Introduction
[T]he postcolonial is in many ways about [an] unfinished business, the continuing projection of past conflicts into the experience of the present, the insistent persistence of the afterimages of historical memory that drive the desire to transform the present. The postcolonial remains: it lives on, ceaselessly transformed in the present into new social and political configurations.
Robert J. C. YoungFootnote 1
In 2000, the British Asian writer Rana Dasgupta moved from New York to Delhi, reversing his father's act of migration from India to the West in the 1960s, to find a new, but already obsolescent, ‘rising India’. This was the India of the economic boom, whose extent and import have been increasingly under scrutiny in the past decades. With reference to the temporalities of ‘rising India’, the purpose of this article is to examine in Dasgupta's non-fiction work Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014) the representation of globalization's multiple temporalities or, in other words, the timescapes of New India, in the sense of perceptions of time that are dependent on the position of the observer. As established by my reading of Capital, the book's re-Orientalist frame underscores, from the outset, the difficulty in decoupling ideas of modernity and progress from a Eurocentric, Enlightenment project. If we begin by unpacking the title of Dasgupta's work, we find it carrying certain assumptions. Delhi has been the capital of India since 1911 (at the time British India) and a centre of capital accumulation—a simultaneity the title plays with. As David Harvey argues, cities have been the subject of much ‘revolutionary romanticism’Footnote 2 but, at the same time, they are, and will remain, sites of capital accumulation. Adding to that concurrence is a not-so-subtle intertextual nod to Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867–83) and the conceptualization of capital as a value in motion. Drawing on the characteristics of ‘value’ as they are presented by Marx in the opening chapter of Capital, Harvey contends: ‘To find value in a commodity by just looking at a commodity is like trying to find gravity in a stone. It only exists in relations between commodities and only gets expressed materially in the contradictory and problematic form of the money commodity.’Footnote 3 While theoretical conceptualizations such as Marx's cannot be transferred seamlessly from the 1860s–1890s to the 2010s, his reflections in Capital seem to offer Dasgupta an illuminating intertext to the socio-economic and political cleavages of globalization. If we pursue this reading of the title further, Dasgupta is possibly referencing Marx's teleological account of progress as well as his argument that the homogenization of time is a condition and effect of the logic of capital.
Read as a travel narrative, Capital is a returnee author's personal attempt to inhabit the multiple temporalities of Delhi—the various timescapes of the capital of India—wherein the pull of globalization, here understood as neo-liberal corporate economic globalization, is alternatively embraced and resisted by its inhabitants.Footnote 4 In this sense, it is a travelogue documenting the city's ‘eruption’ in the context of the ‘Asian twenty-first century’, eloquently illustrating Ann Laura Stoler's idea of ‘imperial debris’ in its highlighting of ‘the actual imperial residues and remnants’Footnote 5—the material and immaterial remains of Delhi's fury of progress. In a process that Dasgupta describes as ‘the furious tearing down of all that hardware in the pursuit of globalism’,Footnote 6 his erupted and ruined Delhi is populated by aging parents, new construction sites where once was vacant land, or new buildings erected alongside or on top of the debris of colonial structures. To construct such a narrative involves shuttling between here and there, now and then. By passing through and inhabiting particular locations, Dasgupta excavates the larger narratives making up the city while at the same time tracing his family's stories within it. Here, a parallel can be drawn with Capital’s survey of the multiple modernities of the present day and the longue durée of colonial history that permeate Delhi. Concurring with the thesis that modernity and European colonialism are co-constitutive historical formations,Footnote 7 the writing of Capital should be marked as a sort of lay methodology in which academic debates about post-colonial modernities might—or even ought to—be replicated and displaced. It is through politicized and territorialized genealogies of ‘imperial debris’ such as Dasgupta's that we can arrive at new critiques of modernity, as well as interrelated post-colonial modernities.
Guided by the question ‘Are we all moderns now?’, the first part of this article argues that Dasgupta's representation of the multiple temporalities of globalization confirms the conceptual limitations of a multiple-modernities framework for understanding post-colonial, post-liberalization New India. At the same time, this article is concerned with the ways in which Dasgupta's fractured and multi-temporal present of Delhi, inhabited by the old and the new, is being captured by a returnee from the United States of America to India who is concurrently the ‘other’ from ‘abroad’ and is the ‘same’ at ‘home’. Because Capital’s portrait of the ‘eruption’ of an Indian megalopolis is drawn by a diasporic, cosmopolitan subject of enunciation, the second part of this article reflects on the subject's voice as one that is inevitably mediated by the West—in other words, as a re-Orientalist voice.Footnote 8 The time of Capital speaks to current migration trends, wherein the mobility of the highly skilled is rising and remittances tend to fall. The return to India by highly skilled PIOs (People of Indian origin), whose affluence and mobility, and therefore social capital, allow them to circulate seamlessly in and be part of global networks ‘friction’-free,Footnote 9 seems to be largely unquestioned. For these ‘skilled transients’ and ‘transnational sojourners’Footnote 10 such as Dasgupta, the right to the city—to live and work in the city, to inhabit the city unencumbered—is taken for granted. Part of Dasgupta's privilege includes having access to an advantageous point of view: one that is at the same time, contrapuntally (to draw on Edward Said's terminologyFootnote 11), inside and outside the rising India he is analysing.
