Book review: Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity

Published on Wednesday 24 June 2009 14:53

BY SAM MILLER Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £14.99 Review by NED DENNY

WHEN I FIRST VISITED DELHI IN the mid-1990s, I used to count the ways in which the street life of the old city echoed that of Victorian Britain. Wooden cartwheels rattling through thronged, dung-strewn streets – check. Stalls selling marble-stoppered bottles of dubious pop – check. Bellowing costermongers with shabby barrows of fruit – check. Rag-pickers bent over mountains of refuse, together with the odd pig – check. Doleful, shoeless street-sweepers – check. Gaslit coffee-stands in a ragged, sulphurous, pre-dawn gloom – check. Shifty-looking characters with small moustaches and oiled-down hair – check. It was like a living, breathing, spice-infused version of the British cities our great-great-great grandfathers would have known.

All these things can still be seen in Delhi, but its urban planners would surely wince at them. In the brave new "world city" of flyovers, shopping malls and gleaming SUVs, they are regarded as embarrassing remnants of a pitiful past (funnily enough, the equally ambitious Victorians were also fanatical modernisers). "Delhi is now a megalopolis," Sam Miller writes in this erudite, comical portrait of a city "sprawling beyond its own borders, swallowing up villages and farmland, sucking in migrants, spewing out pollution. There are no natural limits to this rampant city, nothing to stop it growing except, perhaps, if it fails to live up to the new Indian dream – it is becoming India's dream town – and its purgatory".

Citing the contemplative tradition of the urban flneur, Baudelaire's meandering "botanist of the sidewalk", Miller sets out to walk a spiral pattern from central Delhi to its distant outer reaches. Taking to one's feet in this manner – instead of, as the technocrats might prefer, simply driving from purchase to purchase – can make a city humane and interesting as opposed to somewhere merely to be endured. And, sure enough, Miller's Delhi emerges as a place more akin to Through the Looking-Glass than a crass, polluted hellhole.

As he picks his way across railway tracks towards the start of his perambulation, he comes upon a "ghostly platform" where a voyaging carriage of eccentric south Indians has berthed. "There were clothes lines strung out between the windows of a single train carriage and the struts and pillars of the platform. Sarong-sized chequered sheets, pink starched saris, and assorted Victorian-style underwear hung from the lines."

In an alley deep in Old Delhi, he passes a man with a wheelbarrow full of animal ears. He is coming from the local slaughterhouse, where a shaken Miller finds "a scene of cruelty and comradeship, a giant courtyard of death and laughter". On arid farmland by the Yamuna, once celebrated by Mughal poets for its ghostly beauty and now one of the most polluted rivers in the world, he encounters a uniformed band playing a strangely familiar theme. "The conductor was delighted that I had recognised The Marriage of Figaro – but quickly lost interest when my ignorance about brass bands became obvious. He did not want to talk about anything else."

At an exhibition centre, he wanders into a fair for the printing industry, where representatives of a very different Delhi shout into mobile phones ("I'm dead meat if I'm not in Korea by tomorrow evening – latest. Route me via Timbuktu if you have to") and Miller is almost overcome by the stench of printer fluid and glue. He discovers an exquisite, partly ruined mosque "with perfect squinches and beautifully carved rosettes", then returns to find it has vanished into thin air – a victim of preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Encounters with stinging ants, killer pigs and uncovered manholes provide moments of light relief; this is an entertaining and thoughtful book – albeit one that does not offer much hope for the prospects of Delhi's "land-guzzling, gigapolitan future". That is not India's problem, though, but the world's.