City of Djinns

Chandni Chowk (2005)

Delhi ... 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.
--William Dalrymple, City of Djinns (Prologue)

So the ancient Indian capital appeared to writer William Dalrymple when he first visited the city as a youth of 17.  In his 1993 book of travel and history, City of Djinns, Dalrymple writes of his year living in Delhi, as a married man, several years later. 

I've visited Delhi only once -- before and after a trek that I went on with Pascal, the teenage son of family friends, through the Indian Himalayas of Ladakh.  We were there in August 2005 -- a fine month for mountain trekking, an appalling month to be wandering about in the heat, humidity, and chaos of Delhi.

Nevertheless, the city was fascinating.  We walked long distances from one monument to another, and took tuk-tuks where distances were unwalkable.  We saw a lot.  What we lacked, however, was context.  I knew that the Muslims and the British had each once ruled Delhi, but that the city was now part of a Hindu nation.  I knew of the calamities and dislocations resulting from the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan.

Beyond that, like perhaps most Americans, my sense of the city was fuzzy.  After our first day wandering about, I might well have written something in my journal echoing Dalrymple's confused impressions as a 17-year-old.

Several years after his teenaged introduction to the city, Dalrymple, recently married, returned to Delhi, rented a ramshackle room from an interesting Sikh couple, and began shuffling about the city, trying to figure it out.  From that experience, City of Djinns evolved.

Dalrymple is an outgoing and adventurous sort of guy -- he wrote In Xanadu, which I discussed in June 2015, about his attempt as a Cambridge student to replicate Marco Polo's travels from Palestine to Beijing.  He likes people, has a talent for languages (he speaks, for example, Hindi, and seems to have some knowledge of Persian), is comfortable with persons from every station in life and enjoys listening to their talk and ideas.  And he has an enviable sense of curiosity, one that sometimes leads him to cloister himself in a library for days on end seeking the answer to some obscure question, and at other times to search barren land for some trace of a city that an ancient saga indicated might have once existed in that area.

Delhi is a palimpsest, an area on the Jumna river that one invasion after another tried to wipe clean of earlier civilizations -- but never completely succeeded.  (Indians claim that only with the help of djinns could the city have been reconstructed after each of its many destructions.)  Working backward from the present, Dalrymple shows how partition radically changed an Urdu-speaking Muslim city to a city filled with Hindus and dominated to some degree by energetic Punjabi Sikhs.  In the years before partition, the British had built a modern New Delhi -- adjacent to the old Delhi -- filled with architecture that was a fusion of Western classical and traditional Indian styles.  Similarly, each chapter leads us back further -- to the Muslim Mughals who brought Persian languages (like Urdu) and civilization, to pre-Mughal blood-thirsty Hindu tyrants, and back ultimately to the legendary times described in the great Hindu sagas.

But Dalrymple does not impose on us a dry summary of Delhi history.  We learn Delhi's history as a by-product of Dalrymple's adventures in the modern city, the people he meets, the weather that appalls him and his wife, the foods they eat, the disturbing sights that he happens upon.  Dalrymple's book is presented as "the cool year my wife and I spent in Delhi"; the history is the medicine we swallow -- always willingly -- along with the sweet syrup.

My only complaint with the book is a complaint I also had with In Xanadu: Dalrymple is an amateur student of architectural and art history.  We often hear far more detailed descriptions of rather obscure monuments than we can absorb.  It's tempting to skip over those portions of the book -- with which the late chapters are especially filled -- but it's better to read the book as a whole, as the author intended, and do one's best to follow his discussion.

Also, Dalrymple uses many Hindi and Urdu and colonial British expressions (and common contemporary Indian idioms) in his text.  Some were defined by my Kindle dictionary, others could be deduced from their context.  But I wish I hadn't waited until I'd finished the book to realize that he has appended a very extensive glossary of terms at the end of the book. 

I'm ready for a return to Delhi -- not to experience the city as Dalrymple did, which would be impossible without his background -- but to visit the Red Fort, the Viceroy's Palace, the Chandni Chowk, all the many tombs and other monuments, with some understanding of who build them, and why, and the historical reasons for their being where they are in today's Delhi.