Are we all moderns now?
Modernity means many things, and its arrival and progress can be traced using many and different markers. One feature of modern life and its modern setting stands out, however, as perhaps . . . the crucial attribute from which all other characteristics follow. That attribute is the changing relationship between space and time. . . . In modernity, time has history, it has history because of the perpetually expanding ‘carrying capacity’ of time—the lengthening of the stretches of space which units of time allow to ‘pass’, ‘cross’, ‘cover’—or conquer. Time acquires history once the speed of movement through space (unlike the eminently inflexible space, which cannot be stretched and would not shrink) becomes a matter of human ingenuity, imagination and resourcefulness.
Zygmunt BaumanFootnote 12
Despite ongoing efforts to decolonize modernity,Footnote 13 and even after it has been demonstrated that the post-Enlightenment project of creating a rational European modernity was never really fulfilled,Footnote 14 the taken-for-granted nature of modernity as both ‘fact’ and imperative endures. This linear perspective, which betrays a judgement of socio-historical development wedded to European Enlightenment and Western rationalism, has come to accentuate the forceful, instrumental and one-directional application of European epistemologies. Circumventing this perspective, for Jürgen Habermas, building on Max Weber's concept of ‘modernity’,Footnote 15 the term ‘modernization’, introduced in the 1950s, ‘dissociates “modernity” from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general’.Footnote 16
There have been ongoing critical projects intent on establishing the fact of a counter-temporality of modernity that responds, in Homi Bhabha's words, to ‘Fanon's temporality of emergence—his sense of the belatedness of the black man’.Footnote 17 Critiques that have attempted to undermine a normative horizon to modernity (and the connotations of progress that accrue to the term) have included the articulations of ‘singular’ and ‘alternative modernities’,Footnote 18 ‘multiple modernities’,Footnote 19 modernity ‘at large’ and ‘multiple globalizations’,Footnote 20 and the interrelated notions of cultural fluidity, such as in the concept of ‘liquid modernity’Footnote 21 and the glocalization, flexibility, mobility and hybridization that they entail.Footnote 22 This scholarship presents modernity as a global process, not limited to Europe, and as resulting from cultural interconnections, beyond diffusion from the centre followed by imitation by the peripheries, to draw on Immanuel Wallerstein's world system terminology and his account of the development of a Eurocentric capitalist world system.Footnote 23 Under the rubric of a critical theory of development and within a multiple-modernities framework, Tom McCarthy observes that the challenge that we face today is ‘how best to be modern in a world in which “we are all moderns now”’.Footnote 24 Owning up to this idea, McCarthy adds, ‘means opening diverse paths to multiple modernities rather than following the same path to a single modernity’.Footnote 25 A significant number of post-independence novels and non-fiction works of Indian Writing in English (IWE) have also consistently tried to unsettle notions of a single modernity. Works of IWE such as Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie and The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga, to name only two, have endeavoured to destabilize a dominant discourse of modernity as progress and development as per a Western project of the global expansion of capitalism since the seventeenth century.Footnote 26 Though the success of this subversive effort has at times been questioned, given the pressures of the global literary marketplace, several IWE narratives, in their undermining of a linear model of modernity as a destination and a process that presupposes arrival, demonstrate that, with reference to the subcontinent, the discourse of modernity in its singular tense fails to cover the fractured and multi-temporal present of our multi-polar world. Beyond reinforcing a bipolarity, they show that there are many—albeit unequal—poles. Via their narratives, they have thus been impacting on readers’ awareness of the multiplicity of modernity's temporalities.
