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City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way—from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven "dead" cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city—today's Delhi. 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. Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure.

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

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About the author

William Dalrymple

74 books2,863 followers
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997; it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. A collection of his writings about India, The Age of Kali, won the French Prix D’Astrolabe in 2005.

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.

William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

In 2002 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his ‘outstanding contribution to travel literature’. He wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. His Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, The Long Search, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as ‘thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio’. In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards. In June 2006 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa by the University of St Andrews “for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding”. In 2007, The Last Moghal won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. In November 2007, William received an Honourary Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, from the University of Lucknow University “for his outstanding contribution in literature and history”, and in March 2008 won the James Todd Memorial Prize from the Maharana of Udaipur.

William is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now live on a farm outside Delhi.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,023 reviews
Profile Image for Warwick.
877 reviews14.8k followers
May 23, 2017
Delhi is lucky to have William Dalrymple as a chronicler – not many cities get such exemplary treatment as this. I think I even preferred it to Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, just because Ackroyd presents himself as an expert dispensing knowledge, whereas Dalrymple is pure ingénu: curious, open-minded, he allows us to accompany him on his own journey of exploration and discovery which dovetails with the social and historical narratives he uncovers.

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.

Partition in particular emerges as the event that underlies almost everything about modern Delhi. While some authors might present this as a bald historic fact, Dalrymple instead lets us share in his growing realization over quite how much of the city's population left, arrived, or was radically changed by Partition.

Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single-handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles.


Nor is he content with hearing only from those still in the city. He travels to Pakistan to hear from Delhi's former population of Muslims too, still speaking what they refer to as pure Delhi Urdu in the streets of Karachi. Dalrymple's interview with Ahmed Ali, the author of Twilight in Delhi, is fascinating. Ali loathes the whole idea of Pakistan; indeed the only country he seems to hate more is post-Partition India itself, to the extent that when a flight he was on had to make an emergency stop in Delhi, he refused even to get off the plane.

‘The civilization I belong to – the civilization of Delhi – came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place.’


This sense that the city has created a constant stream of such refugees throughout the years, whether physically or mentally, is central to Dalrymple's understanding of Delhi. The British are an unusual case because, as he points out, their lengthy period of political rule has left remarkably few traces on Indian culture. The Brits that Dalrymple can find who had lived in colonial India show a hilariously skewed kind of imperious equanimity over Indian independence. ‘On balance I think you must never take land away from a people,’ says one old Englishwoman who, as a child, had known Lutyens.

‘A people's land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’


And the few Brits still remaining in-country show the sort of bizarre false memories of "the motherland" common to all such colonial relics (I've met some similar people myself in Kenya) – ‘The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,’ confides one man as he reminisces about a couple of trips to relatives in Suffolk. ‘It's a very popular dish over there, that Kentucky Fried Chicken is. A delightful dish.’

The major exception to Britain's complete disappearance from Indian society is of course the English language. The English spoken in India is its own animal, with all kinds of strange and unusual pleasures awaiting those who are unfamiliar with it. Its status as a lingua franca means that the fluency of some users is not high, and many of the ensuing idiosyncrasies, along with influences from Indian languages, have made their way into the standard idiom. 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. Dalrymple offers up this obituary from the Hindustani Times as a minor classic of the genre:

SAD DEMISE

With profound grief we have to condole the untimely passing of our beloved general manager MISTER DEEPAK MEHTA, thirty four years, who left us for heavenly abode in tragic circumstances (beaten to death with bedpost). Condole presented by bereft of Mehta Agencies (Private) Limited.


Perhaps the most impressive parts of the book, though, are the result of more intensive research that takes Dalrymple out of the library and into the streets. In particular his long, delicate attempts to get first-hand interviews and experience with Delhi's hijra community – representing a kind of fusion of transgender identity with India's eunuch tradition – are amazing, and result in some remarkable testimony from within a very closed and secretive subculture.

‘I started to wear women's clothes and to put on makeup. The following year I was taken to a village in the Punjab. I was dosed with opium and a string was tied around my equipment. Then the whole lot was cut off. I knew it would be very painful and dangerous, but I got cut so that no one would taunt me any more. After I was cut all my male blood flowed away and with it went my manhood. Before I was neither one thing nor the other. Now I am a hijra. I am not man or woman. I am from a different sex.’


My only real concern is that so much of this must now be out of date; comments about how the roads are ‘becoming clogged’ (ha! I actually read this page while sitting in an afternoon-long traffic jam that was nose-to-tail cars, buses, pedestrians and cattle) are a reminder that 1993 is a long time ago for a city changing as fast as Delhi is. But overall there is so much to enjoy here, such a wealth of great material so well tied together, and motivated by a palpable love of the city, that despite its age it's still the first book many Delhi-wallahs recommend for anyone visiting this City of Djinns for the first time.

(Dec 2014)
Profile Image for Riku Sayuj.
658 reviews7,255 followers
November 12, 2014

City of Djinns: The Reader’s Journey

I started reading The White Mughals sometime in an auto in Lucknow, in 2011. I still remember reading enchantedly of Old Delhi while sitting stuffed inside a crammed  "share-auto", dodging the remains of an equally old Lucknow (and close to the pre-Shah Jahani capital, of Agra). I remember missing my stop. I don’t remember when I left off reading it.

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.

I then picked up White Mughals again, flipped it around and got the mistaken impression that it must have been set after The Last Mughal. I have no way of explaining how that logic worked, but, it probably went something like this - only after the ‘Last Mughal’ could ‘White’ Mughals come into the story. Right? Brilliant as usual, of course.

Anyway, I started The Last Mughal and Dalrymple kept talking to me as if we were in the middle of a conversation. This disconcerted me until he let slip that he had been talking to me of this subject since The White Mughal. So I immediately went back to that.

Where he informed me that he had initiated the conversation way back in The City of Djinns. This book was the least alluring - ancient Delhi was more fascinating to me than contemporary travel writing.

