City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi Book

City of Djinns: The Reader's Journey

I started reading The White Mughals sometime in an auto in Lucknow, in 2011. I still remember reading enchantedly of Old Delhi while sitting stuffed inside a crammed  "share-auto", dodging the remains of an equally old Lucknow (and close to the pre-Shah Jahani capital, of Agra). I remember missing my stop. I don't remember when I left off reading it.

Then, recently, I had an argument with a friend about that fiendishly invented TV series/Soap Opera 'Jodhaa Akbar' and realized how little I knew about Mughal rule and also remembered that I never got around to even properly beginning The White Mughals.

I then picked up White Mughals again, flipped it around and got the mistaken impression that it must have been set after The Last Mughal. I have no way of explaining how that logic worked, but, it probably went something like this - only after the 'Last Mughal' could 'White' Mughals come into the story. Right? Brilliant as usual, of course.

Anyway, I started The Last Mughal and Dalrymple kept talking to me as if we were in the middle of a conversation. This disconcerted me until he let slip that he had been talking to me of this subject since The White Mughal. So I immediately went back to that.

Where he informed me that he had initiated the conversation way back in The City of Djinns. This book was the least alluring - ancient Delhi was more fascinating to me than contemporary travel writing.

But I decided to humor Dalrymple and started with CoD, if for nothing else but to trace the evolution of an obsession that gave us such great works later. Not a bad decision. But I am sure the next two in his 'tetralogy' are much greater delights - I should know, I have read more than a bit of both.


City of Djinns: The Writer's Journey

Dalrymple plots his own journey (from childhood almost) of sifting through the endless layers of Delhi's historical stratigraphy and historiography. As he sifts, we discover that in the everyday structures lies dormant splendid stories and great figures.

The reader should keep in mind that this is early in Dalrymple's own love affair with Medieval India. What it lacks in insight, it makes up for in enthusiasm. A brisk and breezy Dalrymple is on display instead of the magisterial one we have come to expect. Also, the spirit of imperial fascination and the tendency to view the fall of Delhi as due to "decay" exists in these pages. Need to see if Dalrymple moves beyond that impression of decay in his later more mature works.

Dalrymple still paints quite a wonderful portrait - of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side, a city of djinns. [The story behind the title would be a spoiler]


Two recurring themes:

1. A simple technique of transposition of place and time - Dalrymple first talks of a place that he himself is visiting and then effortlessly takes us back centuries to show what momentous events were transpiring in that same now innocuous piece of land… exposing the grand history in which daily life of great cities are lived.

2. Great Beauty and grandeur hidden amidst everyday squalor - a city that is as fine as the very greatest cities, yet living in the most prosaic manner, with hardly a nod to its own history. A closer look is all it takes in Delhi to be transported back into a distant century. It took a Dalrymple to take that look. And it transformed both the city and the author. [ Refer Footnote #1 ]


Step 1: Independence & Partition

[The easiest reference point for any historian of India. Dalrymple does not duck this one either.]

The Quest to understand delhi convinces D again and again that he has found the key only to be shown each time that the inner doors keep stretching into the distance. A sort of chinese doll palace entrance, with entrances nested inside the other.

Living with a Punjabi family and mixing with Muslim families throws D on an early scent. He follows this contradistinction between the communities and arrives at the answer that partition is what made today's delhi a city of contradictions.

He asserts early in the book:

The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city's central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.

This thread of enquiry leads to an engrossing paean on Old delhi  - of the muslim delhi, of a british delhi - of the high class Old Delhi. Set off in stark contrast from the bureaucratic, boring and boorish Delhi of today.

In pursuit of the Old Muslim glory of the city D reaches Karachi and is thus introduced to even stronger nostalgia for the lost Delhi of before partition, a bi-imperial city.

Soon however, D abandons the idea that this story explains Delhi.

Thus, he discovers that:

New Delhi was not new at all. Its broad avenues encompassed a groaning necropolis, a graveyard of dynasties. Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi, and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number.

The next step was to go even further back.

Peel back one more layer.


Step 2: The Imperial Past / The Raj: Digging up The Elephant in the City 

Multiple strands:

- the vast Lutyens' architecture

- the inhuman scale

- the adaptations from Mughals

- ferreting out of anglo-indians (a favorite method of D to recapture the flavor of living in that layer of Delhi - employed throughout the book until the layers get too ancient for the method)

- the exploration of the 'sub-delhis', the imperial summer outposts of Kashmir and Shimla.

Excerpt:

Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: 'Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,' he writes in one letter. 'It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.' At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that 'some of the work is lovely', but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.

In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful.

Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire - an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority - could have produced Lutyens's Delhi.


By now the pattern should be apparent to the reader. It even appears doubtful if the story of the gradual discovery of delhi's antique mysteries is authentic. In any case, D follows the charade of another surprise discovery that Delhi is much older and needs to be peeled back even more.

Moreover the city - so I soon discovered - possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. 

Time for another peel, obviously.


Step 3: The Long Twilight

Thus, D soon comes up with another key to Delhi: the Twilight. This time he is closer to the mark - much of modern Delhi is an outgrowth or a reaction to this period's history and architecture. First by the Britishers and then by the Leaders of Independent India.

