City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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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.’ He was based in Delhi, and had an army consisting of 900,000 horsemen with magnificent armour and fine costumes, 3000 elephants and some 20,000 warrior slaves. During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum. Although parts of the city still preserved the ways of the Mughal period or even the early Middle Ages, Delhi was nevertheless changing, and changing fast. 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.

City of Djinns – HarperCollins City of Djinns – HarperCollins

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) For Dalrymple, Delhi is a city of accumulated losses, haunted by its innumerable fallen rulers, the locus of empires that have been lost and – though not actively remembered – not quite forgotten either. Two dates recur with especial frequency. 1857, when the Mughal Empire finally fell, and 1947, when the British Indian Empire was dissolved and the territory partitioned into India and Pakistan. Things the book does well deserve initial mention. Obviously, a lot of research went into the book, both academic and experiential, and both of them are laudable and it's always a tougher task for someone from the outside (culturally, even if not geographically) when compared to those who grow hearing about most of the things the text here uncovers. Secondly, it is, after all, well written. WD does quite a good job with his explanations and dramatic moments and an even better, albeit perhaps just a bit parodic, job of representing dialogue and highlighting the unique way English has been appropriated here and frequently misused for all global purposes while yet managing to do the job locally. Finally, he managed to, at that point in time, bear a whole year here all that time ago, when it was most possibly much more difficult than it'd be now. The experience of Partition, including Dalrymple visiting Pakistan to talk to immigrants who left Delhi at that time, and their great nostalgia for the city they had left behind.The manners in the ancient courts of the sultans of Delhi. Dalrymple discusses "The Book of the Perfect Gentleman", written by Mirza Nama in about 1650. 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.

City of Djinns — Book Review - Medium City of Djinns — Book Review - Medium

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. 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.

City of Djinns

The book follows Dalrymple’s now familiar style of tying together contemporary events and anecdotes with historical tales and fantastical legends. In his quest for the city’s (in)famous djinns (fire-formed spirits), Dalrymple and his wife, the book’s illustrator Olivia Fraser, meet a series of interesting characters. They include a thrifty Sikh landlady and her eccentric husband; a jovial taxi driver; various government officials; eunuchs; whirling dervishes; and living relics of the British Raj. 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. We talked for an hour about the Delhi of their childhood and youth. We talked of the eunuchs and the sufis and the pigeons and the poets; of the monsoon picnics in Mehrauli and the djinn who fell in love with Ahmed Ali's aunt. We talked of the sweetmeat shops which stayed open until three in the morning, the sorcerers who could cast spells over a whole mohalla, the possessed woman who used to run vertically up the zenana walls, and the miraculous cures effected by Hakim Ajmal Khan. (64) At the still wet-behind-the-ears age of twenty-five, Dalrymple and his wife went to live in Delhi, and this amazing book is the result of his first year in the city. At one point , when the Dalyrmples have visitors staying, she counts how often the loo is flushed during the night. One night there are seven flushes, and she cuts off the water in protest.

City of Djinns – William Dalrymple (en-GB) City of Djinns – William Dalrymple (en-GB)

I was the founder editor of Sari, the Hindi monthly for women and Kalidasa, the biannual literary journal of Patna. I have donated five acres of land for the Chote Nagpur Cow Hospital. Four times I have been jailed by the Britishers for services to Mother Bharat.’ 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. It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century. The book talks about the soul of Delhi, in a mesmerising, heart rending way, in a manner so poignant that I can smell the Delhi smoke and walk among the streets and alleys again. More importantly, it talks about the spirit of Delhi, which I must say, has been lost today.I read this book through several places in Delhi. I read it in Lajpat Nagar. I read it in Khan Market. I read this book today through my college at Hauz Khas, metro from RK Puram to Nehru Enclave, metro stations, and finally as I was passing the park at East Of Kailash in the auto, I finished reading the book (yes, I even read it in auto in the chase to finish it). Reading City Of Djinns was like reading a fascinating novel and I soon found that it was not a typical travelogue but an enchanting chronicle of the historic city of Delhi. Dalrymple was not just describing to the reader about each sights that comes across him and then moving on to the next destination; he was taking the reader along with him for a captivating journey through location and time inspecting and interacting with key elements and moments from the cities epic history spanning centuries. 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. What stands about the book for me is how the author's narrative draws up on people who live in and around the city and their understanding of what Delhi means to them : Starting from partition era displaced Punjabis, invisible Anglo Indians, the marginalized Hijra community, less noticed calligraphers and Kabooter Baaz in old Delhi, Persian and Urdu scholars or an Archaeologist studying the excavations and to many more voices with their own unique experiences surrounding what they call their home. 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.

