Capital: A Portrait Of Delhi In The Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Dasgupta, Rana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443406058 ISBN 13: 9781443406055

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2015

Synopsis

Winner of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Émile Guimet de Littérature Asiatique

Finalist for the Orwell Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger

At the turn of the twenty-first century, acclaimed novelist Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi with a single suitcase. He had no intention of staying for long. But the city beguiled him—he “fell in love and in hate with it”—and fourteen years later, Delhi is still his home.

Fourteen years of breakneck change. The boom following the opening up of India's economy plunged Delhi into a tumult of destruction and creation: slums and markets were ripped down, and shopping malls and apartment blocks erupted from the ruins. Many fortunes were made, and in the glassy stores lining the new highways, customers paid for global luxury with bags of cash. But the transformation was stern, abrupt and fantastically unequal, and it gave rise to strange and bewildering feelings. The city brimmed with ambition and rage. Bizarre crimes stole the headlines.

In Capital, we see Delhi through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, Dasgupta takes us through a series of encounters—with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts—which plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation. Interweaving over a century of history with his personal journey, he presents us with the first literary portrait of one of the twenty-first century's fastest-growing megalopolises—a dark and uncanny portrait that gives us insights, too, as to the nature of our own—everyone's—shared, global future.

About this title

About the Author:

RANA DASGUPTA won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury, England, in 1971, he now lives in Delhi.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1443406058
• ISBN 13: 9781443406055
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480