The Eruption and Ruination of ‘Rising India’: Rana Dasgupta's Capital and the temporalities of Delhi in the 2010s

• Main Author: Mendes, Ana Cristina
• Publication Date: 2018
• Format: Article
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/35711
• topic: India; Dasgupta, Rana; Postcolonial studies; Postcolonial nonfiction; Globalisation; Re-orientalism

In 2000, the writer Rana Dasgupta moved from New York to Delhi, reversing his father's act of migration 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. With reference to the temporalities of ‘rising India’, the purpose of this article is to examine the representation of globalization's multiple temporalities in Dasgupta's non-fiction work Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014). Capital is a returnee author's personal attempt to inhabit the multiple temporalities of Delhi, wherein the pull of globalization—here understood as neo-liberal corporate economic globalization—is alternatively embraced and resisted. This article argues that the conceptual limitations of the multiple-modernities framework are reflected in Dasgupta's representation of the multiple temporalities of globalization. It is through politicized and territorialized genealogies of ‘imperial debris’ such as Dasgupta's that we can arrive at new critiques of modernity. 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 the ‘same’ at ‘home’. Ultimately, the book's re-Orientalist frame underscores, from the outset, the difficulty in decoupling ideas of modernity and progress from a Eurocentric, Enlightenment project.