Alongside these creative critiques of the concept of modernity understood as linear progress and temporal advance, as a single, univocal process unfolding in a universalizing timeframe, the project of ‘provincializing’ Europe that arguably informs this IWE ‘is to write into the history of modernity, the ambivalences, contradictions’ of peripheral reception.Footnote 27 To provincialize assumes the existence of a form of colonial knowledge understood in two ways: as any kind of knowledge that was used or produced in order to underpin or facilitate colonial conquest or administration, or as a kind of knowledge that was distinctively or even essentially colonial. To provincialize extends to the act of inscribing subaltern or indigenous temporalities into a Eurocentric, synchronic conception of temporality. This nonetheless underscores—even glamorizes—a sense of being out of time: one that is fashioned at the periphery of regular, Western time. A similar conceptual limitation can be discerned in McCarthy's argument that ʻwe are all moderns nowʼ. This can be read as the homogenizing circumstances under which our lifestyles ‘have become conditioned by the practical, discursive, normative, and institutional structures of a global modernity’.Footnote 28 The contention that ‘we are all moderns now’ and that we live in a world of multiple modernities is obviously seductive and persuasive in a context of constant flows and contraflows of informational, intellectual, and financial capital, and possesses obvious analytical possibilities. However, that contention is much narrower than it would at first seem because, as authors such as Gurminder Bhambra point out, it obscures ‘non-modern’, subaltern differences. As the sociologist observes, considering the tension between the original and the derivative, ‘theories of multiple modernity continue to rest on assumptions of an original modernity of the West which others adapt, domesticate, or tropicalize’.Footnote 29
If the paths into modernity are all different, it would be reasonable to expect that it would be in the context of India's encouraging economic environment and fast-growing market, particularly in ‘emerging’ centres like Delhi, that ‘one could best observe the most recent layer of global time’, to use Dasgupta's words.Footnote 30 Dasgupta's ‘world-systemic’ novels Tokyo Cancelled (2005)Footnote 31 and Solo (2009)Footnote 32 had already covered a polychronic concept of the different temporalities, where imperial forms endure in fast-paced, ‘global’ lifestyles. Capital was thought of as a book as much about Delhi as ‘about the global system itself’, in the sense that what Dasgupta was witnessing at the beginning of the 2000s was seen as ‘hypermodern scenes which were replicated, with some variations, elsewhere on the rockface of contemporary global capitalism’.Footnote 33 The ‘hypermodern scenes’ Dasgupta observed in the Delhi of the early twenty-first century were not seen as ‘scenes of a “primitive” part of the [global] system, which was struggling to “catch up” with the advanced West’.Footnote 34 By extending the idea of Delhi as a global city, this reading echoes the notion that a few post-colonial cities are now acting as ‘worlding’ nodes that ‘create global connections and global regimes of value’,Footnote 35 as well as AbdouMaliq Simone's concept of ‘worlding from below’,Footnote 36 wherein worlding cities constitute a ‘mass dream’ rather than an outsider, ‘imposed vision’.Footnote 37 Imaginative, hybrid energies were involved in the domestication and ‘indigenization’ (and not mere borrowing) of the monologic Enlightenment paradigm—the anticipated ‘provincializing’ of the normative ideals of Enlightenment that undergirded the coloniality of power by colonial peripheries that Dipesh Chakravarty proposes. When the writer arrived in the city, ‘[t]he old was dying, the new was in preparation’ and the feeling was that ‘everything was potential’.Footnote 38 Delhi was changing in such a way that ‘it would become liberated from the constraints of the past, and many unknown fruits would sprout in its ground’.Footnote 39
In a 2014 promotion video for Capital commissioned by the publisher Canongate, Dasgupta states that, for the ‘several other places in the world’ besides India, ‘the twentieth century wasn't that great’, meaning that a lot of those populations were
catapulted into the twenty-first century with immense energy not necessarily because they think the future is wonderful, but because the past is nothing to be nostalgic about. And so people here are much more energetic about the future. They think about the future; they believe in the future and they really have very little desire to return to the past, which is different from Europe. I think Europe and increasingly America think a lot about the past, think about how they can hold on to it, how they can return to it.Footnote 40
At the time when Dasgupta was writing Capital, the adaptive and homogenizing energies of the city, in its embrace of ‘utter intelligibility within its own population’,Footnote 41 were expected to materialize in an Andersonian utopia of a truly global imagined community, where the feeling of belonging would be conceived as a comradeship, regardless of minor differences. The realization of this utopian fraternity would change the entire world, ‘since it was clear, in these times of global interconnections, that we were all implicated in relationships with people we would never know or understand’.Footnote 42 Dasgupta felt as if he was witnessing an epistemological revolution initiated by the post-colony; he imagined that ‘[p]erhaps the Third-World city, long thought as a place of desolation and despair, might actually contain implicit forms of knowledge that all places could benefit from’.Footnote 43 ‘There was a “city” to be made,’ the author observes; there was a city to be imagined, presumably following the path of ‘much-imagined cities’ such as Paris, New York, and Mumbai.Footnote 44
Still, as it becomes apparent throughout Capital in ways this article proceeds to illustrate, a multiple-modernities basis for grasping the workings of global capitalism in the 2010s proves inadequate, as it flattens out inequalities, smoothes out power imbalances, and ultimately remains too contingent on Western epistemologies. The above sense of infinite possibility had a decade later been defeated by the ‘dismal energies’ that had created low-quality copies of Western lifestyles. The unrelenting optimism proved to be delusional. Delhites had become, or rather remained, conscripted to Western notions—the ‘conscripts of modernity’, to use David Scott's expression.Footnote 45 India, for Dasgupta, continued to be typecast as a ‘backward’ periphery within globalized economic spheres. The post-colonial, post-liberalization utopia of Delhi as a truly global imagined community, formerly narrated as a romance with much quasi-revolutionary zeal (as has been the case of so many narratives of the transition from colonialism to independence, in India and elsewhere), seemed to have withered into the tragedy of a dejected replica in the eyes of the re-Orientalist returnee. ‘Money would arrive,’ Dasgupta writes, ‘but everything exalted and nurturing was passing away, and nothing could replace it except a flood of baseness.’Footnote 46
