Rana Dasgupta is a British writer and essayist of Bengali descent, author of novels and essay collections. He lived in Delhi for more than a decade, observing at close range the transformations the city underwent after the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s. This Delhi — wrenched from rural lethargy and hurled into the dizzying pace of globalisation — became the subject of his reportage book.

Capital: The Eruption of Delhi is a portrait of a metropolis in which new wealth and old poverty live side by side in a state of permanent tension. Dasgupta meets a wide cross-section of people: property and technology billionaires, children of former aristocrats, women’s rights activists, migrants from the countryside seeking work in the slums spreading around glass skyscrapers. Each conversation is a point of entry into a deeper layer — of history, memory, desire, and fear.

He examines how the dividing line between classes runs through Delhi — how the new plutocracy shapes public space, what price the environment and the poorest residents pay for this wealth, how modernity is entwined with the caste system. He devotes particular attention to the new business elite — their lifestyle, their connections with the political class, and their obsession with status.

The book is at the same time a reflection on what a capital city means in the age of globalisation: not the centre of a nation, but a node in the global flow of capital that creates its own reality, cut off from the rest of society. Dasgupta’s Delhi becomes a metaphor for the entire twenty-first century.