Cities Do Not Die: On Reading City of Djinns

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This is the second book of Darlymple that I read recently, the earlier being "The Last Mughal". Like this book, "City of Djinns", I had also attempted a review and posted it on my blog. That is available at the following link.

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Cities Do Not Die: On Reading City of Djinns

Books are often shaped—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—by the intellectual climate in which they appear. Narratives about colonial India, for example, continue to oscillate between contrasting impulses: some emphasise the destructive legacy of empire on India’s economy, culture, and institutions, while others seek to recover and foreground the scientific and cultural achievements of precolonial India.

William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns opens against the backdrop of another such cultural moment. Dalrymple notes that Britain in the mid-1980s was experiencing what he calls a “Raj revival”: a wave of nostalgia that revisited colonial India through television, fiction, memoir, and public debate. Series such as The Jewel in the Crown captured audiences, newspaper correspondence columns debated the historical accuracy of films like Gandhi, and novels centred on imperial India enjoyed renewed attention.

Yet City of Djinns is not merely a product of this nostalgic climate. Nor is it an exercise in imperial reminiscence. It is, at its best, an attempt to understand Delhi through layered observation, historical excavation, and conversation.

Although often classified as travel writing, the book exceeds the genre's usual expectations. Dalrymple does not simply record what he sees; he constructs a mosaic of Delhi through archival research, memoirs, oral history, and encounters with an astonishing range of people. One moment, he is dealing with a severe landlady; in another, he is speaking to a loquacious Punjabi driver. Elsewhere, he meets eunuchs, dervishes, old Urdu scholars, descendants of Mughal nobility, expatriate chroniclers of fading Delhi culture, pigeon fanciers, calligraphers, ascetics on the banks of the Yamuna, and devotees at the Dargah of Ajmer. Through these encounters, Delhi emerges not as a city but as many cities layered upon one another.

The ambition of the book is extraordinary. Dalrymple attempts to trace Delhi’s historical and cultural continuity from the Sultanate and Mughal periods into the late twentieth century. His canvas includes architecture, memory, migration, changing social classes, fading artistic traditions, urban transformation, and the lingering consequences of Partition. He writes with equal attention to vanished grandeur and living decline.

Particularly memorable are his reflections on communities that once shaped Delhi but gradually lost their influence as times changed; on neighbourhoods transformed by migration; and on traditions that survive only as faint echoes of an older city. His account of the anti-Sikh violence following Indira Gandhi’s assassination is especially striking for the way it captures how quickly civilisation can reveal its fractures.

The historical sections gain authority from Dalrymple’s engagement with contemporary records and eyewitness accounts. He draws upon letters and memoirs of figures associated with late Mughal Delhi—among them Ochterlony, William Fraser, James Fraser, and Charles Metcalfe—to recreate a world at once cosmopolitan and fragile. As the author also observes in his other popular titles, in the earlier phases of British presence in India, some colonial officers adopted elements of Mughal culture and formed close social and familial ties with Indians—an aspect often overshadowed in simplified narratives of colonial separation.

Equally compelling is Dalrymple’s eye for transition. He notices not only how Delhi’s skyline changes—from colonial bungalows to vertical urban growth—but also how language, class, memory, and identity shift with it. Even English, he notes, carries residues of the Raj through words such as bungalow, cummerbund, pyjamas, and pundit.

Dalrymple also records with wit the everyday frictions of Indian bureaucracy: telephone applications, customs procedures, and administrative labyrinths that could bewilder both residents and visitors. These passages occasionally feel familiar to Indian readers, but they are written with enough humour and observation to remain engaging rather than exasperating.

The author is not entirely free from preference. His admiration for British imperial architecture occasionally surfaces quite openly. Commenting on New Delhi, he responds to Nehru’s criticism of the city as a symbol of imperial excess by arguing that it remains one of the finest architectural achievements of the British Empire—an opinion that readers may accept, contest, or simply note as part of Dalrymple’s sensibility.

Also deserving of appreciation is the breadth of reading behind the narrative. Like a careful researcher conducting a literature survey, Dalrymple engages extensively with earlier travel accounts and historical works. Among these are Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire, Manucci’s writings on Mughal India, and accounts of the Tughlaq period by Ibn Battuta. This literary scaffolding gives the book much of its depth.

Finally, a word about the title. City of Djinns is irresistible—and slightly deceptive. It hints at fantasy or magic realism, yet the book itself remains firmly grounded in history and observation. The metaphor of the djinn becomes Dalrymple’s way of asking a deeper question: how has Delhi, despite repeated invasions, destruction, partition, and upheaval, managed to renew itself again and again?

The answer comes through Pir Sadr-ud-Din, who tells Dalrymple that Delhi survives because the djinns love it too much to abandon it.

Dalrymple leaves us with an image that lingers long after the book ends: just as, in Hindu belief, a soul returns through successive incarnations, Delhi too seems destined to reinvent itself century after century—never quite the same city, and yet somehow always Delhi.

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By

Ananta Narayan Nanda

Balasore 22/5/2026

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