In pursuit of the Old Muslim glory of the city D reaches Karachi and is thus introduced to even stronger nostalgia for the lost Delhi of before partition, a bi-imperial city. The Quest to understand delhi convinces D again and again that he has found the key only to be shown each time that the inner doors keep stretching into the distance. A sort of chinese doll palace entrance, with entrances nested inside the other. It had been a bad monsoon. Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed. But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks. As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder. From that day on, however, the old man had become a fervent Sikh nationalist. ‘Everyone should have their own home,’ he would snort. ‘The Muslims have Pakistan. The Hindus have Hindustan. The Punjab is our home. If I was a young man I would join Bhindranwale and fight these Hindu dogs.’

City of Djinns - William Dalrymple - Google Books City of Djinns - William Dalrymple - Google Books

Throughout all this Dalrymple himself becomes much more than an observer, constantly trying to make connections (sometimes stretching to do so). Indeed, he even finds a personal connection with the city’s past in his wife’s ancestor William Fraser. Then, recently, I had an argument with a friend about that fiendishly invented TV series/Soap Opera ‘Jodhaa Akbar’ and realized how little I knew about Mughal rule and also remembered that I never got around to even properly beginning The White Mughals. So, how does all this come together? Is D a travel writer or a new breed altogether? I wonder how the readers at the time greeted this book that makes not much of an effort towards being a travel chronicle and is quite blatantly an exercise in curiosity. Now read by Tim Pigott-Smith, City of Djinns gets a wonderful new lease of life. Dalrymple has a rare gift for historical narrative and catches the engaging, Anglo-Indian speech of his cast with telling accuracy.” The heat (an example of Dalrymple's marvellous writing, and a description of Delhi's unbelievable heat in summer)It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century. Five years after I first lived in Delhi I returned, now newly married. Olivia and I arrived in September. We found a small top-floor flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin and there set up home. Dalrymple also reflects deeply on the New Delhi of the architect Lutyens. He says that the Imperial Delhi of Lutyens reminds him of Nuremberg. To quote his brilliant prose, - '...in its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi.....Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire - an Empire emancipated from the constraints of democracy, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority - could have produced Lutyens' Delhi." Dalrymple explores the many Mughal monuments in Delhi and delves into the city's life in Mughal times. As I read on, I realized that much of the Mughal history in India that was taught to me in high-schools was mostly a sanitised and untrue version of reality. The brutalities of Mohammed-bin-Tughlak, the massacres in Delhi at the hands of Nadir Shah and Mohammed Ghori and the unjust rule of Aurangzeb have been spelt out in detail in the book. On reflection, I suppose it is just as well that the truth not be told to young minds in India as it would only contribute to greater chasm between Hindus and Muslims. Perhaps, the incestuous advances of Emperor Shah Jahan towards his daughter Jahanara could have been hinted at in our text books!

City of Djinns – HarperCollins City of Djinns – HarperCollins

During our high school and college days the Women’s College was out of bounds for males except occasionally and on quite a few occasions when the college was hosting Inter Collegiate Debates we could enter he college and wander about a bit. These debates were usually held in Durbar Hall to which Dalrymple refers in his book. The speaker pushed himself forward, holding together his bulging dhoti with one hand. He was an enormously fat man, perhaps seventy years old, with heavy plastic glasses and grey stubble on his chin.This was an amazing college established in ancient times, academically superb and aesthetically outstanding. Mrs Puri had achieved all this through a combination of hard work and good old-fashioned thrift. In the heat of summer she rarely put on the air conditioning. In winter she allowed herself the electric fire for only an hour a day. She recycled the newspapers we threw out; and returning from parties late at night we could see her still sitting up, silhouetted against the window, knitting sweaters for export. ‘Sleep is silver,’ she would say in explanation, ‘but money is gold.’ City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) is a travelogue by William Dalrymple about the historical capital of India, Delhi. It is his second book, and culminated as a result of his six-year stay in New Delhi. Teeth-grinding horror episodes of 84 Sikh riots and his conviction to discovery truth behind the story of Mahabharata capture imagination to seemingly endless degree.

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices. In Delhi I knew I had found a theme for a book: a portrait of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns. This thread of enquiry leads to an engrossing paean on Old delhi - of the muslim delhi, of a british delhi - of the high class Old Delhi. Set off in stark contrast from the bureaucratic, boring and boorish Delhi of today. D then embarks on an archeological survey into ancient Delhi of lore - to the Mahabharatha and beyond, right to the Vedic origins of the civilization on the banks of the Yamuna - that is interesting by itself but adds precious little to the illumination of present Delhi. But it still shows how continuing traditions lie at the core of such cities. After all, there are only a handful of truly epic and truly modern cities.ferreting out of anglo-indians (a favorite method of D to recapture the flavor of living in that layer of Delhi - employed throughout the book until the layers get too ancient for the method) Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire - an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority - could have produced Lutyens’s Delhi. Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them. Only a little bit, Mrs Puri,' I said defensively, knowing she was speaking the truth. The humiliating retreat of my hairline has been going on for five or six years now and was beginning to turn into a rout.