MISSING THE PARTY
No one knows the NCR, so no one ever invites us to their parties. It’s just as well, though, because we’re kind of awkward in crowds. Instead, we usually spend our Saturday nights in the Review’s dusty Malviya Nagar office. It's not so bad, really. Some evenings we catch up on our reading. Sometimes we have long heart-to-hearts with friends. One Saturday night in December we sat around until three, cups of hot tea in our hands, singing Beatles songs. Good fun.
In a recent Mumbai Boss essay, Rosalyn D’Mello explained that she goes to many parties, with several famous people, and not only is she having a good time, but she’s having a better time than anyone: anyone in Mumbai and anyone anywhere else in the whole country. “The Delhi ‘house party’,” she says, “is a reflection of its buzzing cultural calendar. There’s more than one book waiting to be written about these BYOB treats.” She bums cigarettes off of Pablo Bartholomew, she schmoozes with Sarnath Banerjee, and she thinks Delhi is grand for letting her in.
No one invites us to those house parties, so we can’t judge that claim. But we know something about the cultural calendar which she says the parties reflect, and we don't understand what she's talking about. In a good week, she says, “almost every other day, there’s between three to five must-attend events happening across the city.” But the number of high profile events is no indicator of their quality, and we know that many of them are nothing but boring non-art and non-critical thought: William Dalrymple is a colonial apologist, Hari and Sukhmani put me to sleep, and the Bagel Café doesn't actually sell good bagels. There’s certainly a great deal of cultural production taking place in Delhi (also true of Mumbai, also true of every city in the world), and a greater amount of that production in Delhi seems to fit into the various categories of “high culture” than in other Indian cities. But there’s also a huge amount of fluff, and a huge amount of back-patting and self-congratulation about this fluff.
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We aren’t Delhi-haters. That tribe paints Delhi in too-broad strokes too, and hasn't yet delivered the knock-out blow against the city -- that it gets really too hot here and we should all go someplace else -- so we won’t engage them. We like Delhi just fine. What really upsets us are Delhi’s apologists and promoters, the Delhi-lovers -- of which D’Mello is a fine specimen.
The question isn’t whether Delhi is a good city or a bad city or a better city than or a worse city than – answers to those questions will always miss the mark of twenty million people’s lives and experiences. We want to know why there is so much boring high culture in this city, why so many D’Mellos feel compelled to defend Delhi’s worth, and why they cite this boring high culture as proof of its worth.
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To appreciate high culture in this way -- without any critical lens -- is the logical converse of the Romantic injunction to create “art for art’s sake”: if the making of art has moral value regardless of its content or context, then it can’t be considered or criticised in those terms either, it must simply be loved. No politics or even displeasure here: we’re consuming Art.
And so we realise that D’Mello has provided us with the key to the conundrum of Delhi’s high cultural back-patting: “The Delhi ‘house party’ is a reflection of its buzzing cultural calendar. There’s more than one book waiting to be written about these BYOB treats.” Indeed there are. The cultural calendar has the same character as the house parties: both are bourgeois. The value of art openings and book launches, we're told, is that they "feature open bars and facilitate networking with publishing bigwigs and art enthusiasts." Both the cultural calendar and the house party are delicate games of Jenga, the goal of both to accumulate social capital while protecting the social status quo.
This much isn't unique to Delhi: Bourdieu demonstrated that the bourgeoisie, everywhere and always, are condemned to appreciate only reactionary and anti-intellectual art, which provide for them both a means of self-assurance and useful symbolic capital -- a demonstration of their good taste. But D'Mello's piece indexes a tighter loop in Delhi between the world of high cultural production and high social reproduction -- between the art gallery and the house party -- than even Bourdieu would predict. The domain of cultural production, for him, has a limited autonomy that allows for class treason, for the production not only of new critical tools, but also of new forms of solidarity between bourgeois and proletarian. What's wrong with Delhi, then?
Another clue in D’Mello’s piece: nearly all of the institutions she mentions as the sites of Delhi’s superior art scene are funded either by the Indian state (the universities) or by foreign states (the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institut) as instruments of state policy. Unlike in, say, Mumbai, in Delhi the terms of the high cultural conversation are being set by bureaucrats and by the exigencies of diplomacy, and the city's bourgeoisie is reading the script. Through the deliberate undermining of the partial autonomy of high cultural production, we've ended up with a lavishly-funded but critically-bankrupt cultural world. Unless Delhi's culture-consuming bourgeoisie learns to pay attention to the large mass of cultural production taking place outside of Chanakyapuri and outside the house party’s gate, they’ll have no idea what they’re missing.
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