"A Year in Delhi": Dalrymple's City of Djinns
There is not much merit, I feel, when you sit to review a book that you have just read and while it's still fresh in your memory. You lack that beautiful, weather-beaten retrospective character which only comes with time. But I prefer doing this at a time when the only worthwhile thing I am doing is reading books, albeit, accompanied by bouts of forgetfulness, that's so inherent in me.
A friend once told me, "City of Djinns is nothing to do with history or the Sultanate stuff. It's all about how the present populations of Delhi came to be."
While I would give him the credit for having pointed that necessary component in Dalrymple's novel, which is peoples and their migrations, but it's certainly not the sufficient one. Rather, to me, the very essence of Dalrymple's account is the sense of history and memory which automatically clings with anything that has to do with Delhi. I mean, could I ever write about Delhi without talking about its history, its historical landmarks and its textured past.
I love Dalrymple's narrative strategy. He aims at peeling off the pasts of Delhi, layer by layer, like you would do with an onion, till you reach the core of it, that encompasses the very essence of the city. For Dalrymple, prehistory seems boring and a dull past, as compared to Ved Vyasa's epic imagination of a marvelous urbanity:
The professor turned and began walking back to the Rest House. 'The Indraprastha of the Mahabharata,' he said, 'was basically created by the pen of a poet.'
'And destroyed,' I said, 'by the trowel of an archaeologist.'
For me, as a student of Archaeology and a lover of Palaeolithic, this seemed disheartening. But never mind, Dalrymple won all my heart and rest of the brownie points in the way he weaved the narrative for the rest of the book.
Willy Dally (this is what I call Dalrymple in my absolute fan-boyish moment) combines the past and the present, in a parallel universe-type of narrative, where he explores how his and everybody else's lives are enmeshed in the histories of the city, Delhi. Dalrymple comes to live in Delhi for an year, with his newly wed wife, Olivia, ( as Dalrymple puts it, for the first time he was living with a woman whom he loved, doing his favorite work in a place he loved by his heart; what more does a man need in life!) and they take a room in rent from a Punjabi lady, Mrs. Puri, who turns out to be the ideal industrialist, ambitious and equally pragmatic Punjabi, face of a whole group of peoples who have come to live ane dominate Delhi in the post-1947 era, driving away the luxury-loving, culturally inebriated Delhiwallas of Old Delhi. This, as Dalrymple observes, brings about a fundamental change in the character of Delhi, as it loses much of its pre-colonial and colonial culture and life way with the emigrated groups. Yet, they live behind a part of themselves in Delhi, and the entire novel is sprinkled with bits of such peoples here and there--a Dr. Jaffery who sits in his haveli to read and translate an old extant manuscript of Shahjahan's biography; Sahabzadi Qatar Sultan and her daughter Pakeezah, the only living bearers of the Mughal blood line; Marion and Joe Fowler, who have been living under the ghostly shadows of the colonial past; and so many such illuminating characters here and there. I think if I were to take a walk through Delhi's gullies and kulchas, I would certainly meet some of them, the last torch-bearers of the Dehlavi culture.
For me, reading Dalrymple 's novel was a slow, enrapturing process. I was at times holding my book in my hands, closing my eyes and thinking of my time in Delhi and what I had gathered from three years in this city. There were whole sections which really made me cry, so much so that I can't suppress my urge to quote some of those (I won't commit a rape of literature, though)
So, here is a description of seasons: anyone having lived in Delhi would know how unbearable its summers are, how the hot summer loo strikes your face with a thud, and how the winters are such lovely times to roam around and enjoy the morning sun.
Dalrymple writes: As soon as you awoke you knew it was going to be hot.....By late morning the air was on fire; to open the door on to the roof terrace was to feel in your face a blast of heat strong as that from a blazing kiln. Noon came like a white midnight: the streets were deserted, the windows closed, the doors locked. There was no noise but for the sullen and persistent whirr of the ceiling fans.
(I laughed when he says, it's a sledge-hammer summer, marking the transition from winter to summsr almost as if six months of European weather were compressed into little more than a Delhi fortnight!)