But I decided to humor Dalrymple and started with CoD, if for nothing else but to trace the evolution of an obsession that gave us such great works later. Not a bad decision. But I am sure the next two in his ‘tetralogy’ are much greater delights - I should know, I have read more than a bit of both.


City of Djinns: The Writer’s Journey

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.

The reader should keep in mind that this is early in Dalrymple’s own love affair with Medieval India. What it lacks in insight, it makes up for in enthusiasm. A brisk and breezy Dalrymple is on display instead of the magisterial one we have come to expect. Also, the spirit of imperial fascination and the tendency to view the fall of Delhi as due to “decay” exists in these pages. Need to see if Dalrymple moves beyond that impression of decay in his later more mature works.

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]


Two recurring themes:

1. A simple technique of transposition of place and time - Dalrymple first talks of a place that he himself is visiting and then effortlessly takes us back centuries to show what momentous events were transpiring in that same now innocuous piece of land… exposing the grand history in which daily life of great cities are lived.

2. Great Beauty and grandeur hidden amidst everyday squalor - a city that is as fine as the very greatest cities, yet living in the most prosaic manner, with hardly a nod to its own history. A closer look is all it takes in Delhi to be transported back into a distant century. It took a Dalrymple to take that look. And it transformed both the city and the author. [ Refer Footnote #1 ]


Step 1: Independence & Partition

[The easiest reference point for any historian of India. Dalrymple does not duck this one either.]

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.

Living with a Punjabi family and mixing with Muslim families throws D on an early scent. He follows this contradistinction between the communities and arrives at the answer that partition is what made today’s delhi a city of contradictions.

He asserts early in the book:

The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.

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.

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.

Soon however, D abandons the idea that this story explains Delhi.

Thus, he discovers that:

New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number.

The next step was to go even further back.

Peel back one more layer.


Step 2: The Imperial Past / The Raj: Digging up The Elephant in the City 

Multiple strands:

- the vast Lutyens’ architecture

- the inhuman scale

- the adaptations from Mughals

- 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)

- the exploration of the ‘sub-delhis’, the imperial summer outposts of Kashmir and Shimla.

Excerpt:

Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: ‘Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,’ he writes in one letter. ‘It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.’ At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that ‘some of the work is lovely’, but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.

In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? 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.

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.


By now the pattern should be apparent to the reader. It even appears doubtful if the story of the gradual discovery of delhi’s antique mysteries is authentic. In any case, D follows the charade of another surprise discovery that Delhi is much older and needs to be peeled back even more.

Moreover the city - so I soon discovered - possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. 

Time for another peel, obviously.


Step 3: The Long Twilight

Thus, D soon comes up with another key to Delhi: the Twilight. This time he is closer to the mark - much of modern Delhi is an outgrowth or a reaction to this period’s history and architecture. First by the Britishers and then by the Leaders of Independent India.

The Twilight, as defined by D, is bounded by two of the greatest disasters in Delhi’s history: the Persian massacres of 1739 and the equally vicious hangings and killings which followed the British recapture of Delhi after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

If we extend this and add the next great disaster, modern Delhi would appear to take shape, even though D does this in reverse, it is easy for the reader to do the mental jugglery.

But having come this far, D could not stop. He had to dig deeper. How could a history of Delhi be complete without talking of Mahabharata??

Especially when every section is marked by an elephant - a tribute to Hastinapura of old?


Step 4: The Epic Past

Unfortunately, Delhi’s history fades away quickly into legend past the ‘twilight’. Except for eulogies, not much is known of the leaders such as Prithviraj Chauhan.

It soon became clear that trying to disentangle the history of pre-Muslim Delhi was like penetrating deeper and deeper into a midsummer dust storm: the larger landmarks stood out, but the details were all obliterated.

And then, quite suddenly, on the very edge of the dark abyss of prehistory, ancient Delhi is dramatically spotlit, as if by the last rays of a dying sun. The light is shed by the text of the greatest piece of literature ever to have come out of the Indian subcontinent: the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

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.


Step 0: Tracing a City: The Present 

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.

To D, Delhi is unique. This is why the historical, architectural and archeological approach was inevitable. For, this uniqueness is due to the fact that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. 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. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Mogul. The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined as stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

As they drove up the Ring Road, the motorway which for much of its length follows the old course of the Jumna. Driving up the dry riverbed was like looking at a section of Professor Lal’s stratigraphy: on the way we drove through millennia of Delhi’s history, the detritus of city after city spaced out on the old river bank. Leaving Lutyens’s broad twentieth-century avenues we passed by the Purana Qila, the early Mughal addition to Delhi’s bastions; after that we passed the shattered domes of Feroz Shah Kotla; then the magnificent walls of the Red Fort with their great ribbed chattris; and finally we drove under the walls of Salimgarh, the old Bastille of Delhi. Passing beyond all of these, we headed up towards the site of William Fraser’s first house. And then on to the Sufi mystic villages on the outskirts. A journey into the past.


The book’s final message:

There is still continuity here, a few surviving traditions, some lingering beauty, but you have to look quite hard to find it.







A Necessary Footnote [#1]  :

On the complete neglect of the mighty past, of the structures, of traditions, etc. Also a major face slap for ASI as D traces out one major monument after another in complete disrepair and neglect. Indeed, even of a nation that is too busy to look back on past glories and s busy building a shiny, plasticky future.

****

Today the passages are only blocked with a small plug of concrete; it should not be difficult to remove that plug and investigate what lies beyond. The problem would be to motivate India’s impoverished and bureaucratic Archaeological Survey to take an interest in the matter. As Mr Prashad explained when we were leaving: ‘You see actually in India today no one is thinking too much about these old historical places. India is a developing country. Our people are looking to the future only.’

****

The streets here are narrow and full of goats being fattened for Bakri Id. Pack-donkeys trot past carrying saddlebags full of rubble. As you pass into the Sita Ram bazaar and take in the grand old gateways tumbling down on either side of you, you begin to realize what has happened here. The same walls that now form the rickety paan shops and dirty godowns once supported sprawling mansions and the lovely Delhi courtyard houses known as havelis. You can see it for yourself: the slum was once a city of palaces.

