City of Djinns
A Year in Delhi
William Dalrymple
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © William Dalrymple 1993
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006375951
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780007378784
Version: 2017-03-10
From the reviews of City of Djinns:
‘Dalrymple has pulled it off again … At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure, City of Djinns is not really a travel book at all. It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city … Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur. Even his excursions into the world of the eunuchs are conducted with a kind of grave innocence. He is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand … It is the work of a man who has consciously chosen to commit himself to the profession of letters, and in it we see the first fine rapture of In Xanadu deepening to a profounder dedication … hours and hours of pleasure for his readers.’
JAN MORRIS, Independent
‘As the author of the best travel book of recent years at the intensely irritating age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple has now shown that In Xanadu was no fluke. City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diary informed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts of even the most distant past still walk Delhi in the twentieth century.’
CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD, Daily Telegraph
‘City of Djinns is a delight. William Dalrymple is in command of his subject, seizes the reader and uses his skill to tempt and tantalize … The city of djinns is Delhi and Dalrymple reveals it like a Dance of the Seven Veils. It is very intricately organized: ostensibly structured around a year which he and his artist wife Olivia spent in Delhi, paced by vivid descriptions of weather change as signal of seasons, and by the formal punctuation of life, learning, loving, and death. These episodes are interspersed in counterpoint with historical sketches, which (as you suddenly realize at the end) are organized in reverse chronology, beginning with the Sikh massacres after Indira Gandhi’s death, back through Partition, the Empire, and the East India Company, back through the Mughal empire into prehistory and archaeology … The book is Dalrymple’s journey into the soul of Delhi.’
CHARLES MCKEAN, Books in Scotland
‘Delhi has more layers of culture, civilisation and history extant in it than any other city in India, arguably, in the world. It is this, the enthralling and enigmatic features of this ancient-modern city, that William Dalrymple sets out to trace in City of Djinns, and he manages to do it with such pleasing success that henceforth defenders of the city can use his book as a club to beat off Delhi-haters … [The book is] a stationary travelogue that moves more through time than space, looping and whorling in circles and parabolas of past and present. Dalrymple performs these acrobatics of storytelling with the ease of a trapeze artist … One great merit of his book is that the author conducts himself without prejudice or bigotry. He explores Delhi without ideological or racial baggage; in fact, wonderfully, he is not in the least cramped by the need for political correctness. He does not feel the need to be nice or nasty to anyone. What he is, constantly, is curious, scholarly, engaging, the scholarship carried by a light touch … the finest labour of love on the capital in recent times.’
TARUN TEJPAL, India Today
‘An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled … an enlightening and entertaining book.’
IAIN WETHERBY, Literary Review
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