‘Colossus’: An easy-to-read academic book about the ever-expanding city (and state) of Delhi

“Delhi is a city that never ends,” my friend had once commented. We had been traveling on the metro, the yellow line, watching the rush at Kashmere Gate, the markets that clustered below the line, and the Qutub Minar. As we travelled, the landscape morphed into tall skyscrapers, the mood shifted, the people changed.

Delhi had always been explained to me in important terms. In the expansive histories that I read during my high school, or in the politics I followed so closely during my undergraduate degree. But the poignancy of my friend’s comment became apparent when the metro line converted into auto rides and suddenly the bounds of NCR seemed incredibly tenuous. Where did Delhi begin and end?

I moved to the National Capital Region for my undergraduate studies but I did not live in Delhi. I was always an hour away just near the border but never in the city. It was this endlessness that is fascinating – because Delhi perhaps never ends.

A similar question plagues Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi, edited and compiled by Sanjoy Chakravorty and Neelanjan Sircar. It is an immensely populated book that asks and answers some interesting questions about the demography of the city(and now state) that has long since been the seat of power in India. Sanjoy Chakravorty is a Professor of Geography, Urban studies and Global studies at Temple University. He is also a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Neelanjan Sircar is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research and a visiting scholar at CASI. Some of the foremost experts on Indian politics and development contributed to the volume.

Delhi never ends

The chapters are rooted in the Centre for the Advanced Study of India-National Capital Region Survey. The CASI-NCR survey consisted of over 5,500 households with close to 25,000 people covered. The data for the survey was collected 2015 through 2016 but the people mapped were based on the 2014 electoral rolls. It spanned the National Capital region which also includes parts of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. While the authors contend that this may not be the most comprehensive study, it is one of the only large scale surveys of an Indian city – the only other comparable study being the Janagraha survey held in Bangalore.

The book then uses the data from the survey – both qualitative and quantitative to understand different facets of Delhi – the energy consumption, the crime rates, the spatial arrangement of colonies, the politics, religion and caste and even why people marry the people they marry. The authors note that the purpose of this study is not to compare Delhi to any other city in the world – for them that seems like an unhelpful comparison.

A “grand urban theory” or a model that is general enough to encapsulate a large number of cases, or to abstract something about “cities” seems a wasteful project. They instead indicate that a more helpful comparison would ask the question much closer to home– why isn’t Delhi like Mumbai or Vijayawada or any other Indian city. This is a question that could help with policy formulation and also lead us to a theory of Delhi(and perhaps a theory of India). The authors seem optimistic.

For instance in his chapter Neelanjan Sircar he speaks in great detail about the paradox of the city, where poorer colonies are clustered around the richer ones. He notes that even while the broader literature on organisation of social spaces in cities has studied this as an abnormality, they mostly study it as a matter of aesthetics. However Sircar argues that the structure of economic transitions between the rich and the poor incentivise the spatial co-location between them.

In another chapter, Milan Vaishnav and Mathew Lillehaugen study the results of the crime victimisation survey that was undertaken in Delhi. They argue that issues surrounding crime and justice delivery have begun to take a front seat in the larger political discourse. Despite such a deep interest in security, the police have remained an understudied phenomenon in India. This they attribute to poor data and lack of reportage.

Delhi and Indian polity

However, this is not an issue that is new to the country and in this case, to combat this the authors suggest taking a crime victimisation survey. This could fill in the gaps about the crime rate and the police responsiveness. Delhi has often been dubbed as the crime capital of the country and has seen some of the highest crime rates recorded. In that case, these surveys become important ways to record public perceptions of safety and security and thus hold long term implications on the ways in which criminal redressal systems are dealt with in larger policy circles.

These are some of the few chapters in the book – it is a vast repository of detailed discussion on not just Delhi but also larger issues that remain relevant for the Indian polity. It raises important questions related to not just urban organisation, but state capacity, urban cities in India and crime and questions surrounding energy consumption. It would be hard for me to arrange the book into an argument, even if the bulk of it is trying to scale the data available to understand rigorously what it means to be living in the city of Delhi, but I want to use the space of this review to highlight the importance of an academic book such as this.

Many books written in the academic world often make important contributions but, let’s face it, they are terribly tedious to get through. Cadence is not an academic’s best friend and even if they do end up writing for a popular audience, their ideas get “lost”, “watered down”, or “simplified”. But Colossus has some space. It is making some of the most rigorous data collected on Delhi, accessible. I spent many hours scouring the book, underlining, capturing pictures of paragraphs that made me want to read them over and over again. The book is an important contribution especially for those that want to study policy and policy making. And for those that spend many hours going through Connaught Place reels on Instagram.

Perhaps the charm of Delhi cannot simply be understood by looking at the beautiful red brick buildings from the Mughal era or talking to my friends from Delhi University who spent many happy dates walking around Lodhi garden or marvelling at Humayun’s tomb. Delhi is an endless city – endlessly expanding and contracting .

Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi, edited by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Neelanjan Sircar, Cambridge University Press.