****

In Shahjehanabad the town houses were so planned that a plain façade, decorated only with an elaborate gatehouse, would pass into a courtyard; off this courtyard would lead small pleasure gardens, the zenanas (harems), a guardhouse or a miniature mosque, the haveli library and the customary shish mahal or glass palace. The haveli was a world within a world, self-contained and totally hidden from the view of the casual passer-by. Now, however, while many of the great gatehouses survive, they are hollow fanfares announcing nothing. You pass through a great arch and find yourself in a rubble-filled car-park where once irrigation runnels bubbled. The shish mahals are unrecognizable, partitioned up into small factories and workshops; metal shutters turn zenana screens into locked store rooms; the gardens have disappeared under concrete. Only the odd arcade of pillars or a half-buried fragment of finely-carved late Mughal ornament indicates what once existed here.
Profile Image for Kalliope.
691 reviews22 followers
May 21, 2013
This is the perfect read when visiting Delhi.

Written by a Brit, this book is the result of a one year stay in Delhi. It reads as a mixture of memoir, travelogue, history, religion, and myth book.

Its nicest charm is that it conveys, sweetly, the author’s absolute love for the country. The understanding with which he presents his stories becomes contagious and after this relatively short read one feels immersed into the magic and mysteries of India.

I read it while visiting a friend who was also spending one year in India as a Fulbright scholar. She was sharing an apartment in South of Delhi with other Fulbrighters, and that apartment had become as a kind of warm and welcoming consulate-refugee camp for any friend or friend of friends going through India. I was one of those migrants.

In that apartment Dalrymple’s book figured prominently. It was the companion and welcoming read for anybody knocking at the door.
Profile Image for Daren.
1,391 reviews4,440 followers
March 22, 2024
As a 25 year-old, Dalrymple and his wife Olivia set themselves up in Delhi to live. This book is the result of their first year. Published in 1993, their time in Delhi was in the early 90s.

The reader is offered up continuity with their landlord, Mrs Puri and favourite taxi driver Balvinder Singh.
... Mr Singh is a kshatriya by caste, a warrior, and like his ancestors he is keen to show that his is afraid of nothing. He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxton his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing 'chicken' with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.
Dalrymple explains his everyday life, and what outings he goes on, and people he meets and interacts with. These interactions lead to the historical context he provides woven through each interaction.

These cover a multitude of histories of Delhi, from the Partition to the architecture of Lutyens; from Eunuchs to partridge fighting. He researches one of the early East India Company agents, William Fraser, who proves to be a relative of Olivia! The family events of Shah Jehan takes up a larger proportion than most of the stories, but all are equally interesting and well framed in the things Darlymple is seeing and doing. Ibn Battuta, the 14th century scholar and traveller spent seven years in India, and again Darlymple drills into this fairly heavily, along with the Mahabharata, which he looks to determine what truths it is based on.

Dalrymple attends a Hindu wedding, he meets with Anglo-Indians (disdained by the British and the Indians); he visits old Mughal gardens..... but the two major arcs in his history are the Partition and the end of Mughal empire. Because the Partition occurred in the living memory of many of Delhi's citizens, Dalrymple is able to find stories first hand. For the Mughal empire he is more reliant on books and academic historians. In Dr Jaffrey he finds a historian and a spiritual advisor (whether Dalrymple wants it or not), and he joins Mrs Puri and Balvinder Singh as recurring factors in the narrative (and all the much richer the narrative is for them). However Dr Jaffrey had his own Partition story to share.
'...During the Partition [his parents] went into hiding, and for a fortnight their good Hindu friends brought them food and water. But one day they were betrayed; a mob came in the night and burned the house down. We learned later that the traitor was a neighbour of my father's. My father had helped him financially. This was how the man repaid him...' Dr Jaffrey shook his head. 'In this city,' he said, ' culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It does not take much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed.'
The authors curiosity and passion for Delhi are obvious to the reader, which makes this book all the more enjoyable. If I was to be ultra picky in order to find something to be critical about, the last third of the book becomes more history heavy. In the narrative, Dalyrmple mentioned that after 11 months they have booked tickets home at the end of the month, but that he must finish the research on Delhi's deepest history before he leaves. The book seems to carry that momentum towards the end.

I awarded it a fairly arbitrary four stars as I had read it pre-Goodreads (most got 3 stars, unless they were memorably good). This rating stands for the second reading - although I would extend it to 4.5 stars, rounded down. I am pleased to have re-read this and done it the justice of a review.
Profile Image for Caroline.
518 reviews666 followers
November 24, 2015
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.

It is an utter delight from beginning to end. A smorgasbord of historical people and places, myths and facts, festivals and parties, pilgrimages and ancient texts. It is also full of touching examples of everyday life - as Dalrymple explores with a kindly eye, the nooks and crannies of Delhi and its people.

The scope of the book is incredible, but his skills as a writer are so brilliant that you just float effortlessly from theme to theme, carried on a cloud of warmth and humour. The book covers an amazing spectrum though, and of course different bits of it will appeal more or less to different people. Even so, it is all hugely readable.

Herewith just a few of the things that I found particularly interesting, or which gave me great pleasure. A taster of just a few of the book's delights....

1) His interactions with his eccentric and very funny landlady, Mrs Puri.

2) The kindness of the people of Delhi

3) 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.

4) He says that the influence of the British has almost completely disappeared, and the Indians regard their stay in India much as the British regard the stay of the Romans in Britain.

5) Hinglish - English as spoken in India. It has changed drastically in the last century.

6) Lutyens architecture in Delhi, and his racial prejudice against Indians.

7) Partridge fighting, which is still popular :O(

8) The role of poets, who were much lauded in past centuries.

9) Anglo-Indians, and the hardships they experienced when the British left India.

10) Eunachs, or 'hijra'. Dalrymple befriends a hijra group in Delhi, and gives us some fascinating insights into this small but interesting group of people.

11) 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.

