Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity
Sam Miller
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 499
Sam Miller
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 293
Price: Rs 499
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It is not usual for someone who has described Delhi as “provincial and mean-spirited and matlabi in the early 1990s to end up writing on the same city, now “hometown”, a “dizzyingly complex city undergoing rapid and unpredictable change”.
Well, Sam Miller, is not your usual Dilliwala. For one, he has arguably come up with a book that is perhaps the first since Narayani Gupta’s Delhi Between Two Empires to bring the streets and smells of Delhi unfamiliar to the reader. The city has not lacked chroniclers – right from its heyday during the Sultanat period to more recent like Ghalib, Zauk, Ahmed Ali, Khushwant Singh and William Dalrymple amongst many. And the only one perhaps to chronicle in such detail the post globalisation city.
But a city that has grown exponentially in the last two decades – and as Miller points out – has changed not just physically, but ethnologically and demographically as well – this is chronicle in the grand tradition of western travel writer. Miller decides to give his 21st century Delhi a thorough look as a flaneur – someone who wanders aimlessly through cities!
The tales are old. Yet there’s a freshness in the retelling. Miller is not that taken up by south Delhi, describing it as, “the haunt of the junior diplomat and the senior journalist; of expatriate aid workers and retired mandarins. This is Anglophone, blinkered, comfortable Delhi with its large pockets of well-hidden poverty, away from the main roads, away from the unprying eyes of its more affluent residents, who travel to their offices and golf clubs and sports centres in smart new cars (with chauffeur, of course – except on Sundays) ... The rich of South Delhi live in flats and they know their square footage. The shrunken, nuclear household is gradually becoming normal. Servants and grandparents will have to live out.” (page 223)
But it is in discovering the other parts of the city that Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity adds great value. Starting from the usual suspect – Connaught Place – he decides upon the spiral route to cover the city – and perhaps covers ground that any previous raconteur of the city. Black and white photographs by Miller supplement the text, while each chapter is charmingly introduced by the diagram of the particular spiral he orbits in. The footnotes suggest the text to be for a non-Indian reader, but they are often informative for just about anyone.
The observations avoid the usual firangi pitfalls. Cows are an ignored species, and bargaining is not part of the text. The tone is of an insider – helped perhaps his ability of speaking Hindi and being married to an Indian. The humour is understated, self-deprecatory, and very humane. This is not an elite look into the exotica, in fact, Miller is fairly savage about some parts, Vasant Vihar he describes it as a “transit camp”, while “walking through Gurgaon was a soulless, dispiriting, lonely experience… there’s a sense of anomie that overwhelms them, a sense of purposelessness now that they have achieved a major aim of their lives – a smart new flat in Gurgaon”.
Foreigners do have repeat cameos – the incident of the Israeli lady who spat on the author makes for particularly unintentionally funny reading, one of the many in fact. His look at Indians from other parts of the country is kinder, and he notes the shift from a Punjabi-dominated city to a more widely inclusive one – especially the emergence of Chhath as a major festival in the city. He discovers the Embassy of Nauru (read the incident with its guard to really know how low-level a PJ can get!), demystifies some of the Malcha Mahal urban legends, has some chilling moments in an abattoir, visits a ‘computer-in-a-hole’, gets ‘decapitated during his walks, finds a monument he desperately tries to save from being razed to the ground, in vain.
He meets a cross-section of people – some he gets mystified by, others he mystifies. Having learnt the word cheenti the day before he finds ants traveling up his trouser – at which he “danced about, spinning around like dervish, and trampling their ant-hill, destroying their great city, beneath my feet. I saw a young man in torn clothes watching me as if I was mad. Chinta, I said distracted from my discomfort by my delight at being able to use the Hindi word for ant, which I had learnt one day earlier. ‘Chinta-chinta,’ I repeated playfully, pointing at the ground, my shoes and my ant-afflicted leg. He shook his head sorrowfully, before loping off. A few seconds later I realised that I had used the wrong word. Chinta means worry or anxiety; the word for ant is cheenti. I looked ahead and who I had so embarrassingly misled as the nature of my affliction was still there in a distance, way ahead of me. So I went tearing after him, thinking I could catch him up and explain what I had really meant. I soon thought better of the plan, slowing down to catch my breath, to protect my bad knee, and to save myself from further humiliation.”
His visits expand the horizon for most of us with areas we are fairly unfamiliar with. He discovers two Gandhi Museums – both of which claim to house the watch he was wearing when he died. His first introduction to the city had been through the Merchant-Ivory film, The Householder, and recognises the Zeenat mosque from the image. His effort to identify the exact locations of the scene see him being rebuffed a number of times, and it is tribute to his perseverance that he is finally able to locate the house and room where Leela Naidu melancholy had played out nearly half a century ago.