All that glitters is not gold: Capital as a ‘report from the global future’
[M]odernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’
Marshall BernmanFootnote 47
When Dasgupta arrived in Delhi, a decade into the adoption of the principles of open markets and free enterprise, ‘the city was a vortex of prophecy and possibility’.Footnote 48 In the context of a swift and certain process of change, Capital begins by detailing the often acrimonious clashes between global and local, modernity and tradition, seemingly debunking the idea that, in an Indian context, these should be seen as dichotomous and corresponding pairs, where the global is univocally associated to modernity and the local to tradition. However, the narrative soon destabilizes a ‘multiple globalizations’ approach—and, interrelatedly, a multiple-modernities approach—for grasping the situation of the Indian subcontinent in the 2010s. The author describes the bereaved ushering of India into post-colonial modernity through globalization in the historical context of promise that characterized the post-liberalization period:
In our era . . . we recognise only one kind of ‘globalisation’. . . . India's entry into the global system, like that of so many countries around the same time, was not the smooth reversion to a natural state it is so often imagined to be in our now-seamless capitalist world (which has lost so much of its comprehension and empathy for variety and alternative). . . . India ‘came into’ globalization in the same sense as someone ‘comes into’ an inheritance: with a sense both of new economic possibility, and of crippling bereavement.Footnote 49
The ‘utopian clamour’ that literally materialized into the Delhi Metro, which had begun operating in 2002, ‘was no more’ well over a decade later. As is apparent in Dasgupta's portrayal of urban segregation resulting from a new lifestyle, the desire to embrace the limitless possibilities of this modernity had become void:
The future had arrived and it was not very impressive. The city had been taken over by more dismal energies, and Delhi once again seemed peripheral and irrelevant. . . . the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic—it made it difficult to dream of surprising futures any more. . . . the new lifestyle that we saw emerging around us was a spiritless, degraded copy of what Western societies had developed: office blocks, apartment blocks, shopping malls and, all around, the millions who never entered any of them except, perhaps, to sweep the floors.Footnote 50
Though probably not as invested with utopian hopes as the Delhi Metro, shopping malls had arrived ‘as part of a rapacious economic torrent that had turned everything upside-down, destroying things human and divine, scattering objects and energies, and setting down alien needs and rituals in the rubble’.Footnote 51 A testament to the excess and deficit of the above-mentioned ‘economic torrent’, malls have become a naturalized part of the landscape of urban India and have become a feature of its divided cities. On imperial debris rest ‘alien needs and rituals’, as illustrated in the architecture of a particular upscale mall Dasgupta visits in Delhi, built just next to the airport, presumably the Indira Gandhi International airport. Here, the modernity on display is that of the ‘perfectly geometrical’ European city, simultaneously in and out of time and place, where the mimicry of the modernity of the Italian-like piazza and the Viennese-like ballroom is compounded by lawns, classical columns, and porticoes; fountains synchronized to Johann Strauss waltzes; and Mediterranean-style parasols on rooftop bars.Footnote 52
This notion of India as the site of belated and duplicate Western modernity reverberates throughout Capital. At times, the voices of ‘observers’ from ‘the older centres of the global market’, such as those issued via the Western media (after all, the United States of America stand as a symbol of advanced modernity at large), are ventriloquized:
The technology companies, the cafés, the mixed-gender groups of professionals drinking after work, the alternative lifestyles: Americans recognized it all immediately as—America. Knowing publications such as The New York Times ‘explained’ to their readers how the landscape of the rising Asian giant was, through the spread of cappuccino drinking, rapidly becoming just like their own.Footnote 53
Dasgupta recounts how India was docilely imagined in the early 2000s as a ‘second America’ by the holders of the seats of global power. Outwardly, for the transition to a new stage of globalization to be seamless, Indian citizens would have to become exemplars of conforming, Foucauldian ‘docile’ bodies. The recognition that ‘[a] body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’Footnote 54 is yet another product of Western epistemological meta-narratives. Accordingly, the process of governmentality that Dasgupta hints at must base itself on the incorporation of knowledge that makes the body suitable for the new economics and politics of globalization. However, given the discursive specificity of capitalism ‘at its edges’—the individual is more than just a product of governmental techniques of ‘self-formation’ and the technologies and capital fuelling globalization are not wholly owned by the West—the Westerners’ strategic forecast would not be fulfilled:
If the centre of global power was to shift to Asia, if American hegemony was to decline, perhaps India could provide the guarantee that American values continue to reign. The future managers of the world might look somewhat different, but inside they were exactly the same. The future of the world, in other words, presented no unpleasant surprises. It would be exactly like the present. . . . Global capitalism might have appeared serene and civilised in its ancient heartlands but this was not how it felt when it suddenly burst in somewhere new. This is why the system failed to produce, at its edges, those tranquil, docile citizens that Westerners so often assumed to be part of the package.Footnote 55
