City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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The damburst of western goods and ideas that were now pouring into India had brought with them an undertow of western morality. During our high school and college days the Women’s College was out of bounds for males except occasionally and on quite a few occasions when the college was hosting Inter Collegiate Debates we could enter he college and wander about a bit. At that time or as it is even today The Residency is a college Osmania University College for Women. 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.

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple: 9780142001004

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. 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. 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. 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 descendants of the once mighty Mughals, now impoverished; Anglo-Indians and Britishers trying to fit into Indian society after the fall of the Raj; practitioners of traditional Unani medicine from Central Asia; sadhus; caligraphers, and eunuchs all make an appearance in the text. B. Lal, referred to in the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata as Indraprastha, was in the ninth century B. With little possibility of much fulfilment in this world, they look to the next; they are forever visiting temples and mosques.

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

The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined as stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic. My only real concern is that so much of this must now be out of date; comments about how the roads are ‘becoming clogged’ (ha! After all, Mr Singh is a kshatriya by caste, a warrior, and like his ancestors he is keen to show that he is afraid of nothing. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. Indraprastha’s towers of amethyst had crumbled into dull palisades of mud brick and sharpened stakes; an apparently impregnable city of the imagination, built of couplets and rhymes and ingenious metres, had been breached by the archaeologist’s pickaxe and shovel.The book covers an amazing spectrum though, and of course different bits of it will appeal more or less to different people.