City of Djinns: A Year In Delhi - William Dalrymple

Published by Flamingo, 1994, softcover, illustrated, index, 350 pages, condition: as new.

 Could you show me a djinn? I asked. Certainly, replied the Sufi. But you would run away.

Delhi is lucky to have William Dalrymple as a chronicler not many cities get such exemplary treatment as this. I think I even preferred it to Peter Ackroyd's , just because Ackroyd presents himself as an expert dispensing knowledge, whereas Dalrymple is pure ingénu: curious, open-minded, he allows us to accompany him on his own journey of exploration and discovery which dovetails with the social and historical narratives he uncovers.

For Dalrymple, Delhi is a city of accumulated losses, haunted by its innumerable fallen rulers, the locus of empires that have been lost and though not actively remembered not quite forgotten either. Two dates recur with especial frequency. 1857, when the Mughal Empire finally fell, and 1947, when the British Indian Empire was dissolved and the territory partitioned into India and Pakistan.