In appearance, the discourse of globalization as homogenization or Americanization (with particular reference to standards of living) caused bodies to become docile in India. But the fact remained that ‘[t]he presence of American brand names did nothing to alter the fact that India was a vastly poorer country than the US . . . and what was emerging in India looked like nothing ever seen in America’.Footnote 56 The improvement of living conditions was desired, but its links with Americanization are a source of discomfort (even embarrassment) for the author, as they were associated with a radical threat to, and even destructive rejection of, ‘traditional’ values. In Dasgupta's nostalgic representation of a pre-globalization Paradise Lost, the revolutionary and romantic fashioning of local modernities in the early twenty-first century led to the abandonment of the perceived attributes of ‘Indianness’ (here understood as an object of knowledge production and mediation). The positives ‘slow, intimate and idiosyncratic’ (curiously, speaking to renewed Western appraisals of slowness) are opposed to the negatives ‘fast, vast and generic’. Specific forms of temporality are being lost or transformed—there is an atmosphere of ‘permanent temporariness’, of living in a ‘cultureless place’.Footnote 57 Re-Orientalistically, this characterization of Delhi as a ‘cultureless place’ echoes colonial representations of the erstwhile administrated colonial territory as an empty space and its indigenous inhabitants as ‘people without history’.Footnote 58
On Delhi as a spectacle for the middle class that can only be seen through car windows, as the streets are not to be made for walking (and especially not by members of the elites), Dasgupta writes:
If a painter were to paint [a] middle-class view, as, for instance, so many nineteenth-century painters tried to paint Paris from the perspective of its new, cosmopolitan boulevards, it would not, accordingly, be smooth or intimate. There would be no dwelling, like the Impressionists, on details of costume and gesture, no slow rendition of café light falling on pedestrian faces, no capturing of the almost unnoticeable interactions that happen between strangers in a public space.Footnote 59
Delhi's ways of everyday life are at odds with those of Paris's modernity and, interrelatedly, elite aspirations of world-class cities. Walking was a way of knowing Paris, which had developed into the quintessential modern city by the nineteenth century and became co-constitutive with a locale whose boulevards were in themselves structured for knowing the modern city. Now the socially privileged flaneur of European modernity is being re-enacted by the middle-class individual—Dasgupta himself while in transit in the city—sitting in the back of a car or, less frequently, driving and fighting for space in the overcrowded Indian city. Judging from Dasgupta's empirical observations of city space, the field of vision of the middle-class individual is quite different, as seen through Benjaminian lenses, from Baudelaire's Paris: ‘Car lights weave in every direction, blinding high beams all, and in the retinal shadow dart unlit human bodies, almost undistinguishable from the night.’Footnote 60 In early twenty-first-century Delhi, ‘[c]hange was happening at such a stupefying pace that people of every age were cut off even from their recent existence’.Footnote 61 As perceived by Dasgupta, the Delhi of 2000 intersected rural and urban temporalities, as one could still experience the slowness of time, ‘an older kind of time’, ‘a languorous breed of time imported from small towns and villages by Partition refugees’.Footnote 62 But ‘[t]ime in Delhi is macabre’, as he concludes when discussing a feeling of the general impermanence of the relentless ‘fast-dissolving time’ of the mid-2010s: ‘To be here is to exist in that kind of time in which everything is old even when it is new, in which everything is always already lost to decay and obsolescence.’Footnote 63
The intersection between affect and temporalities is one of the key concerns of Capital.Footnote 64 While the book engages in practices of cartography by, among other features, being prefaced by two physical maps of the subcontinent and Delhi, it is the practices of horology that are connected to affect. The understanding of time as a succession, as opposed to a relational notion, is clearly linked to Western politics and power, and figures conspicuously in Dasgupta's narrative, premised on the incorporation and disciplining of indigenous narratives of time through their homogenization as flat temporal relations measured by technologies such as the clock and the calendar. After the naturalization of the globalized clock time of the Greenwich Meridian in 1884, GMT was henceforth regarded worldwide as the common zero of longitude and standard of time. Just as GMT is a cultural configuration, so is the naturalization of the clock as displaying an objective ‘universal’ time. The clock—one of the symbols of the epistemological superiority accorded to Western knowledge—and not the expected, customary map, became a vehicle of affect for Dasgupta's father, who had ‘displaced onto a collection of clocks—and not, say, maps—his attachment to lost places’.Footnote 65 He took to collecting nineteenth-century French carriage clocks as his form of migrant heirloom—a counterpoint to the profligate inheritance of ‘chests and ornaments, paintings and vases’ he often saw on display in the houses of the British bourgeoisie:
[These clocks] have been ticking for the entirety of his life and long before: they are old enough to have chimed the quarter-hour not only for the entire history of independent India but throughout the British rule that went before. And so, with each pealing cacophony in his Cambridge home, they restore all the absences of time. Aged, stately things, they make time calm and complete, they gather up all history and store it so that it will never seep away.Footnote 66
Taking the discourse on Western knowledge versus indigenous knowledge further, how the people of India lived, their customs and traditions, their relationship with time, the landscape and climate, and their technologies were seen before independence through a colonial perspective that valued these various knowledges according to instrumental, ideological purposes. This assumes a process through which prior knowledge was marginalized, extinct or co-opted into the realm of the colonial. As scholars like Andre Gunder FrankFootnote 67 and Prasannan ParthasarathiFootnote 68 have demonstrated, Asia possessed superior products and technologies to those of Europe for centuries before European expansion. If the clocks collected by Dasgupta's father hold within them the spectre of indigenous technologies, might there be alternative ways of reasserting this repressed content in the form of a counter-horology—measuring time back against the West?
