Take Me to the River

In a time of radical social and economic reorganization, we witness the emergence of new forms of destruction. It is not surprising, then, that in recent years there has been an outpouring of accomplished and frequently innovative narrative journalism that draws on the tools of a genre long dedicated to capturing the vertiginous experience of living in the historical present. From the heady early days of the “new” journalism until now, narrative journalism has been distinguished by the practice of immersive reporting, a technique that produces intensities for the reporter that reflect and magnify the reader’s own bewilderment in the face of conflict and change. Two recent works of narrative journalism—Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012) and Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: A Portrait of Delhi in the Twenty-First Century (2014)—use immersive reporting to explore the impact of global capital on the Indian cities of Mumbai and Delhi. Together these books provide a sweeping portrait of modern India and suggest some of the ways that narrative journalism is being repurposed to document contemporary realities.

In 1973, Tom Wolfe described the methods that distinguished what he called “the new journalism.” Wolfe’s reporter was a kind of extreme athlete, who had to “gather all the material the conventional journalist was after—and then keep going.”¹ Despite the language of mobility he used to describe new journalists who were “moving beyond” convention (20), Wolfe’s reporter traveled not through geographical space but across the threshold of consciousness. New journalists immersed themselves in the lives of their subjects, staying with them “for days at a time, weeks in some cases” (21). As a result, they were able to give not only a “full objective description” of the scene in question, which included details of dialogue, gesture, and setting, but also an equally accurate rendering of “the subjective or emotional life of the characters.” Responding to critics who accused new journalists of “entering people’s minds,” Wolfe declares, “But exactly! I figured that was one more doorbell a reporter had to push.” In Wolfe’s “doorbell,” one can detect an echo of Aldous Huxley’s “doors of perception,” and indeed doors provided an all-purpose figure to counterculturalists of the sixties and seventies who were committed to exploring extreme states of perception. New journalists reported on the extraordinary trends that rocked Cold War America—street demonstrations, the drug culture, serial murders—with an eye to investigating their impact on individual experience.

Today’s narrative journalists use the same immersive techniques to document realities of a different sort. They are not by and large interested in extreme states of mind but rather in extreme living conditions, and they travel widely to report on the effects of armed conflict, resource scarcity, and economic upheaval. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Boo documents poverty in a Mumbai slum; in Capital, novelist Rana Dasgupta narrates the lives of Delhi’s affluent. Both books investigate the impact of deregulation and rapid and uneven economic growth, on the urban poor and on the aspiring middle-class, respectively. Yet the two authors’ approaches to immersive reporting could not be more different. For Boo, immersion is a means to experiential knowledge and the basis for a finely crafted portrayal of the inner lives of her protagonists. The years she spends with her subjects enable her to speak for the poor of Mumbai and, in this way, push back against the institutions that would expunge all trace of their difficult lives. By contrast, for Dasgupta immersion is a means to historical understanding: in the experiential intensities of urban life, he discovers traces of Delhi’s past and signs of its future.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers represents a high-water mark in the tradition of novelistic narrative journalism, which...