City of Djinns - Hardcover

Dalrymple, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000215725X ISBN 13: 9780002157254

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1993

Synopsis

Indraprastha is the Hindu name for the first, mythical Delhi. In this book the author peels back the successive encrusting layers of Delhi's history, using both the material and the human remains of each period as a touchstone with the present. With each of the six cities of Delhi being revealed in respective chapters, the climax, the final chapter, tells of the mythical first city, whose beginnings, told in the Mahamarata, form the principle Hindu creation myth. This book is a portrait of Delhi, the mother of all cities. Its dry plains are the fertile meeting point of all the great cultures of South Asia, the place where Rajput, Persian, Afghan and British influences all intermingle. By the author of "In Xanadu".

About this title

Review:

“Delightful... Surely one of the funniest books about India”
TLS

“Now read by Tim Pigott-Smith, City of Djinns gets a wonderful new lease of life. Dalrymple has a rare gift for historical narrative and catches the engaging, Anglo-Indian speech of his cast with telling accuracy.”
Independent 23/5/98

From the Back Cover:

Certainly, said the Sufi mystic, he could show William Dalrymple a djinn: but he would run away. With his wife Olivia, William stayed for a year in Delhi. Lodging with the beady-eyed Mrs Puri and her eccentric husband, rushing around in the International Backside taxi of Balvinder Singh, the sights and sensations of the city and the Delhi-wallahs closed in around him. Through the narrow alleys of the Old City, along the broad boulevard of the New City of the Raj, he pursued the spirit of the people and their living history through the burning heat and bitter cold of Delhi weather, finally to discover, in the crashing rains of the monsoon, his own and eternal City of Djinns.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 000215725X
• ISBN 13: 9780002157254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320