City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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Everyone has servants,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘You must have servants too. This is what these people are for.’ Is there any wonder that there is water shortage in our India when you people are making seven flushes in one night?’

City of Djinns – HarperCollins City of Djinns – HarperCollins

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" My name is Sunil Gupta—please call me Sunny.’ He strode forward and grabbed Mr Lal by the hand, shaking it with great verve. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan … They all built new cities and they all lost them. We [the British] were no exception.” Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starch English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange." 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!

About the contributors

Dalrymple was played by Bollywood and stage actor Tom Alter, with Zohra Sehgal playing the role of Nora Nicholson, a British national who prefers to stay in India after it achieves independence.

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

Dalrymple plots his own journey (from childhood almost) of sifting through the endless layers of Delhi’s historical stratigraphy and historiography. As he sifts, we discover that in the everyday structures lies dormant splendid stories and great figures.

All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned to the same dust. 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. Subjects studied included Muslim jurisprudence and Quranic studies, and probably astronomy and medicine too. I am ex-member of the Publicity Committee of the All-India Congress I, Bhagalpur division. Ex-Joint Secretary of the Youth Congress Committee, Chote Nagpur, Bihar. I am a poet and a journalist. A war hero from the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jaisalmer sector …’