City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

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But if you have no car and no driver,’ said Mrs Puri, ‘how will you be getting from place to place?’ 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.’ 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 - William Dalrymple - Google Books City of Djinns - William Dalrymple - Google Books

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.... 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. 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 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’. 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 am ex-member of the Publicity Committee of the All-India Congress I, Bhagalpur division. Ex-Joint Secretary of the Youth Congress Committee, Chote Nagpur, Bihar. I am a poet and a journalist. A war hero from the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jaisalmer sector …’ 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. 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. 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. 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.

City of Djinns - Wikipedia

Accepting the findings of Professor Lal, still the question remains-the description of the great war with its destructive weaponry-how did the poet envisage the scenario and is it all poetic license or is there some fact still unknown to archaeologists? Or is the Indraprastha of The Mahabharata located elsewhere and would excavations under Delhi Zoo throw up surprises – the sixty-four million dollar question! I was a Founder Member cum Chairman of the Religious and Social Institute of India, Patna Branch …’ Is there any wonder that there is water shortage in our India when you people are making seven flushes in one night?’ My name is Sunil Gupta—please call me Sunny.’ He strode forward and grabbed Mr Lal by the hand, shaking it with great verve.AS WAS HER HABIT, Indira Gandhi had toast and fruit for breakfast. It was 31 October 1984 and the bougainvillaea was in flower. 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. The hijra wear make up, jewellry and women's clothes, and each group has their own 'parish'. They cannot practice outside their parish. This is enforced by a special council of eunuchs coming from all over India and Pakistan, which meets once a year. Only a little bit, Mrs Puri,' I said defensively, knowing she was speaking the truth. The humiliating retreat of my hairline has been going on for five or six years now and was beginning to turn into a rout. 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!

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

Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan … They all built new cities and they all lost them. We [the British] were no exception.”The heat (an example of Dalrymple's marvellous writing, and a description of Delhi's unbelievable heat in summer) The book is well researched, beautifully narrated and gripping. At least Delhi wallahs can proudly claim their city is the oldest in this part of the world nearly three thousand years old-if not more. I greatly enjoyed reading the book and would recommend it interested students of Indian History-ancient, medieval, and modern. Long live the story of Delhi. 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) 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.

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi: William Dalrymple

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.' Since the riots, Mr Puri had also become intermittently senile. One day he could be perfectly lucid; the next he might suffer from the strangest hallucinations. On these occasions conversations with him took on a somewhat surreal quality: 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.

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."