Again, at another place, he writes: Every night during the week leading up to the festival (of Diwali) the sky reverberates with a crescendo of thunderflash and fireworks. The pyrotechnics culminate in an ear-splitting, blitz-like barrage the night of Diwali itself.
I fantasize over all of these because I lived through these, and I loved every bit of that. I can completely relate to what Dalrymple had observed almost three decades ago, that as the summer heat becomes unbearable, the rich move on to the hills of Simla, while the poor move into the more shaded colonies of Delhi. Again,the endless harassment at the hand of the bureaucracy and sarkari babus of Delhi. I think that is my takeaway from this novel: an unchanging,constant core that survives and thrives beneath the veneer of its fast-changing, transitioning self. Dalrymple does complete justice to that through his very many travels in and around the city, living the lives of all who inhabit these spaces. I wish my college could give me that leave for an year, and I could be a little bit of a banjara, living a peripatetic life like that. Alas, my dreams of visiting Nizamuddin are yet to be fulfilled!
So, all good and no bad is never my way of describing something. I would turn a sceptic's eye to the way Dalrymple draws overtly from the travellers' accounts while drawing Delhi history. But probably, being a foreign traveller himself, he was trying to find his way through the city's history by reading these wonderful texts, which otherwise are often largely overlooked. Thus,he is sort of problematic in the way he talks about Aurangzeb, the Mughal court, the Sultanate, and others. But yes, as Dalrymple admits in his introduction to the revised introduction , he was an andro-centric young man back then, being cocky and hawty, and exploring the country for the first time. So obviously, and fortunately, his later books do reveal a more nuanced and evolved sense of history than that.
I think this is all that Dalrymple's City of Djinns had to offer to me. This was a book on Delhi, and an ode to everyone who define Delhi. Dalrymple's book is a perfect guide for newcomers to the city,as much as it is about self-reflection for those who have inhabited this city for long and yet fail to understand the richness, the texture and the complexity of the legacy they inherit. I would love to re-read this book later sometime , and probably my interpretation of that will be different then. I am sure my readers will have their own stories of reading and interpreting this book. Please do share your stories with me, in the moments box below.
Thank you!
A friend once told me, "City of Djinns is nothing to do with history or the Sultanate stuff. It's all about how the present populations of Delhi came to be."
While I would give him the credit for having pointed that necessary component in Dalrymple's novel, which is peoples and their migrations, but it's certainly not the sufficient one. Rather, to me, the very essence of Dalrymple's account is the sense of history and memory which automatically clings with anything that has to do with Delhi. I mean, could I ever write about Delhi without talking about its history, its historical landmarks and its textured past.
I love Dalrymple's narrative strategy. He aims at peeling off the pasts of Delhi, layer by layer, like you would do with an onion, till you reach the core of it, that encompasses the very essence of the city. For Dalrymple, prehistory seems boring and a dull past, as compared to Ved Vyasa's epic imagination of a marvelous urbanity:
The professor turned and began walking back to the Rest House. 'The Indraprastha of the Mahabharata,' he said, 'was basically created by the pen of a poet.'
'And destroyed,' I said, 'by the trowel of an archaeologist.'
For me, as a student of Archaeology and a lover of Palaeolithic, this seemed disheartening. But never mind, Dalrymple won all my heart and rest of the brownie points in the way he weaved the narrative for the rest of the book.