Dasgupta contrasts the grounded temporality his father attaches to these nineteenth-century French clocks with the deterritorialized time of ‘business process outsourcing’ (BPO), engineered by the entrepreneurs of post liberalization and which has even come to stand for ‘rising India’. The time of labour of the outsourcing company is both out of time and out of place because it is experienced in the Indian subcontinent as the time of the Western hemisphere. This conception of ‘the globally dispersed, low-friction corporation’ encapsulated by outsourcing ‘service providers’ is obviously appealing for Western companies.Footnote 69 Verifying the historicizing of time achieved by world-bending and time–space compression that Bauman discusses in the quote introducing the second section of this article—‘Time acquires history once the speed of movement through space (unlike the eminently inflexible space, which cannot be stretched and would not shrink) becomes a matter of human ingenuity, imagination and resourcefulness’Footnote 70—the immaterial labour of the Indian call centre (in other words, the creative labour of ‘ingenuity, imagination and resourcefulness’) acts by contracting two days into one. This contraction resulting from creative labourFootnote 71 is supported by the fast development of communication technologies like the internet:
When it is midnight in India it is tea time in London and cappuccino time in San Francisco. And, as it turned out after 1991, there were billions of dollars to be made from this rudimentary geographical fact. . . . Indian consultants worked alongside their US clients during the American day and then sent a brief to India, Indian software teams worked through their day—the US night—and American clients could view the results first thing in the morning. Two working days had been extracted from one.Footnote 72
To be able to perform this condensation and compression, ‘service providers’ need to acquire various knowledges of the West, including topographical and linguistic aspects. In this sense, time remains the property of others—a situation casually portrayed in the films Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), as well as in novels such as Bharati Mukherjee's Miss New India (2011).Footnote 73 Undermining the political rhetoric of India's economic boom, Capital thus illustrates the ‘power geometry’ that results in the differing impacts on individuals of the time–space compression of globalization,Footnote 74 whether we are considering the global movements of affluent CEOs or labour migrants.
Re-Orientalizing Delhi
For the post-colony, assuming Western modernity as the destination, in a process that pre-supposed arrival to a place not quite here, brought both enabling energies, but also fractures. A decade later, the re-Orientalist lenses of the returnee Dasgupta see India somewhere in an unproductive, un-modern liminality. His disappointment at the ways India became Occidentalized post liberalization in 1991 is re-Orientalist. When, a few years after the first publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, Gayatri Spivak investigated the gaze of Julia Kristeva and other European intellectuals in their mission to interpret the other (in Kristeva's case, Chinese fishing women), she concluded that, in front of the other, it is only possible to ask questions about oneself.Footnote 75 As analysed by Said in the late 1970s, the discourse of Orientalism, which was not only scientific, but also instrumental in its purpose, seems to have been resumed as a form of internal Orientalism, where the ‘Oriental’ (an abstract term used to designate an unchanging exotic non-European individual who was everything the European was not) themselves is seen through re-Orientalist lenses.
Said, taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point for Orientalism, detailed how the Orient was controlled epistemologically by the Occident. In Said's account, for the Occidental world, discovering the Orient was a fundamental step in the discovery and understanding of the Occident for itself. Orientalism, by Said's rationale, has to do with an understanding of European power politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Re-Orientalism, also a product of its time, is conversely a term that can be applied to how Orientals have been defining, or redefining, the Orient and, in the process, asking questions about themselves. This process can be related to Marie Louise Pratt's ideas of transculturation and the ‘autoethnographic text’, which she describes as a text ‘in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them’.Footnote 76 In short, the Orient came to be an agent in its own Orientalism, deliberately engaging with Orientalist representations but in ways that require analysing beyond a mere submission under an ideological discourse of some unidentified, external agent of power.
