It opens up a long and bloody history of conquerors and blood-shed, of periods of glory and despondency, of exile and re-settlement. The author slowly peels the many layers of Delhi, by tracing the antecedents of the city’s famous monuments.

The maps and monuments she draws are really pretty, though much of the sketches have a distinct exotic, western gaze - man smoking hookah, an old cobbler, qawwali singers, a eunuch and so one.

Charmingly, Dalrymple was also newly married around this time, and provides a very flattering portrayal of his artist-wife Olivia, who has done the illustrations for the book. His land lady Mrs Puri, who likes to govern things with an iron hand, and his cab driver, Balvinder, a loutish, pan-chewing Punjabi fellow - are coloured with vivid, ironic strokes. Many interesting character dot his domestic world. Besides uncovering grand, epic stories around the city, the book is punctuated with delightful daily-life anecdotes that Dalrymple narrates with a mix of bemused exasperation and empathy. Still only 25, Dalrymple brought with him a sense of adventure and a charming wide-eyed curiosity to Delhi that he put together in this elegant, lush memoir. The whole city, then, seemed to be an endless and fascinating journey of discovery to the author, who had already by then acquired a reputation as a stunning travel writer with his first book In Xanadu.

Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horror, it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter.Moreover - I soon discovered - possessed a bottomless seam of stories, tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend,' he says in his introduction. 'It was so totally unlike anything I had seen before. Dalrymple had visited Delhi when he was all of seventeen and was instantly under its spell. While the former is about the early relationship between the English and native Indians, The Last Mughal largely is based on events around the 1857 revolt and the ouster of Delhi’s last king, Bahadur Shah Zafar.īoth the above books were born out of City of Djinns. What looked like a fling with India soon turned into a lasting romance, and the Scottish author followed it up with two more books on related themes that became the centrepiece of his literary career - White Mughals and The Last Mughal. For the book, part travelogue and memoir, the author spent nearly a year in Delhi unravelling the city's archaeological riches. For Dalrymple, who has come to acquire the status of a formidable travel writer today, it was City Of Djinns that marked the beginning of his fascination with Mughal history.

City of djinns a year in delhi