The professor who played gang leader

SPEAKING VOLUMES

This is not a first sentence you expect from a Columbia University sociology professor: "I woke up at about 7:30 a.m. in a crack den, Apartment 1603 in Building Number 2301 of the Robert Taylor Homes."

It's the way Sudhir Venkatesh begins Gang Leader for a Day, his study of Chicago's housing projects and JT, the charismatic college dropout who applies his business skills to running an efficient crack dealership. Venkatesh writes with honesty about his growing fascination with JT, and his awareness that his research might be crossing the line. He was a graduate student at the time, and as he admits, his enthusiasm sometimes outweighed his moral compass. He did get to play gang leader for a day: the experience was "more banal and more dramatic" than he had anticipated.

What makes Gang Leader for a Day an absorbing read isn't just Venkatesh's account of fear and loathing on the streets of Chicago; it's his analysis, his appreciation of the management techniques that JT uses with his "sales managers". Running a Chicago gang turns out to be not so different from being a middle manager "" Venkatesh uses that term to describe JT "" in a corporation, with genuine blood-and-gore substituting for the office paintball championships.

Readers of this paper will probably remember Venkatesh from Steven D Levitt's Freakonomics, last year's runaway economics bestseller. One chapter in Freakonomics analysed the economic structure of the Chicago gangs "" it was based on the notebooks Venkatesh provided. Levitt and Venkatesh discovered that the crack gang closely resembled McDonald's in its structure, with the boss at the top of the pyramid raking in a relatively large "salary", while the footsoldiers earned a pittance ""but also had a chance of making it to the top. Venkatesh is not likely to repeat himself, which is a pity "" it would have been interesting to turn this sociology professor loose on Mumbai's gangs and see what he came up with.

Gang Leader for a Day raises a tricky question: how close can an observer get to his subject without crossing moral lines? Suketu Mehta faced this question when he wrote his book about Bombay, Maximum City. In order to gain the trust of the men who ran Bombay's underworld, he had to spend time with them, listen to their stories about killings and planned executions. Mehta spoke, and wrote, about the sense of alienation he often felt when he exited this world for the "normal" world of Bombay's professional class.

Though we prize objectivity in non-fiction, few writers who've tackled similar subjects have been able to remain dispassionate. Truman Capote spent years chronicling the story of two killers in the deeply unsettling classic In Cold Blood. In his letters, he writes, "I feel a great obligation to write it, even though the material leaves me increasingly limp and numb and, well, horrified "" I have such awful dreams every night. I don't know now how I could ever have felt so callous and 'objective' as I did in the beginning."

Venkatesh's honesty is compelling. He becomes a watcher of himself, constantly checking his own motives, writing freely of the bond of masculine friendship that grows between him and JT. Being Indian gives him a strange freedom "" he is seen as neither black nor white, neither the enemy nor the insider.

He often sounds protective of JT and worries about the extent of his involvement, calling himself a "hustler" who's working the gang for the information he needs. "By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and ... I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster."

It's easy to stand at a distance and criticise Venkatesh for his methods, to suggest that perhaps he shouldn't have taken his role as far as he did. But without the six years of involvement and trust, there would have been no book. What makes this work is that it isn't an ivory tower dissertation; Venkatesh lived with the people he wrote about and shared their lives, to a degree that some may find disquieting. In the process, though, he's created a classic study and written one of the most compelling books of the year.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The columnist is chief editor, Westland and Tranquebar Books. The views expressed here are personal