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. Now read by Tim Pigott-Smith, City of Djinns gets a wonderful new lease of life. Dalrymple has a rare gift for historical narrative and catches the engaging, Anglo-Indian speech of his cast with telling accuracy.” 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. Among flowers and trees he should admire the narcissus, the violet and the orange..... A gentleman 'should not make too much use of tobacco' but 'should recognise the Fort in Agra as unequalled in the whole world (and)...must think of Isfahan as the best town in Persia.' 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]

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

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.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.

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

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.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. These people are often banned from the villages where they were born, and sent instead to live with a 'hijra' group in the city, led by a hijra guru. The guru is like a mother to the new members, and teachers them the ways of the jijras. When she gets old, they look after her as they would look after a real mother. The book was adapted into a play in 2007 by Rahul Dasinnur Pulkeshi of Delhi-based Dreamtheatre. [2] 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.

Travel Reviews: City Of Djinns – Book | Travel.Earth Travel Reviews: City Of Djinns – Book | Travel.Earth

People became tired and listless. Fruit decayed: an uneaten mango, firm at breakfast, could be covered with a thin lint of mould by evening. Water shot boiling from the cold taps. There was no relief except to shower with bottles of cold water from Mrs Puri's fridge.... 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. Before coming out to Delhi we had lived impecuniously in a tiny student dive in Oxford. Now we had to make the transition to a life where we still had only two rooms, but suddenly found ourselves with more than twice that number of servants. It wasn’t that we particularly wanted or needed servants; but, as Mrs Puri soon made quite clear, employing staff was a painful necessity on which the prestige of her household depended. 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. Hot sulphurous winds began to rake through the empty Delhi avenues. The walls of the houses exuded heat like enormous ovens. The rich fled to the hill stations and the beggars followed them.... 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.

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The woman broke down in a convulsion of grateful sobs. Beside her Mr Gupta was still in full flood: 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. 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.

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

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) is a travelogue by William Dalrymple about the historical capital of India, Delhi. It is his second book, and culminated as a result of his six-year stay in New Delhi. 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. In Delhi, right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle", shows he wrote the book with exceptional observation. as well as whirling dervishes and eunuch dancers (‘a strange mix of piety and bawdiness’). Dalrymple describes ancient ruins [1] and the experience of living in the modern city: he goes in search of the history behind the epic stories of the Mahabharata. Still more seriously, he finds evidence of the city’s violent past and present day—the 1857 mutiny against British rule; the Partition massacres in 1947; and the riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.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. 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.