City of Djinns- A Review

He calls his book a memoir of a year in Delhi, but this is a book which transcends eras. Dalrymple sweeps past Delhi's physical landscapes and wanders into its nooks and crannies, exploring their raisons d'etre in the capital.

Countless are the times we have read about the impact of the Mughal and the British empires on India. Here, we get a look at what they changed on smaller scales and how they moulded the character of a city in a manner that makes it a schizophrenic mix of grand colonnades and derelict ruins, Delhiites with stiff upper lips and Punjabi cabbies who leer at women.

Vehicled in a taxi from the International Backside Taxi Stand, Dalrymple makes various trips to the past that he sees responsible for the Delhi around him. He takes us with him through his discovery of the Mughal empire, with its richness of art, poetry and court intrigues, which are recalled with a nostalgia, a lament for all that has been lost and for the prosaic nature of what has been left behind. The British are spoken about in view of their individual eccentricities and their unique relationships with Delhi. Throughout these periods, Indian civilians are seen as passive subjects who are subject to the winds of change swirling around them. How do the Anglo-Indians of Delhi live, abandoned without a country they are allowed to call their own?

It is to the partition of 1947 that Dalrymple traces the fissures and the structures of Delhi society, that has resulted in two Delhis, the old in perpetual disdain of the nouveau Delhi of immigrants who run beauty schools, to whom Urdu is but the title of the latest Bollywood film. It's here that the book pulls you in, with the human geography of Delhi a fascinating read.

There is an underlying wit in every age of the book at the Indianisms of everyday life (he narrates with great amusement a tale of the Indian customs officer who refused to let him leave the country for two weeks without confiscating every electronic equipment he had got from Britain to prevent them being sold in India, only to offer a price for them much later in whispered pleas). The prose is fluid, though there are instances when you grapple with how an incident connects with the bigger picture of the chapter. At no point, however, do you stop in boredom.

Cities are born, and they evolve, their state of being shaped by a host of events. We have only to scratch their surface to unearth a wealth of heritage that make them living breathing entities. As a travelogue, Dalrymple makes you want to step out into a Delhi (a city that I have never given much thought to) and discover the city as he has. The book should have perhaps be called "The Story of Delhi" and it is one he narrates very well indeed.