![]() ![]() His own personal adventures are limited and structured enough that they feel illuminating rather than self-indulgent, and his relationship in particular with his taxi-wallah connects with his various jaunts to historical sites and to meet with various people who represent different aspects of Delhi’s history. ![]() It’s a clever approach, one that creates a surprising degree of suspense that would have been lacking if we’d gone the other way: the Raj and Partition and modern India are well enough known, but the deeper threads, the long-lost layers, keep us wondering just how far back we can go and what strange wonders we might discover there.ĭalrymple marries this story to a cycle of a year spent in Delhi. In it, Dalrymple peels back the layers of Delhi’s history, moving in reverse-chronological order: Partition, the British Raj, the Mughals, and so on, back to the scant remains of the time of the Mahabarata. ![]() ![]() William Dalrymple is a deft storyteller with a fine sense of pacing, an eye for detail, and the depth of research to back it all up.Ĭity of Djinns isn’t his most famous book, but it’s the one most structured as a travelogue about India, so that’s what I read. OK, so I can see what all the hype is about. William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) ![]()
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