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple: 9780142001004 City of Djinns by William Dalrymple: 9780142001004

He starts out with India's partition and reveals poignantly the chasm between the old Delhi-wallahs and the new Punjabi immigrants after partition. The Urdu-speaking elite - both Hindu and Muslim - who inhabited the city for centuries during the Mughal and British times looked down on the 'boorish, uncultured' Punjabi immigrants. Their memories of Delhi consisted of Mushairas and mehfils (literary evenings) of great Delhi poets, subtlety and perfection in Urdu and the Delhi cuisine. They saw the new Punjabi immigrants as essentially colonizing farmers. On the other side, the Punjabis see the old Delhiites as lazy, indolent, slothful and effeminate. Consequently, the two Delhis never really meet and mingle. In his research on the old Delhi-wallahs, Dalrymple even goes and meets Ahmed Ali, a quintessential old Delhi elite, who ends up in Karachi much against his will as a result of the partition of India. Ahmed Ali tragically spews venom on partition and Pakistan. But he wouldn't set foot in Delhi even when he accidentally lands in Delhi airport. 'I won't put foot on that soil which was sacred to me and has been desecrated' says Ahmed Ali. Horoscopes. These are incredibly important to many people in India, especially around marriage decisions. Even the date of the wedding has to be astrologically chosen, and this can result in wedding jams, with everyone trying to get married at more or less the same time. Dalrymple still paints quite a wonderful portrait - of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side, a city of djinns. [The story behind the title would be a spoiler] I was hooked to the works of William Dalrymple from the moment I started reading City Of Djinns. It was in 2004 while browsing through a bookshop that I came across three of the 2004 penguin published Indian editions from the author – ‘City Of Djinns’, ‘The Age of Kali’ and ‘In Xanadu’ and I bought them all. The authors name was slightly familiar from a newspaper article, which I have read a year before about his documentary titled ‘Indian Journeys’ and the news about his then published ‘White Mughals’. Poetic licence,’ said the professor. ‘The archaeological evidence shows that the Painted Grey Ware culture was really fairly primitive — basically it was a rural, pastoral economy. At Hastinapura they had iron and copper implements, a few tools made of bone. Some glass ornaments, good wheel-turned pottery …’Walking through the streets of this old city, Dalrymple visits ruins hidden in narrow lanes and wades through musty old libraries to piece together its past. Throughout all this, he ties together the past and the present, especially when talking to people with connections to these chapters of Delhi’s past. 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. Coming next to the need to categorize every artifact and building by a Muslim/ Hindu boolean, WD blindly ignores (to the benefit of his readers) the complexity and syncretism of Indian society. Taj Mahal is called one of the most beautiful buildings in all of "Islam". The Taj is Mughal and Indian; but such details are ignored to propagate the dangerous and wrong notion that it is an Islamic monument. As Indian historian Sohail Hashmi argues: is there such a thing as "Christian" architecture? No, there is Classical, Baroque, Gothic, etc. but there exists Muslim and Hindu architecture. Dualities are over-amplified in these incorrect generalizations at the expense of the people who inhabit the subcontinent. They keep pigeons with different abilities - high fliers, fast fliers, fighters...which they train to do all sorts of things. Pigeon keeping was the "civilized old pastime of the Mughal court" Its delights and dangers were illustrated by Mughal miniaturists, and there were laws governing its practice. These people bring to life the details of history in a truly unique way. It allows the reader to see how the past actually co-exists with the present. This is something that Dalrymple continues to do with later books, such as The Last Mughal, and with White Mughals. Showman Pictures/UTV Motion Pictures/Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra Pictures