12) Dalrympe gives an interesting description of a Hindu wedding.

13) 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.

14) The pigeon fanciers of Delhi.

15) An interview with the Crown Princess - the last in line of the Mughals who founded Delhi. (See comment 14 for more info.)

16) Tales of the wicked Sultan, Muhammed bin Tughluk.

17) The Hauz Khas Medresse.

18) The heat (an example of Dalrymple's marvellous writing, and a description of Delhi's unbelievable heat in summer)

I cannot recommend this book highly enough....and I cannot recommend it to enough people. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't love it.

As I read it, the old second-hand copy I was reading started disintegrating. Pages kept falling out, and as I read I was madly sellotaping them back into the book. In the end there was a great big flurry of loose pages, and a big chunk fell out. I felt such a sense of loss. Sadness that even one copy of this magnificent book would have to be thrown away... What a fabulous read.





Profile Image for Hana.
522 reviews344 followers
March 27, 2016
“Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number. But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too…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.”



A mystic explains to William Dalrymple that Delhi is a city of djinns. Delhi was destined to appear in a new incarnation century after century because the djinns loved Delhi so much they could never bear to see it empty or deserted. Delhi is a city haunted by djinns. “You could not see them, said Sadr-ud-Din, but if you concentrated you would be able to feel them: to hear their whisperings, or even, if you were lucky, to sense their warm breath on your face.”

Newly married, William Dalrymple and his wife, the artist Olivia Fraser, move to the Sufi neighborhood of Nizamuddin in New Delhi and set out to explore their adopted city. They arrive in the City of Djinns in September of 1989. Their landlady, the formidable Mrs Puri and her husband are, like so many others in Delhi, refugees of the Partition, Sikhs expelled from their home in Lahore during the upheavals of 1947. The terrors of those times have left Mr Puri flitting in and out of madness, but Mrs Puri has rebuilt the family’s life and fortune with discipline and iron determination.

The Puris are the first of many vividly drawn characters who inhabit this city of djinns. The first veils of history that Dalrymple must part to understand the city and hear the whispers of the past are the veils hiding memories of the Great Partition that tore India apart at the very moment of her birth as an independent nation.



In layer after ancient layer; story after story, Dalrymple lets us hear the murmuring of the djinns and the voices of Delhi’s many peoples. Roughly organized by season, we live through the Delhi calendar, celebrating Diwali and Ramadan. We freeze in the grey cold of the winter, delight in Delhi’s brief glorious spring and endure the scorching heat of summer. Dalrymple’s stories carry us slowly back through time. Sometimes prompted by a conversation, at other times by the discovery of yet another ancient building crumbling into dust, we journey to the British Imperial India of Lutyens; to the early days of the East India Company; to the waning decades and tragic end of the Mughal Empire in 1857; to the Golden Age of Shah Jahan; and far, far back to the Tughluk dynasty that ruled nearly all of India from Delhi in the 14th century. In the final chapter, Dalrymple explores the historical roots of the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and speculates on its links to the most ancient excavations in the Punjab.

But this is no dry, depressing history. Dalryple’s stories are enlivened by his wife Olivia’s watercolors and by Dalrymple’s ear for language, his keen, appreciative sense of humor and his deep fondness for humans with all their foibles. He salutes his driver, Mr Balvinder Singh from International Backside Taxi as “son of Punjab Singh, Prince of Taxi Drivers...” A warrior by cast and inclination, Mr Balvinder Singh disdains “such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ’chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.” One month after Dalrymple’s arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh careened his Ambassador into the back of “a Maruti van which bled Mango Frooty Drink all over Mr Singh��s bonnet. No one was hurt, and Mr Singh—strangely elated by his ‘kill’—took it stoically. ‘Mr William,’ he said. ‘In my life six times have I crashed. And on not one occasion have I ever been killed.’”



City of Djinns is only Dalrymple’s second book. He had not fully mastered his art and the book at times feels disorganized and unbalanced. I longed for a chronology of Indian history and the many Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Hindi terms are sometimes translated and sometimes left for us to Google or guess. Dalrymple’s later outings, including the superb White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India and The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, explore India’s history with greater depth and scholarly assurance. Those who love fine travel writing and appreciate religious studies should sample From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East, which has a special poignancy now that world of Dalrymple’s pilgrimage has been destroyed. Still, Dalrymple’s many fans as well as lovers of all things Indian should not miss City of Djinns; it is an atmospheric classic and almost as wondrous as being in Delhi yourself. Three and a half stars.

Content rating PG for occasional gruesome, gritty details, comments on Delhi's red light districts and a section on the hijra transgender community.
Profile Image for Tanya Sharma.
12 reviews13 followers
March 8, 2023
Colonial nostalgia and exoticism is STRONG in this famed account of Delhi. The author's fluid style is a veneer for the ideology underneath. I do not blame the author for writing with the lens of colonial nostalgia; I am simply identifying that he is clearly pandering to audiences the likes of which revel in the "glory" of the Empire. In the introduction itself (2017 edition), WD mentions how CoD is his first best-selling book in India. I think he was as surprised by this outcome as I am; since serious readers of Indian history and/ or readers aware of post-colonial paradigms will be thoroughly disappointed.

WD knew the story he wanted to tell about Delhi since his first backpacking trip onward. He has subsequently constructed it: a city where multiple eras, languages, and cultures co-exist, but ultimately a crumbling city – a broken dream, as it is for a colonial power whose time has passed. The attention to Britons living in India before/ after Independence is quite exhaustive. While they were clearly important in shaping the city/ country during their reign, the attention is not so much for historical purposes as it is to build the narrative of a broken (colonial) dream. These characters are described in excruciating detail and attributed backstories such as leaving for the colonies due to poverty and looking for home (Scottish Borders etc.) in Kashmir's landscape.

