Here’s another book that has been on my TBR list for a while! I heard of William Dalrymple when This Nook Is For A Book posted about From the Holy Mountain, also by Dalrymple all the way back in 2020! I thought it sounded fascinating and finally borrowed City of Djinns from the library.

Subtitled: A Year in Dehli, City of Djinns is an exploration of the history and people of Dehli. Dalrymple and his wife have moved to India for a year and rent a home from the eccentric but also very successful Mrs Puri. As we get to know Mr and Mrs Puri, his driver Valvinder Singh, and a few other people, we start to go into the history of Dehli. Dalrymple starts with something relatively recent – the partitioning of India and Pakistan, but we gradually move further and further back in time, to the Mughal empire and eventually to the mythological founding of the city itself. Along the way, Dalrymple meets a variety of people, from Anglo-Indians who opted to stay in India after the British retreated to learned professors like Dr Jaffery. Each person starts a mini-journey, as Dalrymple investigates the history that they hold.

Fun fact: the words veranda and bungalow are based on Hindi, the word candy is based on Sanskrit (khaṇḍa being the word for “fragment”, from there it travels to Arabic and then to French before going to English), and the word pyjamas comes from Urdu and Persian! I’ve always thought that most common English words were from Latin and French (or native to the language) so it’s interesting to see how some common words come from India, or as the book more accurately puts it, “could never have been developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.”

My favourite part of the book is definitely the way history and travel is mixed. A new friend or a new location is enough to spark a digression into the history of Dehli. Apart from one section, where the transition between history and travelogue felt jarring, the book does a good job balancing both aspects.

As an aside, this book was published in 1993 and I definitely think that attention spans were generally longer back then. These chapters were about 70 pages on my kobo which I found very long – I suppose the internet (and thrillers) have conditioned me to expect snappy, fast reads! Still, it didn’t take very long to get into the rhythm of this book.

Overall, this is a fascinating and vividly written book. Dalrymple has a clear affection for India and for Dehli, and it was a pleasure to follow him during his year living there! I’m sure the city has changed even more since he visited, so it would be interesting to one day visit and see what it’s like for myself!

Featured Image: Photo from Canva