And perhaps it is this quality of dogged pursuance that is perhaps the most valuable asset of the book, for it is safe to say that apart from a handful of the city’s citizens, few can claim to know the city as well. Not to be missed.
Well, Sam Miller, is not your usual Dilliwala. For one, he has arguably come up with a book that is perhaps the first since Narayani Gupta’s Delhi Between Two Empires to bring the streets and smells of Delhi unfamiliar to the reader. The city has not lacked chroniclers – right from its heyday during the Sultanat period to more recent like Ghalib, Zauk, Ahmed Ali, Khushwant Singh and William Dalrymple amongst many. And the only one perhaps to chronicle in such detail the post globalisation city.
But a city that has grown exponentially in the last two decades – and as Miller points out – has changed not just physically, but ethnologically and demographically as well – this is chronicle in the grand tradition of western travel writer. Miller decides to give his 21st century Delhi a thorough look as a flaneur – someone who wanders aimlessly through cities!
The tales are old. Yet there’s a freshness in the retelling. Miller is not that taken up by south Delhi, describing it as, “the haunt of the junior diplomat and the senior journalist; of expatriate aid workers and retired mandarins. This is Anglophone, blinkered, comfortable Delhi with its large pockets of well-hidden poverty, away from the main roads, away from the unprying eyes of its more affluent residents, who travel to their offices and golf clubs and sports centres in smart new cars (with chauffeur, of course – except on Sundays) ... The rich of South Delhi live in flats and they know their square footage. The shrunken, nuclear household is gradually becoming normal. Servants and grandparents will have to live out.” (page 223)
But it is in discovering the other parts of the city that Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity adds great value. Starting from the usual suspect – Connaught Place – he decides upon the spiral route to cover the city – and perhaps covers ground that any previous raconteur of the city. Black and white photographs by Miller supplement the text, while each chapter is charmingly introduced by the diagram of the particular spiral he orbits in. The footnotes suggest the text to be for a non-Indian reader, but they are often informative for just about anyone.
The observations avoid the usual firangi pitfalls. Cows are an ignored species, and bargaining is not part of the text. The tone is of an insider – helped perhaps his ability of speaking Hindi and being married to an Indian. The humour is understated, self-deprecatory, and very humane. This is not an elite look into the exotica, in fact, Miller is fairly savage about some parts, Vasant Vihar he describes it as a “transit camp”, while “walking through Gurgaon was a soulless, dispiriting, lonely experience… there’s a sense of anomie that overwhelms them, a sense of purposelessness now that they have achieved a major aim of their lives – a smart new flat in Gurgaon”.
Foreigners do have repeat cameos – the incident of the Israeli lady who spat on the author makes for particularly unintentionally funny reading, one of the many in fact. His look at Indians from other parts of the country is kinder, and he notes the shift from a Punjabi-dominated city to a more widely inclusive one – especially the emergence of Chhath as a major festival in the city. He discovers the Embassy of Nauru (read the incident with its guard to really know how low-level a PJ can get!), demystifies some of the Malcha Mahal urban legends, has some chilling moments in an abattoir, visits a ‘computer-in-a-hole’, gets ‘decapitated during his walks, finds a monument he desperately tries to save from being razed to the ground, in vain.
He meets a cross-section of people – some he gets mystified by, others he mystifies. Having learnt the word cheenti the day before he finds ants traveling up his trouser – at which he “danced about, spinning around like dervish, and trampling their ant-hill, destroying their great city, beneath my feet. I saw a young man in torn clothes watching me as if I was mad. Chinta, I said distracted from my discomfort by my delight at being able to use the Hindi word for ant, which I had learnt one day earlier. ‘Chinta-chinta,’ I repeated playfully, pointing at the ground, my shoes and my ant-afflicted leg. He shook his head sorrowfully, before loping off. A few seconds later I realised that I had used the wrong word. Chinta means worry or anxiety; the word for ant is cheenti. I looked ahead and who I had so embarrassingly misled as the nature of my affliction was still there in a distance, way ahead of me. So I went tearing after him, thinking I could catch him up and explain what I had really meant. I soon thought better of the plan, slowing down to catch my breath, to protect my bad knee, and to save myself from further humiliation.”
His visits expand the horizon for most of us with areas we are fairly unfamiliar with. He discovers two Gandhi Museums – both of which claim to house the watch he was wearing when he died. His first introduction to the city had been through the Merchant-Ivory film, The Householder, and recognises the Zeenat mosque from the image. His effort to identify the exact locations of the scene see him being rebuffed a number of times, and it is tribute to his perseverance that he is finally able to locate the house and room where Leela Naidu melancholy had played out nearly half a century ago.
And perhaps it is this quality of dogged pursuance that is perhaps the most valuable asset of the book, for it is safe to say that apart from a handful of the city’s citizens, few can claim to know the city as well. Not to be missed.
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