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. Although I am devoted to him, Olivia is quick to point out that Mr Singh is in many ways an unattractive character. Having your own original opinions was clearly a major flaw in a mirza and, just to be on the safe side, the Mirza Nama offers a few acceptable opinions for the young gentleman to learn by heart and adopt as his own. Successive civilisations have made Delhi their capital, and in City of Djinns, we get to go back in time and experience everything from the (then recent) Sikh Riots; the aftermath of the Partition of India; the British Raj; the Mutiny of 1857; opulent Mughal Delhi; the city of the Sultanate; and finally, its connections to the famed city of Indraprastha from the Indian epic “The Mahabharata”.

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

There were never any robberies in our part of New Delhi, and the chowkidars were an entirely redundant luxury. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. But when we first took the flat Mrs Puri drew us aside and warned us that her husband had never been, well, quite the same since the riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s death in 1984. But perhaps the strangest novelty of coming to live in India—stranger even than Mrs Puri—was getting used to life with a sudden glut of domestic help. This is something that Dalrymple continues to do with later books, such as The Last Mughal, and with White Mughals.Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city’s Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. Over the course of a year he comes to know the bewildering city intimately, and brilliantly conveys its magical nature, peeling back successive layers of history, and interlacing innumerable stories from Delhi’s past and present. The result is a very dynamic printed language subject to a lot of rapid tonal shifts which make it especially prone to bathos and other register-clashing effects. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s.

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple: 9780142001004

White Mughals was published in 2003, the book won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003, the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award, the Kiryama Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Uttering a blood-curdling cry, he whipped out his old service revolver and fired the entire magazine through the door. Essentially historical, but Dalrymple also talks about the architecture, so you will do well to keep your browser open and google down the wiki articles for the many terms. He utters incoherent whoops of joy as he drives rickshaws on to the pavement or sends a herd of paper boys flying into a ditch. There was never any herder in sight, but they would always rumble slowly past, throwing up clouds of dust.He had a muffler wrapped around his head and, despite the heat, a thick donkey-jacket was buttoned tightly over his torso.

City of Djinns : A Year in Delhi - Softcover - AbeBooks

He would sing hymns and sacred qawwalis and sometimes the rich people would send down a servant with a handful of change. A smorgasbord of historical people and places, myths and facts, festivals and parties, pilgrimages and ancient texts. At one point , when the Dalyrmples have visitors staying, she counts how often the loo is flushed during the night.

The sun had just appeared over the treeline, as blond as clarified butter but powerful none the less, hinting at the furnace-heat to come. Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful. Herewith just a few of the things that I found particularly interesting, or which gave me great pleasure.