Similar in many ways to orientalism, re-Orientalism is a discourse in the sense that it is a system of thought that sustains a specific understanding and ordering of the world, and that discloses structures of power and power relations that are often obscured by repetition. Re-Orientalism was nurtured in India by the cultural and political circumstances underpinning the raging ‘utopian clamour’ of the first years of the twenty-first century. At the discursive level, more than an overthrowing and reversal of power, the representation of India as a transitioning society, not only ‘catching up’, but even surpassing the West, corresponded to a rearrangement of discourse to fashion a new reality, allowing the Orient to reposition itself in a changed geopolitical context. As mentioned before, the shape through which the Oriental perspective was voiced was more domesticated than borrowed from the colonial masters, incorporated to emerge as a self-fashioned expression of culture in a context of not-so-hidden geopolitics of empire. As such, Dasgupta is, using Said's words, ‘containing the Orient and finally representing it or speaking on its behalf’, placing it in a position of inferiority, even if unwittingly:
Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient and finally representing it or speaking on its behalf.Footnote 77
If the Orientalists Said was referring to were external agents who created an image, gave voice, and characterized this ‘exotic’ place and its people as returnee and/or cosmopolitan, diasporic authors such as Dasgupta also set out to create an image of India. This image presented in his travelogue is foremost driven by a diluted anti-Americanism—‘American’ in the sense of ‘fast, vast and generic’Footnote 78—which is intimately related to a nostalgic yearning for a ‘slower’ India. Echoing the discursive constitution of orientalism, as well as Marxist arguments that posited the British civilizing project in India as a necessary developmental stage leading towards progress,Footnote 79 Dasgupta argues for the need to reject the American attributes of the ‘fast, vast and generic’, which should be taken as a counter-image with an identity-creating function for India itself. A culturalized legitimization of Indianness is pitted against Americanization (one is reminded of the nineteenth-century argument that saw ‘America’ as a European project and thus affiliated with European civilization—a perception that changed after the Second World War). In Dasgupta's image, India is positively defined by the opposition to everything that is construed as American. Here, re-Orientalism is visibly the successor (albeit ‘with a vengeance’) of Orientalism, as both are based on images of constitutive cultural others.
Upon returning to India, the writer fell simultaneously in love and hate with Delhi.Footnote 80 Departing from an image of the subcontinent that stresses poverty as exotic, his travelogue Capital is assumedly ‘about the members of that rising, moneyed section of the Indian urban population who see themselves as the primary agents—and beneficiaries—of globalisation’.Footnote 81 This emergent class is usually referred to as ‘the new Indian middle class’—though, as Dasgupta proceeds to clarify in his ‘Note to the reader’, ‘the “middle classes” are not really in the “middle” at all’,Footnote 82 more aptly corresponding to the elite.Footnote 83 Narratives of the growth or, in Dasgupta's formulation, ‘eruption’ of Indian cities, such as the travelogue Maximum City (2005) by Suketu Mehta,Footnote 84 draw attention to the establishment of private townships, flanked by new shopping malls, apartment blocks and steely corporate skyscrapers, bullet train tracks, and expressways, where the burgeoning ‘new Indian middle class’ Dasgupta refers to takes refuge, fenced out in one of ‘the most extravagant manifestations of a more widespread isolationist ethos’.Footnote 85 In Dasgupta's portrait of Delhi, affective displacement has provided stark relief in the suburb of Gurgaon—the epitome of what is characterized as an alienating post-public culture.Footnote 86 The case of Gurgaon, whose form of self-reliant, privatized administration has been replicated all over the country, exemplary of a weakening of communal allegiances as ‘it appeals to a group of people for whom the corporation has come to seem a far more fertile form of social organisation than the state, and who seek out enclaves of efficient, post-public living’.Footnote 87 The book's chronotopic sketch of a visible future in Gurgaon's gated communities accordingly underscores notions of atomization and fragmentation instead of communality. The anachronistic, ‘super-saturated future’ brought to the present in Gurgaon seems to belong to a sci-fi scenario—even one of a dystopia.Footnote 88
While NRI (non-resident Indian) returnees are the primary commercial market for gated communities, in places like Gurgaon, we also find the loss and dispossession, both material and moral, of the millions who never crossed the threshold of ‘office blocks, apartment blocks, shopping malls . . . except, perhaps, to sweep the floors’.Footnote 89 Highlighting critical issues of urban development and ‘good’ governance in India, the streets that are unwalkable for the middle classes are a home for many thousands of Delhi residents—‘the throngs of refugees from “development” and “real estate”, the ones who lived relatively stable lives until they were displaced by the new factories and private townships of India's boom’.Footnote 90 This representation of Delhi's darkness—its corruption, violence, and dejection—stresses the remains of feudalism:
At the core of the city's soul was something dark and fatal. Like all dark things, however, Delhi held a powerful attraction. It promised terrible, forbidden pleasures. . . . newcomers . . . sensed the violence under the ground and quickly adopted the city's ways. Delhi's grip was nauseating and yet secretly delicious: you gave yourself to it, and you did not realise until you spoke to outsiders just how corrupt you had become. . . . Delhi whispered promises, even to the purest souls, of violence and demonic pleasures. Come to me, all ye who have been fucked, it told them, and I will show you how you can fuck others.Footnote 91
Arguably, representations that exoticize the ‘other’ through images of the deprived and backward, un-modern East continue to feed a European post-imperial fascination, which now centres on the East's economic growth and its undersides.Footnote 92 The fact that this growth is unregulated and ridden with corruption and social inequalities looms large in the Western imaginary, and echoes preconceptions about the Orient while re-Orientalistically reinscribing the privileged historical position Europe wrote for itself as the place of ur-modernity. Concurrently, portraits of Indian metropolises (in fact megalopolises) such as Dasgupta's not only replicate, but are, in turn, impacting the idea of globalization's temporalities, continuously retrieving an idea of a temporality measured by Western standards, of which Delhi's temporalities are at best disjunctive temporalities, and at worst dysfunctional variations.
