Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure.

Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city's Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven 'dead' cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city-today's Delhi. Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. Flamingo.Read ePUB City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi Ebook Online ePUB Download and Download ePUB City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi Ebook Online ePUB Download. Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (1994).ĭalrymple was played by Bollywood and stage actor Tom Alter, with Zohra Sehgal playing the role of Nora Nicholson, a British national who prefers to stay in India after it achieves independence. The book was adapted into a play in 2007 by Rahul Dasinnur Pulkeshi of Delhi-based Dreamtheatre. The book followed his established style of historical digressions, tied in with contemporary events and a multitude of anecdotes. Still more seriously, he finds evidence of the city’s violent past and present day-the 1857 mutiny against British rule the Partition massacres in 1947 and the riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. Dalrymple describes ancient ruins and the experience of living in the modern city: he goes in search of the history behind the epic stories of the Mahabharata.

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, Īs well as whirling dervishes and eunuch dancers (‘a strange mix of piety and bawdiness’). It is his second book, and culminated as a result of his six-year stay in New Delhi. City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993) is a travelogue by William Dalrymple about the historical capital of India, Delhi.

City of djinns a year in delhi