City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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The City of Djinns is one of the first books by William Dalrymple which doesn't revolve around the history of India, rather it represents various anecdotes of his time in India and explores the history of India with the help of various characters he meets, like the Puri family, the driver, the customs officer, and British survivors of the Raj, [1] From that day on, however, the old man had become a fervent Sikh nationalist. ‘Everyone should have their own home,’ he would snort. ‘The Muslims have Pakistan. The Hindus have Hindustan. The Punjab is our home. If I was a young man I would join Bhindranwale and fight these Hindu dogs.’ Old Mr Puri, her husband, was a magnificent-looking Sikh gentleman with a long white beard and a tin zimmer frame with wheels on the bottom. He always seemed friendly enough—as we passed he would nod politely from his armchair. 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.

City of Djinns – HarperCollins City of Djinns – HarperCollins

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: 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. Attitudes were changing too. A subtle hardening seemed to have taken place. In the smart drawing-rooms of Delhi, from where the fate of India’s 880 million people was controlled, the middle class seemed to be growing less tolerant; the great Hindu qualities of assimilation and acceptance were no longer highly prized. A mild form of fascism was in fashion: educated people would tell you that it was about time those bloody Muslims were disciplined—that they had been pampered and appeased by the Congress Party for too long, that they were filthy and fanatical, that they bred like rabbits. They should all be put behind bars, hostesses would tell you as they poured you a glass of imported whisky; expulsion was too good for them. 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.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. Across the top of the piece of paper, in huge red letters, was blazoned the slogan: A NATIONALIST TO THE CORE AND A FREEDOM FIGHTER. Mr Gupta straightened his glasses and read from the charter: 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. 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.

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

Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’ 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. 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. 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.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. In the Old City men set up small roadside stalls around big earthenware pots containing 'jal jeera', a dark, spicy, green liquid which burns the mouth but cools the body.... 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.

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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. This was all very admirable, but the hitch, we soon learned, was that she expected her tenants to emulate the disciplines she imposed upon herself. One morning, after only a week in the flat, I turned on the tap to discover that our water had been cut off, so went downstairs to sort out the problem. Mrs Puri had already been up and about for several hours; she had been to the gurdwara, said her prayers and was now busy drinking her morning glass of rice water. The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. Although parts of the city still preserved the ways of the Mughal period or even the early Middle Ages, Delhi was nevertheless changing, and changing fast.Or rather was. One month after our arrival in Delhi, Mr Singh and I had an accident. Taking a road junction with more phlegm than usual, we careered into the Maruti van, impaling it on its bows, so that it 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.’ In 2016, the situation was different as my sister and I entered the college without any hassles. The system had become more liberal and a number of young men on motor-bikes entered the premises to drop the women students riding pillion. When we went to Durbar Hall all that faced us were steps leading up to a blank wall. The building had deteriorated so much that one could no longer enter the Durbar Hall it was a big disappointment an unexpected let down. Five years after I first lived in Delhi I returned, now newly married. Olivia and I arrived in September. We found a small top-floor flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin and there set up home. The woman broke down in a convulsion of grateful sobs. Beside her Mr Gupta was still in full flood: 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’.

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

It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century. The professor shrugged: ‘Yes and no. You see, all we found in the PGW layers was one small mud structure. I think the main part of the city must probably have been to the south — through the Humayun Gate towards Humayun’s Tomb.’ They keep pigeons with different abilities - high fliers, fast fliers, fighters...which they train to do all sorts of things. Pigeon keeping was the "civilized old pastime of the Mughal court" Its delights and dangers were illustrated by Mughal miniaturists, and there were laws governing its practice. 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.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: 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. 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!