I do not contest the veracity of these accounts; however, these selective narratives are contrasted with the author denying Mughal/ pre-Mughal/ and even current inhabitants their humanity. For example, the author incessantly looks down upon the Punjabi refugees who have taken shelter in Delhi since Partition. They are presented as carriers of inferior culture (compared with old Delhi-wallahs). Similarly, accounts are chosen to reflect the mismanagement of the city almost always in contrast with British times (where there was law and order, "no monkeys", etc.). In a striking personal account, when the housemaid Murti does not dust WD's room and Mrs. Puri points out that WD/ Olivia do not know how to manage her, Olivia is shown to contest her on grounds like "Oh but Murti doesn't like dusting...". Thus, Olivia becomes an image of British humanity and equality, whereas Mrs. Puri becomes an exploitative Indian house maker.

So far, I have only focussed on what the author has presented. What he has missed is more appalling. There is no mention of the British role in the Partition, poverty or institutions existing as they are today, or any discussion around how much intellectual wealth was looted by the British even when the occasion arises. When the Mirza-nama is found in a "private library", WD simply brushes past, but such a casual admission unsettles anyone with a sense of historical justice. An opportunity to discuss the same is sadly, lost.

Most strikingly absent, however, is any REFLECTION about the author's power and privilege in Indian society. This grave omission surfaces in many instances: how this man can walk about all of Delhi with what I would go so far as to call special access. When a house staff member invites him to the wedding and not another long-term colleague from the house staff, WD completely misses the social dynamics (of inviting/ having a white person at a wedding). Instead, he is busy impressing people at the wedding with his Hindi and poorly translating the Devi Lal slogan (read: there is no "Fall" in Haryana...).

Now coming to history and architecture itself: I have picked problematic ideological errors. First of all, WD sees Hinduism and Islam as dualities which is a historic narrative that the British have immensely benefitted from. He sees Hinduism as a religion of the land, best kept around rivers and forests, and Islam as an "urban" religion (pg. 235). Such a claim is a grave misreading of history. Any amateur reader of history can undermine this "feeling" by pointing out that Islam was born in the desert and showing the author the urbane architectural behemoths commissioned by Hindu kingdoms (e.g. the surviving ones in the South).

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.

I have presented some examples that demonstrate my objections with the book. Why bother critiquing it? Why read it at all? To understand how global politics embeds in travel writing. My hope is that Indian readers will not internalize these biases and Western readers will recognize the problems with the writing and challenge their travel writers to present whole and lively accounts as well as shed light on the responsibility they have for closure re. colonialism.
Profile Image for Sudhakar Gupta.
52 reviews12 followers
March 20, 2012
I'm not sure if I can call myself a Delhi-walla after reading City of Djinns. Despite living in Delhi for the past 17 years, I had not known most of the sites mentioned, except on a superficial level.

Delhi today is completely unrecognizable from the beautiful city that it once was. Dalrymple successfully manages to bring to life that old Delhi with all its charms and customs. He employs a rather unusual method, that of going through the history in a reverse chronological order.

Thus we start in Indira Gandhi's Delhi, taking part in the riots of 1984, and move back to the Partition in 1947, the birth of Lutyens' Delhi, the Siege of 1857, construction of Shahjehanabad and all the way back to the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan at the hands of Muhammahad of Ghor before ending at the ancient epic of Mahabharata.

The author adds another dimension to these stories and makes them much more interesting by introducing some modern day aspect, say an existing but long forgotten ruin or a living person who is directly related. We get to meet Dr Jaffrey who serves as an expert on Purani Dilli, the Haxby sisters who tell us about the unfortunate Anglo Indians, and a visit to an Office of the Railways Board reveals a tykhana built for William Fraser.

One thing that I loved about this book is how Dalrymple interspersed the story with his daily life experiences. How he deals with the shrewd Punjabi landlady Mrs Puri, or the refreshingly funny stories with his cab driver Balvinder Singh, amidst the noisy, heavily populated, sweltering hot Delhi, turn this into a book a reader can relate to, rather than just another bland volume of history.

To a reader, a travel enthusiast and a history buff, I highly recommend City of Djinns for the delightful book that it is, and to a Delhi-walla, for getting to know his Dilli better.
Profile Image for Chandana Kuruganty.
202 reviews59 followers
June 18, 2021
It took me a good month to get around to completing the book and it was a long journey through the annals of history surrounding the city of Delhi, which was absolutely stunning.

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.
Also, Darlymple's writing style ensures we travel along with him in his journey of demystifying the city of Delhi from eyes of an outsider trying to put together pieces of its central position from Modern India to Ancient Indian History. (In that specific order)

What did not work for me- the architectural descriptions of monuments which fills up pages ( for a 21st century reader, a simple image search gives you an easier understanding on facades or jaalis of Indo-Islamic Architecture) and I enjoyed the second half of the book more than the first half which goes into excessive details on William Frazer that doesn't have too much to do with Delhi's history.

Overall, this is a must read for history buffs for its people-centric narration, good illustrations and for bringing out lesser known facts surrounding historical places in Delhi.
Profile Image for Nishu Thakur.
110 reviews
January 15, 2021
Dalrymple, in his book “Delhi: City of Djinns” made his predilections very clear. He believed that Delhi’s glory days were when it was allegedly a centre of Muslim culture (and, in his view, its essence was still best preserved in that culture) while the “Punjabi refugees” (Hindus) had debased Delhi through their allegedly loud and money-minded attitudes. These biases are evident in this book.
Profile Image for Jim.
2,174 reviews715 followers
March 25, 2010
I first heard about this book as a result of searching eBay for the works of the Scottish writer and poet George Mackay Brown, whose works I collect. I kept running into William Dalrymple's City of Djinns, which Brown is quoted in the accompanying squibs as saying it was his favorite travel book.

Brown was only half right. It is both a travel book and a history at the same time. Under the guise of describing a year in Delhi, Dalrymple also goes back into the history of Delhi, ranging from even before the days of the Mahabharata, India's great national epic which is about as old as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, all the way to the present day. Included are several fascinating chapters about the Mughal rulers, including Tunghkul, Shah Jehan, and Aurangzeb. As well, there are fascinating stories of British rule and the Partition that marked the birth of a free India and Pakistan.