The Twilight, as defined by D, is bounded by two of the greatest disasters in Delhi's history: the Persian massacres of 1739 and the equally vicious hangings and killings which followed the British recapture of Delhi after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

If we extend this and add the next great disaster, modern Delhi would appear to take shape, even though D does this in reverse, it is easy for the reader to do the mental jugglery.

But having come this far, D could not stop. He had to dig deeper. How could a history of Delhi be complete without talking of Mahabharata??

Especially when every section is marked by an elephant - a tribute to Hastinapura of old?


Step 4: The Epic Past

Unfortunately, Delhi's history fades away quickly into legend past the 'twilight'. Except for eulogies, not much is known of the leaders such as Prithviraj Chauhan.

It soon became clear that trying to disentangle the history of pre-Muslim Delhi was like penetrating deeper and deeper into a midsummer dust storm: the larger landmarks stood out, but the details were all obliterated.

And then, quite suddenly, on the very edge of the dark abyss of prehistory, ancient Delhi is dramatically spotlit, as if by the last rays of a dying sun. The light is shed by the text of the greatest piece of literature ever to have come out of the Indian subcontinent: the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

D then embarks on an archeological survey into ancient Delhi of lore - to the Mahabharatha and beyond, right to the Vedic origins of the civilization on the banks of the Yamuna - that is interesting by itself but adds precious little to the illumination of present Delhi. But it still shows how continuing traditions lie at the core of such cities. After all, there are only a handful of truly epic and truly modern cities.


Step 0: Tracing a City: The Present 

So, how does all this come together? Is D a travel writer or a new breed altogether? I wonder how the readers at the time greeted this book that makes not much of an effort towards being a travel chronicle and is quite blatantly an exercise in curiosity.

To D, Delhi is unique. This is why the historical, architectural and archeological approach was inevitable. For, this uniqueness is due to the fact that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too. Somehow different areas of Delhi seemed to have preserved intact different centuries, even different millennia. The Punjabi immigrants were a touchstone to the present day; with their nippy Maruti cars and fascination with all things new, they formed a lifeline to the 1980s. The old majors you would meet strolling in the Lodhi Gardens were pickled perhaps half a century earlier. Their walrus moustaches and Ealing comedy accents hinted that they had somehow got stuck in about 1946. The eunuchs in the Old City, some speaking courtly Urdu, might not have looked so out of place under the dais of the Great Mogul. The sadhus at Nigambodh Ghat I imagined as stranded citizens of Indraprastha, the legendary first Delhi of the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.

As they drove up the Ring Road, the motorway which for much of its length follows the old course of the Jumna. Driving up the dry riverbed was like looking at a section of Professor Lal's stratigraphy: on the way we drove through millennia of Delhi's history, the detritus of city after city spaced out on the old river bank. Leaving Lutyens's broad twentieth-century avenues we passed by the Purana Qila, the early Mughal addition to Delhi's bastions; after that we passed the shattered domes of Feroz Shah Kotla; then the magnificent walls of the Red Fort with their great ribbed chattris; and finally we drove under the walls of Salimgarh, the old Bastille of Delhi. Passing beyond all of these, we headed up towards the site of William Fraser's first house. And then on to the Sufi mystic villages on the outskirts. A journey into the past.


The book's final message:

There is still continuity here, a few surviving traditions, some lingering beauty, but you have to look quite hard to find it.







A Necessary Footnote [#1]  :

On the complete neglect of the mighty past, of the structures, of traditions, etc. Also a major face slap for ASI as D traces out one major monument after another in complete disrepair and neglect. Indeed, even of a nation that is too busy to look back on past glories and s busy building a shiny, plasticky future.

****

Today the passages are only blocked with a small plug of concrete; it should not be difficult to remove that plug and investigate what lies beyond. The problem would be to motivate India's impoverished and bureaucratic Archaeological Survey to take an interest in the matter. As Mr Prashad explained when we were leaving: 'You see actually in India today no one is thinking too much about these old historical places. India is a developing country. Our people are looking to the future only.'

****

The streets here are narrow and full of goats being fattened for Bakri Id. Pack-donkeys trot past carrying saddlebags full of rubble. As you pass into the Sita Ram bazaar and take in the grand old gateways tumbling down on either side of you, you begin to realize what has happened here. The same walls that now form the rickety paan shops and dirty godowns once supported sprawling mansions and the lovely Delhi courtyard houses known as havelis. You can see it for yourself: the slum was once a city of palaces.

****

In Shahjehanabad the town houses were so planned that a plain façade, decorated only with an elaborate gatehouse, would pass into a courtyard; off this courtyard would lead small pleasure gardens, the zenanas (harems), a guardhouse or a miniature mosque, the haveli library and the customary shish mahal or glass palace. The haveli was a world within a world, self-contained and totally hidden from the view of the casual passer-by. Now, however, while many of the great gatehouses survive, they are hollow fanfares announcing nothing. You pass through a great arch and find yourself in a rubble-filled car-park where once irrigation runnels bubbled. The shish mahals are unrecognizable, partitioned up into small factories and workshops; metal shutters turn zenana screens into locked store rooms; the gardens have disappeared under concrete. Only the odd arcade of pillars or a half-buried fragment of finely-carved late Mughal ornament indicates what once existed here.