Review: Malvika Singh’s Perpetual City and Rana Dasgupta’s Capital

Essentialism feeds specious arguments in Capital. Perpetual City breathes a time of grace and preferment: The Outlook

Books on Delhi clearly suffer in comparison with those that embrace Mumbai, such as Maximum City or Shantaram. Only Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, written with an obvious fondness for the city’s monuments but an irreverent disdain for its inhabitants, and Sam Miller’s Megacity, with its idiosyncratic approach, come to mind. Neither, though, seeks to be representative of a city, not in the sense Rana Dasgupta’s Capital claims to be ‘A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi’.