This is a marvelous work to luxuriate over and enjoy at a slow pace. Also, I suspect that even as Brown's quote led me here, Dalrymple will lead me to more fascinating books. Life is a knowledge quest.

Profile Image for Siddharth Sharma.
13 reviews11 followers
January 19, 2013
William Dalrymple embarks upon a journey to unravel the history of Delhi, thus providing the reader with historical perspectives behind various parts of the city- a city which, as a Persian proverb goes, is destined to be lost by whoever who builds it. Set upon a period of a year of his stay in the capital, the narration opens up beautiful aspects of Delhi, including architectures erected in the Mughal phase (Humayun Fort, the Red Fort...), the Tughlaq phase, the British Raj; even dating back to the times of the epic poem 'Mahabharata' which has helped to bear testimony to the existence of this city even thousands of years before Christ.

He has extensively studied the accounts of various travelers who wrote about the then society, the state of music and art, the clandestine diplomacy inside the courtrooms, etc. etc. Based upon the letters that they wrote back home, various British civil servants like Metcalf, Lutyens, Fraser, have been pictured and their distinct approaches towards India and Indians has been well illustrated. At one point, he beautifully concludes a discussion on how the architecturally exquisite constructions of British time, are also tragic reminders of Lutyen's condescension and his broad dislike for everything Indian...

"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"

And about Fraser, who acquired the Indian traditions & customs and mixed enthusiastically with the common gentry, Dalrymple quotes Jacquemont's memoirs...

<>"He is a thinker who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas, which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land."

Throughout the book, he has had a parallel attention towards the people of Delhi...

"The more I read, the more it becomes clear that the events of 1947 (referring to partition) were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city's central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture"

In an attempt to excavate the background of Delhi, beginning from the modern history and receding behind till as far as 2000 BC, he has composed a great mix of travel writing and history.
Profile Image for Sashwati Sanyal.
1 review2 followers
September 12, 2007
This is the first of William Dalrymple that i am reading. Having being pushed into it via heavy recommendations, must say that WD fails to inspire.

The book starts with a lot of promise but takes a meandering tone halfway through the narration. Delhi's intriguing past is a delicious topic that more than simply nudges your curiosity but WD is yet to bite a fulsome piece into it.

Here's hoping that the latter half would live upto expectations!
Profile Image for MVV.
81 reviews35 followers
June 21, 2019
Let's begin with disclaimers, they seem to do good. Here it goes: I found a lot of merits within the book to write home about, as I proceed to do below. It's just that I didn't enjoy it a whole lot nonetheless, due to reasons again enlisted below. As always, the rating, that superficial device, reflects how much I enjoyed the work rather than being any attempt to judge intrinsic value for that'd be plainly wrong and extremely misguided.

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.

I didn't enjoy it, though, because this is a far more effective text for non-natives (and that was perhaps the point anyway) than it is for someone like I, who has heard and read multiple iterations of most stories, historical snatches, myths and so on which are presented here in miniscule. Of course, that I have little interest in these matters now, or that whatever asides he takes (like going up to the hills to talk to the residual Anglo-Indians) are, according to me, needless and accord more importance to the old colonisers than they deserve now and in a way makes a 1947 a bit of grand tragedy for them, for they feel so in their stories which are given a space in this book. Oh, and one more thing. I find it troublesome when a purported chronicle of a city focuses so single-minded on so-called glories/gories of the past. The present, the bold and the new forms it boasts of, deserves its space and its own narrative for this place that I've inhabited for 23 years no is as much its present, shyly globalised self and maybe more so for all its hunger to change quickly, than it is about its dreamy past and I think that the former deserves talking about as well and not just the incessant waffling about the 'golden olden' times we hear about so frequently, as we do herein, too.

There you have it, then. A well-crafted and well-planned book done with, dare I say, more heart than most locals' attempts (if any) at something of this sort but for a reader (and well-informed local) like me, it adds not much and seems a bit extra and forced, full of a lot of the exoticising gaze of the West when it casts its eye towards the East.
Profile Image for Vik.
292 reviews358 followers
June 14, 2014
William Dalrymple is the best travel writer(only exception is V.S.Naipaul)

"In Delhi, right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle", shows he wrote the book with exceptional observation.

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.

"Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes", Second rate filthy expression of Mr Singh(his driver), reflects his playfulness and fearless humor.

I would like to end the review with a delicious sense of irony. Just as Olivia (his wife) upon arrival of morning chai as a gesture from Mrs Puri(their landlord)said, "I wish she had sent it up two hours later". I also wish this book had not finished for another two hours :)




Profile Image for russell barnes.
464 reviews20 followers
June 24, 2007
Despite William Dalrymple's deeply upsetting background of being posh, and having wealthy relatives allowing him to potter around ancient castles in Scotland and seemingly taking random years off without having to work, it's a pretty inspiring read.

There's more to Dehli than curry and he picks it apart to reveal the fascinating, multi-layered history beneath the stereotypical surface.

It made me want to seek out the two Eighteenth Century books he used as a guide to learn more. And not only that, who knew Cliff Richard was an Anglo-Indian?

Miss Lucy Ferguson, a top recommendation - I salute you!
Profile Image for Heather.
728 reviews18 followers
July 16, 2014
(Really somewhere between two and three stars for me.)

One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin's wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It's not a fair comparison, really: both books include travel in India, and both feature art by the author's spouse, but Shopsin's book is more personal, while Dalrymple's book has more history in it. I found Dalyrmple's mix of travel/memoir and history sometimes appealing, and sometimes not: I sometimes wanted to be reading just a memoir, or just a history book.

Dalrymple tells the story of Delhi, or rather, of many Delhis, in two strands: he writes about his time there chronologically, but writes about the city's history in reverse chronological order, from Partition back through the mythic past of the Mahabharata. He writes about Delhi as "a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic" (9). And the Delhi of the present (this book was published in the early 1990s) is multiple, complex: "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" (7-8).