Willy Dally (this is what I call Dalrymple in my absolute fan-boyish moment) combines the past and the present, in a parallel universe-type of narrative, where he explores how his and everybody else's lives are enmeshed in the histories of the city, Delhi. Dalrymple comes to live in Delhi for an year, with his newly wed wife, Olivia, ( as Dalrymple puts it, for the first time he was living with a woman whom he loved, doing his favorite work in a place he loved by his heart; what more does a man need in life!) and they take a room in rent from a Punjabi lady, Mrs. Puri, who turns out to be the ideal industrialist, ambitious and equally pragmatic Punjabi, face of a whole group of peoples who have come to live ane dominate Delhi in the post-1947 era, driving away the luxury-loving, culturally inebriated Delhiwallas of Old Delhi. This, as Dalrymple observes, brings about a fundamental change in the character of Delhi, as it loses much of its pre-colonial and colonial culture and life way with the emigrated groups. Yet, they live behind a part of themselves in Delhi, and the entire novel is sprinkled with bits of such peoples here and there--a Dr. Jaffery who sits in his haveli to read and translate an old extant manuscript of Shahjahan's biography; Sahabzadi Qatar Sultan and her daughter Pakeezah, the only living bearers of the Mughal blood line; Marion and Joe Fowler, who have been living under the ghostly shadows of the colonial past; and so many such illuminating characters here and there. I think if I were to take a walk through Delhi's gullies and kulchas, I would certainly meet some of them, the last torch-bearers of the Dehlavi culture.
For me, reading Dalrymple 's novel was a slow, enrapturing process. I was at times holding my book in my hands, closing my eyes and thinking of my time in Delhi and what I had gathered from three years in this city. There were whole sections which really made me cry, so much so that I can't suppress my urge to quote some of those (I won't commit a rape of literature, though)
So, here is a description of seasons: anyone having lived in Delhi would know how unbearable its summers are, how the hot summer loo strikes your face with a thud, and how the winters are such lovely times to roam around and enjoy the morning sun.
Dalrymple writes: As soon as you awoke you knew it was going to be hot.....By late morning the air was on fire; to open the door on to the roof terrace was to feel in your face a blast of heat strong as that from a blazing kiln. Noon came like a white midnight: the streets were deserted, the windows closed, the doors locked. There was no noise but for the sullen and persistent whirr of the ceiling fans.
(I laughed when he says, it's a sledge-hammer summer, marking the transition from winter to summsr almost as if six months of European weather were compressed into little more than a Delhi fortnight!)
Again, at another place, he writes: Every night during the week leading up to the festival (of Diwali) the sky reverberates with a crescendo of thunderflash and fireworks. The pyrotechnics culminate in an ear-splitting, blitz-like barrage the night of Diwali itself.
I fantasize over all of these because I lived through these, and I loved every bit of that. I can completely relate to what Dalrymple had observed almost three decades ago, that as the summer heat becomes unbearable, the rich move on to the hills of Simla, while the poor move into the more shaded colonies of Delhi. Again,the endless harassment at the hand of the bureaucracy and sarkari babus of Delhi. I think that is my takeaway from this novel: an unchanging,constant core that survives and thrives beneath the veneer of its fast-changing, transitioning self. Dalrymple does complete justice to that through his very many travels in and around the city, living the lives of all who inhabit these spaces. I wish my college could give me that leave for an year, and I could be a little bit of a banjara, living a peripatetic life like that. Alas, my dreams of visiting Nizamuddin are yet to be fulfilled!
So, all good and no bad is never my way of describing something. I would turn a sceptic's eye to the way Dalrymple draws overtly from the travellers' accounts while drawing Delhi history. But probably, being a foreign traveller himself, he was trying to find his way through the city's history by reading these wonderful texts, which otherwise are often largely overlooked. Thus,he is sort of problematic in the way he talks about Aurangzeb, the Mughal court, the Sultanate, and others. But yes, as Dalrymple admits in his introduction to the revised introduction , he was an andro-centric young man back then, being cocky and hawty, and exploring the country for the first time. So obviously, and fortunately, his later books do reveal a more nuanced and evolved sense of history than that.
I think this is all that Dalrymple's City of Djinns had to offer to me. This was a book on Delhi, and an ode to everyone who define Delhi. Dalrymple's book is a perfect guide for newcomers to the city,as much as it is about self-reflection for those who have inhabited this city for long and yet fail to understand the richness, the texture and the complexity of the legacy they inherit. I would love to re-read this book later sometime , and probably my interpretation of that will be different then. I am sure my readers will have their own stories of reading and interpreting this book. Please do share your stories with me, in the moments box below.
Thank you!
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