Book Review: City of Djinns by William Dalrymple
Author: William Dalrymple
Publishers: Penguin Books
Pages: 339
The most important thing that I felt after reading City of Djinns is that Delhi has so many worthwhile places to see, and I should some day be seeing them all. I was speaking to a friend and she expressed the same thing, and said it might takes months to see all those places just within Delhi. And another friend had a head start. He told me over the phone – ‘I have been going to Nizamuddin theses days, visiting those places in City of Djinns’.
That is the charm of the Dalrymple’s excellently written book. Sometimes it takes you right there where he is and in other times you will wish you were there. Dalrymple spends a year in Delhi researching its history and works it backwards from the days just after independence, continuing to the British era and then to Mughals. History doesn’t reveal about the days much before that and he gives up. He has done great research on the topic and the length of bibliography is a good proof of it. And in the process of his research he unearths many monuments still existing but unknown to most of us – like the Nizamuddin Darga, Tughlakh’s fort, Safdarjung’s tomb, Havelis of old Delhi to name a few. He mixes history remarkably well with current day Delhi while he describes his own experiences of living in Delhi as he does his research for the book. It succeeds in making its reader fall in love with the city and at the same time remain cautious about it. An excellent book, needless to say.