I liked the humor of Dalrymple's Delhi experiences: his landlady who turns off the water because of too many toilet flushes, the customs officer who won't let him leave the country on a five-day trip without bringing the electric kettle, printer, computer, and boom box he brought to India to the airport, the cab driver who always points out pretty women.

And I like the nostalgic or lyrical bits, like this conversation with an author born in Delhi but living in Pakistan:
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)


Or like this passage about Delhi after the winter rains:
That February, Delhi seemed like a paradise. Olivia and I filled the garden on our roof terraces with palms and lilies and hollyhocks and we wove bougainvillaea through the trellising. The plants which seemed to have died during the winter's cold – the snapdragon, the hibiscus and the frangipani – miraculously sprang back to life and back into bloom. The smells began to change. The woodsmoke and the sweet smell of the dung fires gave way to the heady scent of Indian champa and the first bittersweet whiffs of China orange blossom. (200)


Olivia Fraser's watercolors of people and buildings, which illustrate the book, are sometimes really satisfying: I especially love a pair of turbaned Sikhs reading (p 26) and a pair of boys on a roof with their pigeons (p 226).
Profile Image for Udit Tyagi.
23 reviews2 followers
March 18, 2018
My first experience of reading a William Dalrymple was with White Mughals when I was in class nine. Until then, although I had always enjoyed reading History as part of the school curriculum, I hadn’t cared to venture into it any further outside of my textbooks. White Mughals turned out to be sad, breathtaking, challenging (I was a kid) and extremely memorable. I finally started to look for books which fell outside the broader fiction genre.

City of Djinns was written almost a decade before White Mughals. While WD is yet to achieve the refined writing he does in his later books, he is clearly on the way. CoD has a fresh, unabashedly opinionated (but never cruel) and passionate feel to it. It’s witty and thoroughly engaging. Read CoD for the fascinating amalgamation of experiences, discoveries, peoples, cultures, histories, and stories. It will make you long to explore the ancient, delightful city of Delhi. It’s certainly on my to do list for 2018.
Profile Image for Laura.
776 reviews32 followers
October 26, 2007
This was the wrong book to read prior to my trip to India. All of the fantastic stories that the author relates seem to end with, "these wonderful sights/monuments/environments/people have all been completely destroyed, and nothing is left except worthless ruins". He makes Delhi seem like a wasteland, all the more disgusting and pathetic in light of its former splendor. The only positive of this book is that the stories he relates are interesting. In short, this book was a major downer.
Profile Image for Raghu.
407 reviews77 followers
January 13, 2011

'City of Djinns: a year in Delhi" is probably the finest book on the city of Delhi covering mostly its recent history of 400 years. It is lovingly and passionately researched and is embellished with endearing encounters. The author spends a whole year in Delhi in 1989 and researches for four more years to produce this gem of a book. It was of particular interest to me as I lived in Delhi for five years in the mid- 1970s. This book teaches me how little I knew of the city and its history. The author was just 25 years old in 1989 and shows what a scholar and culturally-sensitive person he was, especially coming from as foreign a culture as that of Scotland. He talks about the many Delhis that exist and has existed in the past.
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.
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!
The book examines the legacy of the many living Sufi legends such as Hazrat Nizamuddin, Khwaja Khizr and Moin-ud-din-Chishti and shows the strength of the syncretic culture of India. The author shows us the diversity of Delhi through his meetings with Unani medicine practitioners, pigeon-fanciers, the eunuchs of the city, traditional calligraphers and other religious healers. The lighter side is seen through his Sikh landlady Mrs.Puri and her husband and Dalrymple's favored taxi-driver Balvinder Singh of the International Backside Taxis!
This is at once a travel book, a book on Delhi's history, the diary of an young, erudite man as well as an account of a pilgrimage. It is simply a brilliant work.
Profile Image for Travelin.
468 reviews44 followers
November 29, 2016
I FINALLY finished this, just so I wouldn't have to carry it to another strange Balkan country. Such high hopes dashed again. I really feel like Dalrymple is some kind of hermaphrodite, who can't decide if he's proudly English or proudly Scottish/English, but he does spend the first part of the book ridiculing Indians who still think they're English, then 10 full days more trying to meet the city's eunuchs, so I guess that excuses his broad apologia for a Scottish governor and empire builder who allegedly embraced native culture by refusing to wear shoes and taking a harem of his own. I guess it helps his case that Dalrymple's wife is related to him.

Here's a note I wrote last night:
I was almost ready to excuse his youth when he wrote this (24?), but the closest he comes to a Cambridge don is Don Corleone, aping a kind of monkey in his back yard until he suddenly collapses from the sensuality of the orange fruits.

Here's what I wrote months ago:
My God, I just saw Dalrymple interviewed on a dodgy History channel documentary! The documentary is hosted by a woman whose Muslim grandparents never trusted Ghandi, and wouldn't you know Dalrymple agrees. What's so weird, aside from his alleged expertise, is that he shows up on camera seated in a lotus position, with bare feet, answering in a candence so Indian I had to be certain it was him doing the talking. What a show.

All in all, the book is superficial and trivial, with a bizarre and badly explicated focus on the geography of ancient sites which is only slightly ameliorated by his wife's illustrator-quality drawings. Like any book of this size, especially one about such an ancient and interesting topic, it has its valuable excerpts, which I'll try to share before dumping the book. It's just exceedingly strange that the ancient excerpts his text so often depends on are so often so exceedingly tedious.
Profile Image for Abhishek.
45 reviews3 followers
August 23, 2016
This book is an encyclopaedia for all common Dilliwalas and any Indian even slightly interested in knowing about Delhi and ancient India. This is what you can call ‘The Discovery of Delhi.’ Partly a travelogue, partly a history book and overall a pleasurable book. Dalrymple provides information not usually found in school history. He starts describing Delhi right from her very birth and the saga continues till the modern times. It is most fascinating when Dalrymple describes an ancient monument or place and then visits it in person to observe what it looks like. History comes alive then. He lives no stone unturned in uncovering Delhi. Not only it's about buildings and monuments, it's about people too. He describes the lives of the people in times of Shah Jahan and in times of early British rule. He presents excerpts of various journals, historical documents also. He gets in touch with the descendants of the Mughals and interviews them. He even interviews two British ladies in Shimla who stayed back when the British left India.

