To be a hijra is seen as a curse in India, but people are allowed to watch them dance. The blessing of a jijra is considered to be unusually potent. It can make a barren woman fertile, scare off malevolent djinns (spirits), or nullify the evil eye. In the streets hijras are jeered at and sometimes pelted with rubbish. Yet at a poor family's most crucial and public celebrations, at a marriage or birth of a male child, the absence of a hijra would almost invalidate the whole ceremony." It's a sad occasion. Husband and wife have never met one another and do not do so until towards the end of the wedding ceremony. She in in her early forties. Her father was unable to afford the costs of a wedding when she was younger. The groom is quite a bit younger than the bride. Both look very unhappy. He says that the influence of the British has almost completely disappeared, and the Indians regard their stay in India much as the British regard the stay of the Romans in Britain. 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.

City of Djinns — Book Review - Medium City of Djinns — Book Review - Medium

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] 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. 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. My God, I just saw Dalrymple interviewed on a dodgy History channel documentary! The documentary is hosted by a woman whose Muslim grandparents never trusted Ghandi, and wouldn't you know Dalrymple agrees. What's so weird, aside from his alleged expertise, is that he shows up on camera seated in a lotus position, with bare feet, answering in a candence so Indian I had to be certain it was him doing the talking. What a show.Perhaps the most impressive parts of the book, though, are the result of more intensive research that takes Dalrymple out of the library and into the streets. In particular his long, delicate attempts to get first-hand interviews and experience with Delhi's hijra community – representing a kind of fusion of transgender identity with India's eunuch tradition – are amazing, and result in some remarkable testimony from within a very closed and secretive subculture. Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’ More depressing even than Shastri Bhavan is the headquarters of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited. The Telephone Nigam is India’s sole supplier of telecommunications to the outside world. Without the help of the Telephone Nigam one is stranded. This is something every person who works for the organization knows; and around this certainty has been built an empire dedicated to bureaucratic obfuscation, the perpetration of difficulty, the collection of bribes and, perhaps more than anything else, the spinning of great glistening cocoons of red tape.

City of Djinns – William Dalrymple (en-GB) City of Djinns – William Dalrymple (en-GB)

City of Djinns is a mostly light and charming read, one that will especially interest anyone even remotely interested in Delhi’s rich history, culture. Yet he has his principles. Like his English counterpart, he is a believer in hard work. He finds it hard to understand the beggars who congregate at the lights. ‘Why these peoples not working?’ he asks. ‘They have two arms and two legs. They not handicrafted.’ The City of Djinns is one of the first books by William Dalrymple which doesn't revolve around the history of India, rather it represents various anecdotes of his time in India and explores the history of India with the help of various characters he meets, like the Puri family, the driver, the customs officer, and British survivors of the Raj, [1] Literary accomplishment was to be valued...but more important still was grammatical correctness 'In society the mirza should (always) try to guard against the shame of committing any mistake in conversation, for such incorrectness in speech is considered a great fault in a gentleman. They keep pigeons with different abilities - high fliers, fast fliers, fighters...which they train to do all sorts of things. Pigeon keeping was the "civilized old pastime of the Mughal court" Its delights and dangers were illustrated by Mughal miniaturists, and there were laws governing its practice.

About the contributors

I read this book through several places in Delhi. I read it in Lajpat Nagar. I read it in Khan Market. I read this book today through my college at Hauz Khas, metro from RK Puram to Nehru Enclave, metro stations, and finally as I was passing the park at East Of Kailash in the auto, I finished reading the book (yes, I even read it in auto in the chase to finish it).

City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

Across the top of the piece of paper, in huge red letters, was blazoned the slogan: A NATIONALIST TO THE CORE AND A FREEDOM FIGHTER. Mr Gupta straightened his glasses and read from the charter: The scope of the book is incredible, but his skills as a writer are so brilliant that you just float effortlessly from theme to theme, carried on a cloud of warmth and humour. The book covers an amazing spectrum though, and of course different bits of it will appeal more or less to different people. Even so, it is all hugely readable. It was also important for any aspiring young gallant to give good parties. Towards this end the mirza should make a point of smoking scented tobacco blended with hashish; precious gems - emeralds and pearls - should be ostentatiously crushed into his wine.... The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. 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.The heat had sprung up quite suddenly: the change from late winter to high summer - six months of European weather - was compressed into little more than a Delhi fortnight..... One day everyone was laughing and singing in the Delhi gardens, covering each other with pink powder and coloured Holi-water; the next they had imprisoned themselves in the silent air-conditioned purdah of their bedrooms and offices, waiting patiently for the reprieve of evening. So far, I have only focussed on what the author has presented. What he has missed is more appalling. There is no mention of the British role in the Partition, poverty or institutions existing as they are today, or any discussion around how much intellectual wealth was looted by the British even when the occasion arises. When the Mirza-nama is found in a "private library", WD simply brushes past, but such a casual admission unsettles anyone with a sense of historical justice. An opportunity to discuss the same is sadly, lost. The speaker pushed himself forward, holding together his bulging dhoti with one hand. He was an enormously fat man, perhaps seventy years old, with heavy plastic glasses and grey stubble on his chin.

City of Djinns | PDF | Delhi | Mughal Empire - Scribd City of Djinns | PDF | Delhi | Mughal Empire - Scribd

And about Fraser, who acquired the Indian traditions & customs and mixed enthusiastically with the common gentry, Dalrymple quotes Jacquemont's memoirs... Horoscopes. These are incredibly important to many people in India, especially around marriage decisions. Even the date of the wedding has to be astrologically chosen, and this can result in wedding jams, with everyone trying to get married at more or less the same time. 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. But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too…All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned to the same dust.” It was said that not one private Lutyens bungalow would survive undemolished by the turn of the century.In both Delhis it was the ruins that fascinated me. However hard the planners tried to create new colonies of gleaming concrete, crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient Islamic colleges – medresses – would intrude, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal gardens, curving the road network and obscuring the fairways of the golf course. 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. 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. 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. 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.