PENGUIN BOOKS CITY OF DJINNS

William Dalrymple is the author of several highly acclaimed books including In Xanadu, The Age of Kali, Sacred India, and From the Holy Mountain. His latest is Viking’s The White Moguls. He divides his time among London, Delhi, and Edinburgh.

Praise for City of Djinns .

“At a time when the book of travels is beginning to lose its fashionable allure, City of Djinns is not really a travel book at all. It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city ... Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur. Even his excursions into the world of the eunuchs are conducted with a kind of grave innocence. He is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand ... hours and hours of pleasure for his readers.”

— Jan Morris, The Independent

“Scholarly and marvellously entertaining ... A considerable feat.”

— Dervia Murphy, Spectator

“City of Djinns is an entertaining mix of history and diary informed by a deep curiosity about the ways in which the ghosts of even the most distant past still walk Delhi in the twentieth century.”

— Daily Telegraph

“Unlikight=">“Ue much of modern travel writing [City of Djinns] is informative, learned and funny ... a lively and sometimes profound book.”

— Economist

“On one level there are the amusing rites of passage, the struggles with bureaucracy the eccentricity of Dalrymple’s landlord, all entertaining and related. Dalrymple has a way of letting you smell and feel the city. There are beautiful chiselled descriptions of a grand capital ... but much of the book’s strength lies in Dalrymple’s skill in peeling the historical onion and showing how new Delhi resonates with the old ... A splendid tapestry.”

— Sunday Telegraph

“A sympathetic and engaging portrait of this age-old city ... Pursuing his research through the narrow alleys, mosques, abandoned ruins and tombs of Delhi, Dalrymple encounters a range of folk who continue to give Delhi its special character. Pigeon fanciers, Sufi mystics, Moslem healers, musicians, calligraphers, philosophers and a guild of eunuchs all provide Dalrymple with entertaining insights ... It is fine, entertaining, well-written stuff, thoroughly researched but with none of the stern academic tone that so many historical profiles adopt. What sustains it, apart from his erudite knowledge, is Dalrymple’s sense of historical adventure. Just open your eyes, he says. If you know how to look, even the abandoned ruins of the past are alive.”

— Financial Times

“City of Djinns is a delight. William Dalrymple is in command of his subject, seizes the reader and uses his skill to tempt and tantalize ... The city of djinns is Delhi and Dalrymple reveals it like a Dance of the Seven Veils. It is very intricately organized: ostensibly structured around a year which he and his artist wife Olivia spent in Delhi, paced by vivid descriptions of weather change as signal of seasons, and by the formal punctuation of life, learning, loving, and death ... The book is Dalrymple’s journey into the soul of Delhi.” — Books in Scotland

“An expansive and inclusive work, richly peopled ... an enlightening and entertaining book.”

— Literary Review

Penguin Books Ltd,lign="cen Registered Of6ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1993
Published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1994
Published in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright © William Dalrymple, 1993

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Dalrymple, William.
City of Djinns : a year of Delhi / William Dalrymple ;
illustrations by Olivia Fraser.
p. cm.
Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-12701-8

1. Delhi (India) — Description and travel. 2. Delhi (India) —
Social life and customs. 3. India — History.
DS486.D3 C58 2003
954’.56052 — dc21 2002033382

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