Erudite reading: "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple

I have read William Dalrymple before, The Last Mughal (2006). This astonishingly powerful account of the Indian Mutiny (or the "First War of Independence", as I now know it to be termed in India) made a huge impression on me, to the extent that when, in preparation for an upcoming trip to India, I spotted the name "Dalrymple" in the travel section of Nottingham Waterstones, I could hardly not pick up the book. 

City of Djinns is an autobiographical account of a year spent by a young William Dalrymple, together with his newlywed wife, Olivia, in Delhi. The book is a mix of the personal recollection of an (initially) rather wide-eyed Brit decamping in the chaos that is Delhi and the learning he acquires while there: tales of the British Raj (a brief interlude), the Mughal empire it supplanted and indeed the preceding centuries, fading into the semi-myth, semi-history of the Mahabharata. Correspondingly, the book provides a marvellous introduction to the reality of contemporary Delhi (though the 12 years since its publication have wrought many changes, I suspect) as well as to the history with permeates the city, both through the monuments and sites any tourist will visit (Humayan's Tomb, the Red Fort...) and through the oral tradition and backstreet religion the casual visitor will find it much harder to encounter directly.


Dalrymple's observation is acute and nuanced. He has an eye for the charmingly absurd - how not to love his indomitable Sikh landlady, Mrs Puri, or his reprobate taxi-driver of choice, Balvinder Singh? - as well as an ability to infiltrate worlds as disparate as those of erudite Muslim scholars, Hindu mystics, state archeologists and the normally ferociously inaccessible Hijras (modern eunuchs). The result is a rich, fascinating and loving portrait of one of the world"s greatest and surely most confounding cities, Delhi.

For me, on a first visit to India (a long-desired destination), City of Djinns was a wonderful companion: on the one hand, its descriptions of the city held true and expanded hugely on my own, necessarily limited and superficial, observation, on the other, Dalrymple's love of story-telling added incalculable depth to my experience of the Mughal marvels which we visited in the course of our ten-day trip in Delhi, Agra and Rajasthan.

If you have any interest in India, and even more so if you will be in Delhi for any period of time, I cannot recommend City Of Djinns highly enough.