A friend sent me a signed copy of Dalrymple’s The Golden Road from overseas a few months ago, and it still hasn’t arrived thanks to our lousy postal system. But as I wait, another friend lends me her copy of City of Djinns. It’s comforting to know that I won’t run out of Dalrymples (and kind, reading friends).
City of Djinns is Dalrymple’s second book after his debut, In Xanadu. Published only four years apart and yet the Dalrymple of Djinns is already so much wiser and more thoughtful than the one in Xanadu. It is one of his best books. City of Djinns is a precious gem in a brilliant bibliography that is a testament to how a series of meaningful travels can profoundly ripen a person and a writer.
And Delhi, this book’s chosen city, is one such city that seems like a heaving anarchy on the surface; but as this book’s adept writer shows us, if one dares to steep oneself in its murky river of humanity, one comes out of it acquiring a thousand and one lessons about the layers of its incredible history, about different faiths and cultures, and about the rise and fall of empires.
“The civilization I belong to — the civilization of Delhi — came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place,” laments Twilight in Delhi author, Ahmed Ali.
India was where the sun finally set on the British Empire, and this book is another witness to how much the Partition — the British Empire’s parting gift to the Indian sub-continent — wreaked havoc on this particular city, whose towers, ironically, used to be, “The resting place of the sun”.
Delhi is not a destination and subject for the faint-hearted. It takes a Dalrymple to deftly paint the interplay of light and dark, of myth and truth, of what was and what is.
The Book-Butterfly 