, flatulent beasts……..Instead the world is scrubbed clean and neutered. Our workspaces are chilled, food wrapped, flowers scentless, armpits deodorized, sewage safely sealed on the other side of the U-bend. Noses dormant, retired like old hound-dogs………..our noses are ignored, except perhaps at mealtimes, and when they choose to dribble in the winter.

In India the nose is restored to its queenly place.

 

………..The glorious flat burnt smell of rain on hot dry earth called manvasanai in Tamil, in English its little-known but evocative name is ‘petrichor’ ………..

 

On one hand, bad smells play a potent role in upper-caste, prejudice: traditional ‘untouchable’ work often involved ‘unclean’ substances with unpleasant smells, like blood, corpses, leatherwork or human waste. Once again, smell, disgust and bigotry appear closely linked. ………Pleasant or auspicious smells are offered up to the gods…..

 

Journalist and professional sociopath A.A.Gill wrote, ‘If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Delhi, then, might be an ageing tsarina: ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid – and fond of bright colours, pretty trinkets, and sex scandals. Like all grandes dames, she’s showy, cash-splurging, hard to love, easy to photograph. Or perhaps, given her recent reinvention, she’s more like a nouveau riche socialite – exactly as above but on Twitter. The whole city jangles with theatricality, bling and the so-bad-its-good.

 

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