There used to be a cliché about cities in India, back when Bombay was Bombay and Calcutta was Calcutta: that Bombay had the energy, Calcutta the intellect. And then there was Delhi, a sarkari town set in the arid northern plains, which supposedly had neither. That was never completely true, but now, more than two decades after liberalisation, it is slowly becoming clear how completely inaccurate that has become. True, there are scorching afternoons in the height of summer when it feels like nothing will ever move in Delhi, whether a file, an idea, or a person. But, come winter, and the blossoming of the city is evident.
Consider, for example, the space that cultural activity has staked out for itself in the past few years. In recent weekends, Delhi and its environs saw the Jaipur Literature Festival (not in Delhi, true, but in a place picked a short distance away, and it frequently felt like everyone from Delhi was there); the Delhi Art Fair, which took over Pragati Maidan and art galleries across the city, and even transformed the occasional private house; the International Sufi Festival at Siri Fort, of course, and the Delhi Book Fair at Pragati Maidan as well as the National School of Drama’s theatre festival just down the road; and even festivals devoted to, respectively, jazz and blues music. Two things stand out about that list. First, aside from the Book Fair and the NSD’s theatre festival, nothing in that list was in existence a bare decade ago. And second, most of those are not organised by the government, as was common in Delhi once, but by the private sector, and supported by advertising, ticket sales, or the sale of goods. And for every International Sufi Festival that is government-run, there’s a Jahan-e-Khusrau, at Nizamuddin’s tomb, which isn’t. Once, perhaps, not so long ago, Delhi was a sarkari city where the main cultural activity was carefully manoeuvring yourself on the Indian Council for Cultural Relations’ invitation list, or ensuring your bureaucrat friend sent you a pass or two. Somehow it has grown past that without even noticing.
Indeed, Delhi has become the location not just of independence from the state in cultural terms, but of contestation of the state. When the anti-corruption crusaders led by Kisan Baburao Hazare began their agitation, it was in Delhi that they saw the most response; Mumbai let them down badly. Nor was that a one-off; that middle-class Delhi is willing to protest was underlined by the events of last December. And, as this newspaper reported recently, even the space of ideas is no longer monopolised easily by the government. The Brookings Institution’s high-profile move into India recently has been preceded, in fact, by several Indian think tanks essentially severing themselves from the government’s umbilical cord — reducing their dependence on state grants drastically, and making up the difference by private contracts. And the fast-growing presence of, for example, Shiv Nadar University and Jindal Global Law School on the National Capital Region’s perimeters suggests that even the academic space will no longer be monopolised by direct beneficiaries of the state.
Delhi’s slow development of the attributes of a real city is far from complete. There are still too few safe public spaces, for example, and the state needs to do a better job with security for women. Yet it is no longer contestable that Delhi has thrown off the shackles of empire and socialism, and is now as dynamic as Mumbai ever was, as bubbling with ideas as Kolkata — and probably more than both. India’s capital is now its capital in truth for the first time in hundreds of years.