Conclusion: ‘for the unborn’
In the post-liberalization period, Indian cities have very visibly become the sites of a globalized urbanity. In the time–space compression that characterizes globalization, time rather than space is more relevant to Dasgupta when considering how India ‘came into’ globalization: ‘We tend to think of migration as movement in space, but in some ways this kind of migration is a sideways step within the far grander, onward exodus that everyone who lives amid the churn of capitalism is part of: the migration across the plains of time.’Footnote 93 In the process, alternative ways of knowing the city are pondered. Within this context, modernity and progress are presented as not to be discarded, but as ideas that must be critically reconstructed. Progress is not seen as a continuous movement forward that undergirds Enlightenment notions of modernity, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of upward and downward movements, and in a cyclical state of permanent revolution.
Nonetheless, it soon became apparent for Dasgupta during the writing of his travelogue that the ‘global’ time as experienced in Delhi is a fractured time of unproductive and fake multiple temporalities. Capital compels readers to recognize the presence of imperial debris, of the multi-layered heritage of colonial history, in Delhi's alternative embracing and resisting of globalization. Dasgupta contends that ‘rising’ India, because it continues to be peripheral, or at least semi-peripheral, has produced a modernity and, alongside it, new temporalities, characterized by excess and deficit. Despite the emergence and empowerment of voices such as Dasgupta's that have been addressing these new social formations of ‘rising’ India, it remains difficult to capture the impact of these fractured temporalities on communal structures. Dasgupta declares that Capital is about the ‘primary agents—and beneficiaries—of globalisation’: the middle-class Delhi dot.com workers, urban developers, finance workers, and various entrepreneurs who have come to develop particular consumption habits and taste structures. As Dasgupta's non-fictional book details, the inhabitants of ‘world-class cities’ like Delhi are increasingly characterized by the aspirational lifestyles of the emerging ‘new Indian middle class’. However, Dasgupta feels that the bareness of the culture of ‘the new Indian middle class’ fails to equip Indians for the sociopolitical roles they should play within democratic society. The way of life that characterizes this class is unfavourably compared to an earlier, almost mythical, more organic version of Indian existence. When this non-fictional account of Delhi stresses the failure of these ways of life to emerge from specific roots within the lived cultures of ordinary people in the city, nostalgia becomes central to this representation of Delhi in the 2010s.
Even though agreeing with the coexistence of multiple modernities, McCarthy contends that ‘there is little chance of radically different modernities arising and surviving in the world we live in’.Footnote 94 While McCarthy circumvents, to some extent, the issue of radical subaltern difference, he highlights the difficulty in de-centring these received ideas about modernity that also characterize Dasgupta's portrait of modern Delhi. Capital stages the tension between a critique of Eurocentric, linear schemes of historical development and the call to acknowledge or even prioritize multiple, post-colonial modernities in a way that does not default to a shallow (and also normative) cultural relativism. This desire to not essentialize subaltern difference—as essentializing subalternity can also stand accused of being an Orientalizing effort—accounts, at least in part, for the recurrence in Capital of representations of an Indian modernity tied to a progressive, developmental reading of history, as having ‘just arrived’ at an unproductive modernity. In Dasgupta's reading, such modernity happens to be irreconcilable with the progressive framework of multiple modernities, despite its potential for applicability to the Indian megalopolis in the early 2000s. As has been argued, the book's portrait of India's other modernities as a ‘degraded copy of what Western societies had developed’Footnote 95 sets up the West as the site of ur-modernity. How will ‘the unborn’, to whom Capital is dedicated, cope with the unsustainability of growth—hence the twin ideas of eruption and ruination in the title of this article—that the book painstakingly draws on and describes?
