(Really somewhere between two and three stars for me.)One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin's wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It's not a fair comparison, really: both books include travel in India, and both feature art by the author's spouse, but Shopsin's book is more personal, while Dalrymple's book has more...

This was the wrong book to read prior to my trip to India. All of the fantastic stories that the author relates seem to end with, "these wonderful sights/monuments/environments/people have all been completely destroyed, and nothing is left except worthless ruins". He makes Delhi seem like a wasteland, all the more disgusting and pathetic in light of its former splendor. The only positive of this book is that the stories he relates are interesting. In short, this book was a major downer.

This book is an encyclopaedia for all common Dilliwalas and any Indian even slightly interested in knowing about Delhi and ancient India. This is what you can call ‘The Discovery of Delhi.’ Partly a travelogue, partly a history book and overall a pleasurable book. Dalrymple provides information not usually found in school history. He starts describing Delhi right from her very birth and the saga continues till the modern times. It is most fascinating when Dalrymple describes an ancient monument

City of Djinns: The Reader’s Journey I started reading The White Mughals sometime in an auto in Lucknow, in 2011. I still remember reading enchantedly of Old Delhi while sitting stuffed inside a crammed  "share-auto", dodging the remains of an equally old Lucknow (and close to the pre-Shah Jahani capital, of Agra). I remember missing my stop. I don’t remember when I left off reading it.Then, recently, I had an argument with a friend about that fiendishly invented TV series/Soap Opera ‘Jodhaa

William Dalrymple embarks upon a journey to unravel the history of Delhi, thus providing the reader with historical perspectives behind various parts of the city- a city which, as a Persian proverb goes, is destined to be lost by whoever who builds it. Set upon a period of a year of his stay in the capital, the narration opens up beautiful aspects of Delhi, including architectures erected in the Mughal phase (Humayun Fort, the Red Fort...), the Tughlaq phase, the British Raj; even dating back to...

This is the first of William Dalrymple that i am reading. Having being pushed into it via heavy recommendations, must say that WD fails to inspire. The book starts with a lot of promise but takes a meandering tone halfway through the narration. Delhi's intriguing past is a delicious topic that more than simply nudges your curiosity but WD is yet to bite a fulsome piece into it.Here's hoping that the latter half would live upto expectations!

Delhi is lucky to have William Dalrymple as a chronicler – not many cities get such exemplary treatment as this. I think I even preferred it to Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, just because Ackroyd presents himself as an expert dispensing knowledge, whereas Dalrymple is pure ingénu: curious, open-minded, he allows us to accompany him on his own journey of exploration and discovery which dovetails with the social and historical narratives he uncovers.For Dalrymple, Delhi is a city of accumu...

At the still wet-behind-the-ears age of twenty-five, Dalrymple and his wife went to live in Delhi, and this amazing book is the result of his first year in the city.It is an utter delight from beginning to end. A smorgasbord of historical people and places, myths and facts, festivals and parties, pilgrimages and ancient texts. It is also full of touching examples of everyday life - as Dalrymple explores with a kindly eye, the nooks and crannies of Delhi and its people.The scope of the book is in...

“Some said there were seven dead cities of Delhi and that the current one was the eighth; others counted fifteen or twenty-one. All agreed that the crumbling ruins of these towns were without number. But where Delhi was unique was that, scattered all around the city, there were human ruins too…All the different ages of man were represented in the people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side. Minds set in different ages walked the same pavements, drank the same water, returned

It took me a good month to get around to completing the book and it was a long journey through the annals of history surrounding the city of Delhi, which was absolutely stunning. What stands about the book for me is how the author's narrative draws up on people who live in and around the city and their understanding of what Delhi means to them : Starting from partition era displaced Punjabis, invisible Anglo Indians, the marginalized Hijra community, less noticed calligraphers and Kabooter Baaz

William Dalrymple is the best travel writer(only exception is V.S.Naipaul)"In Delhi, right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle", shows he wrote the book with exceptional observation. Teeth-grinding horror episodes of 84 Sikh riots and his conviction to discovery truth behind the story of Mahabharata capture imagination to seemingly endless degree. "Delhi ladies very good. Having breasts like mangoes", Second rate filthy expression of Mr Singh(his driver), reflects his playfulnes...

Dalrymple, in his book “Delhi: City of Djinns” made his predilections very clear. He believed that Delhi’s glory days were when it was allegedly a centre of Muslim culture (and, in his view, its essence was still best preserved in that culture) while the “Punjabi refugees” (Hindus) had debased Delhi through their allegedly loud and money-minded attitudes. These biases are evident in this book.

I'm not sure if I can call myself a Delhi-walla after reading City of Djinns. Despite living in Delhi for the past 17 years, I had not known most of the sites mentioned, except on a superficial level. Delhi today is completely unrecognizable from the beautiful city that it once was. Dalrymple successfully manages to bring to life that old Delhi with all its charms and customs. He employs a rather unusual method, that of going through the history in a reverse chronological order. Thus we start i...

I FINALLY finished this, just so I wouldn't have to carry it to another strange Balkan country. Such high hopes dashed again. I really feel like Dalrymple is some kind of hermaphrodite, who can't decide if he's proudly English or proudly Scottish/English, but he does spend the first part of the book ridiculing Indians who still think they're English, then 10 full days more trying to meet the city's eunuchs, so I guess that excuses his broad apologia for a Scottish governor and empire builder who...

“City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple was one of my first introduction to Delhi. It gives you a portrait of a city with layers upon layers of history with hidden pockets of a past much more interesting than its present. Sadly, the city of Delhi that Dalrymple experience in the early 1990s no longer exists except in pockets. The city has grown exponentially and become much more polluted. It sprawls and does not feel like it has a center. But the book is useful as a portrait of a Westerner who cam...