He describes Delhi’s cold (Dilli ki Sardi) and her heat too with brutal honesty. The stories go as far back as the Mahabharata. The subtle nuances of the people of Delhi, especially his landlord, landlady and the taxi driver are beautifully portrayed. He even visits Pakistan to interview Ahemd Ali, the famous writer of ‘Twilight in Delhi.’

This book clearly depicts Dalrymple’s love for India and it's people and their history (as does his books Nine Lives, The Age of Kali, The Last Mughal, The White Mughals etc). This gives and unbiased view of Delhi, what she was, is and has always been. This book changed my perspective and literally made me fall in love with the city (all over again).
Profile Image for Sean.
190 reviews26 followers
April 15, 2018
“City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple was one of my first introduction to Delhi. It gives you a portrait of a city with layers upon layers of history with hidden pockets of a past much more interesting than its present. Sadly, the city of Delhi that Dalrymple experience in the early 1990s no longer exists except in pockets. The city has grown exponentially and become much more polluted. It sprawls and does not feel like it has a center. But the book is useful as a portrait of a Westerner who came to India and discovered a hidden world of a culture and society that has disappeared amid the violent cataclysms of the 19th and 20th centuries. What makes this book (Dalrymple’s second) so interesting is that one can see the seeds of most of the subsequent works in the stories he recounts.

The main criticism I have of the book is that I feel Dalrymple seems to not only admire the glittering past of pre-partition Delhi, but he also portrays contemporary Delhi in a less-than-flattering light: a city dislocated and lost to itself. While I think that, for the most part, his analysis is good, one can accuse him of nostalgia for a past (that may or may not exist). As I have lived in India longer and longer, I find that this nostalgic viewpoint of India is pretty but counterproductive. The book excavates the multiple layers of history, culture, and society that makes up Delhi and shows how they jostle and fight amongst themselves. I recommend reading the book once if you’d like but know that the Delhi he portrays does not really exist anymore. It is a good travel book but not, in my opinion, a great one.
Profile Image for Ayushi.
113 reviews29 followers
December 5, 2022
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).
This has to be one of the best books I have read this year. William Dalrymple is a fantastic author with somehow both fluid and poetic writing. I have known that bit from Nine Lives. But this book was a completely new experience. He is a fantastic researcher as well. Flanked by his current day experiences during the stay in Delhi, WD takes us through the various episodes of Delhi's history. From the most modern to the oldest, the very foundation of the city. It is a travelogue, it has humour, and it has history, making it such a fun book to read. I wish there were more books like this. I have visited so many places in Delhi in my last 7-8 years here, but I want to visit them all again. And this time carry this book with me so that I can see what WD saw. Delhi has changed even more since this book was written. And with everything, it still is this glorious, beautiful city that I love. And I love this book.
Profile Image for K.
32 reviews1 follower
September 28, 2013
Would have made a better read back in the 90's. An amateurish attempt at demystifying Delhi. A blah-tale of what makes Delhi what it is today from Dalrymple's perspective, narrative is at best tugging along as he explores one fort/tomb on to the next. A very superficial treatment of the subject at hand and somehow Dalrymple wants to squeeze in everything that objectively partakes in Delhi's history. If D is the word then Disappointed is what it is for.
Profile Image for Zaki.
89 reviews109 followers
June 12, 2015
I'd love to live in Delhi. I'd eat a chicken vindaloo every fucking day, smoke it up with the Sadhus, and see about these ethereal Djinns that rule over the cities unconsciousness.
Profile Image for Kerstin.
210 reviews
April 17, 2013
Awful. A meandering tale that spans time and place with no real point. The saddest part is I think that is what the author intended.
Profile Image for Pramod Nair.
233 reviews198 followers
May 25, 2015
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’.

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.


City Of Djinns is the result of Dalrymple’s encounters during his six-year stay in the capital city of Delhi and the narration is brought alive with an array of fascinating characters like Sufi mystics, philosophers, descendents of the Mogul emperors, a guild of eunuchs, musicians and calligraphers connected to the golden history of the town. The ever curious mind and the always trying to understand what he is seeing nature of the author can be observed in the balanced and open-minded way in which he interacts with these characters; and this gives a wonderful charm to the book. Even the characters that he interact on a daily basis during his stay at Delhi – like his gardner, his landlady, taxi drivers, government officials – are portrayed in the narration with wonderful anecdotes.

With meticulous research, Dalrymple creates a stunning dissection of Delhi by showcasing each era of its centuries old history in reverse chronology delving deep into the ancient roots of the city and narrating the centuries of Delhi’s evolution to the reader in vivid clarity. He takes the reader through each decline and resurgence of the city by inspecting the key moments in Delhi’s history like Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the post-independence bureaucratic Delhi, Delhi during the Indian independence & partition, the refugees in Delhi during the partition days, the massacres during the 1857 mutiny, Delhi made by Edwin Lutyens during the British Raj, the glory during Mugal days and even to the epic pasts connected with the Mahabharata and to the origins of the city. He inspects in detail how the past and present co-exist in Delhi by experiencing the social and historic life of both the Old & New Delhi. Dalrymple packs all these stories within a time-frame of a single year – so the title ‘City Of Djinns; A year in Delhi’ and this allows the author to bring the year-around social happenings, the life of its people, and even the climatic conditions of the city in to the narration.

It won’t be an exaggeration if I say that as a humble reader who has thoroughly enjoyed this book, reading it felt like I was right there along with Dalrymple during each of his experiences unraveling the epic history and cultural vibrancy of this City. The sights and smells of streets of Delhi are described with such detail and with his supreme control over the narration the author has created a stunning and lively portrait of the soul of Delhi. The narrations are interspersed with illustrations by Olivia Fraser (Dalrymple’s wife). Even though few in number these illustrations are certainly charming.
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