Capital City by Rana Dasgupta Publisher: Nanjing University Press

Introduction
As Delhi is rushing towards the world on a high-speed train of money and ambition,
Many people became rich overnight, and even more became refugees in their own homeland.
Greed, violence, anxiety and marginalization have become the key words to understand Delhi.
This is a microcosm of modern capitalist society and the common face of the future of many cities.
【Editor's recommendation】
★ Liang Wendao, Liu Yu, Xiong Peiyun, and Xu Zhiyuan jointly edited the "Utopia Translation Series" (MIRROR) series (030) - Keep an open mind and non-utilitarian eyes to see the richness and complexity of the world. Through a series of interviews and personal exploration and observation, author Rana Dasgupta depicts a place where millionaires and slums coexist, opportunities and corruption coexist, presenting a portrait of Delhi city encountering capitalism.
★The main subject of "Capital" is India and Delhi, which is a microcosm of modern capitalist society and the common face of many cities in the future. The region with dazzling wealth and complex culture was taken over by the colonial regime, suffered cultural destruction, wealth plunder, and experienced the disaster of genocide. The post-colonial government was deeply involved in economic reconstruction and power struggles, and finally gave way to the vibrant free market. The historical trauma of the past is like a ghost floating between greed, ambition, desire, and exploitation. The poor who fell into the economic abyss have no guarantee of life, and the middle class also feels anxious and exhausted. Money has become the goal of life for Delhi people, and it has also become a shackle that dominates life.
★The core theme of Capital City is the rich people who are rising in Indian cities. They are riding the train of globalization and gaining wealth, status and power in Delhi, which has been completely transformed by capitalism. This group of emerging middle class has established a huge business empire through unlimited business opportunities, injecting vitality and Western lifestyle into the city, and also bringing vitality and hope to the rising India. At the same time, their competition for land and resources and their desire for money have severely exploited farmers and the poor, changed the operating rules of politics, housing, medical care, education and other aspects, and made Delhi shrouded in the shadow of capitalism.
★ Won the 2017 Ryszard Kapuściński Award and the Prix Émile Guimet de littérature asiatique. He was also shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
【Content Introduction】
At the turn of the century, Rana Dasgupta came to Delhi, India, a place where millionaires and slums coexist, opportunities and corruption coexist. Since the announcement of the opening of the market in 1991, the capital Delhi has transformed from a cultural ancient city in northern India that suffered from historical trauma to an international city with global influence and abundant capital accumulation in the turbulent economic reforms. Through various business activities such as international business outsourcing and real estate speculation, the emerging middle class regards itself as the main agent and beneficiary of globalization, and its lifestyle has become more and more modern and Americanized. As their wealth soars to the sky along with the city's skyline through plunder, the number of economic refugees and slums in the city has also risen.
The global capital market has brought changes, opportunities, innovation and hope to Delhi, but it has also brought a real estate market and medical system dominated by money, endless violent crimes, abuse and pollution of nature and the environment, a dysfunctional administrative system and corruption, and the racial issues that have existed since the partition of India and Pakistan. The residents of Delhi in the 21st century are facing increasingly severe challenges. No matter the rich, the middle class, the scavengers, or the criminals, no one can stay out of the contradiction between destruction and creation.
As a second-generation immigrant from India to the UK, Dasgupta returned to the land of his ancestors with a feeling of both intimacy and curiosity. Through his own observations and interviews with Delhi residents, he intertwined Delhi's history and present with the novelist's brilliant writing style, leaving an objective record of the alienation and cruelty under the tide of urban development. Today, when capitalism and globalization are sweeping the world, Delhi, which is submerged by money and capital, is both the common past of many cities and the inevitable future of many cities.
【Recommended by famous experts】
Filled with illuminating details and vivid images, covering everything from business to entertainment, from sex to marriage, this book shows how Delhi became a land of opportunity built on the backs of its inhabitants. Dasgupta's sprawling narrative vividly captures the hustle and bustle of the present generation who are steering Delhi into its global economic future. This is both a love letter to a city in transition and a haunting warning.
——Publishers Weekly
A penetrating, unsettling exploration of a city that has lost its soul by a British-Indian novelist who has lived in Delhi for more than a decade... An honest and fraught examination of the wrenching social and cultural transformations that India is undergoing.
——Kirkus Reviews
With insight, humanity, and exquisite prose, Rana Dasgupta peels back Delhi's layers of denial. He succeeds in opening up the festering wounds in a way that is engaging rather than repulsive... He brings sympathetic and understanding insights, and also penetrates the web of politics and money... His startling conclusion is that this city of nearly 20 million people, the engine of the new world order, is interesting not because of its immaturity but because its maturity looks very different from what we expect... Looking at contemporary Delhi is like looking at the most dazzling and avant-garde face of the world in the 21st century.
——Times
A beautifully written portrait of a city that is corrupt, violent, scarred, and growing so fast that its inhabitants can hardly recognize it. This is a stunning masterpiece from a great writer at the height of his powers.
—William Dalrymple, author of City of Fairies: A Year in Derry
Dasgupta's eye is sharp, his sensitivity to small moments makes this an extraordinary and tender book that lingers on the reader like a series of astonishing short stories. In Delhi, destroyed, beleaguered, and startlingly mutated, he sees the global city of the future.
——Prospect Magazine
Fascinating and often frightening… Dasgupta’s lyrical encounters with a wide variety of modern Delhiites reveal a novelist’s ear, all the more beautifully sketched… If Dasgupta appears harsh on Delhi, it’s because he cares.
——The Daily Telegraph
Greed, inhumanity, and the rage that has trapped the city and its people in a vicious cycle of pain - this is what Dasgupta shows us, and it is shocking.
—The Daily Beast
Rana Dasgupta’s masterpiece offers an epic and dramatic portrait of modern Delhi and its millions of increasingly wealthy strivers.
——Maclean's Magazine
A compelling investigation of Delhi’s encounter with capitalism… As in his novels, Dasgupta destroys the boundaries of time and space with aplomb, finding continuities in past grievances, understandings, and myths in the patterns of today.
——Mingchao Magazine
An unsparing portrait of moneyed Delhi… Dasgupta’s gift for writing is matched by his ability to extract startling candor from his subjects… This is the most rewarding of recent books on India’s free-market revolution and its unintended consequences.
—The New Yorker
A very elegant work, whose rich style and scope often recall Naipaul’s India: The Day a Million Mutinied.
——New Statesman
Dasgupta uses his material to reflect more broadly on the beauty and brutality, the pleasures and dynamics, the recklessness and amorality of capitalism... Capital City is primarily a book about the wealth and the good in Delhi. Yet there are some vivid chapters on the English-speaking middle class and the generational changes within it... The excerpts from interviews with businessmen or drug dealers are both startling and chilling... Dasgupta's analysis is always original and his writing is always extraordinary.
—Ramachandra Guha, The New Republic
The author collected all the information through in-depth interviews and analyzed in detail the reasons that contributed to the region's "wealth first" culture... This book is a very successful creative documentary work.
—Betsy Hartmann, Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, New Hampshire College, USA