Candid writing allows readers to see and feel the city for themselves without having to hear the dominating voice of a historian too often. The historian exercises humor and irony to paint the dismal state of Delhi’s architectural inheritance. Simpleton Delhiites are shown to be open about their wounds and proud of their prejudices towards each other. His taxi driver, landlord, Imams of purani-Dilli, Sarkari babus, aloof & regretful Anglo-Indians, barely surviving Naach communities, have all been presented in their peculiar misery or inner bounty, sometimes both. On the face of it, City of Djinns is an entertaining account of Dalrymple’s interactions with Delhi and its people that are no less eccentric than fictional characters. It is absolutely essentially the same feature that persuades me to ignore the standards of a typical book review and rather treat this piece as an artifice that makes City of Djinns more than just a historian’s travelogue. In the collective lack of a single protagonist, a plot, or simply an ambition, a reader can’t help but treat a book dwelled in the author’s expertise of treating and handling historical jewels, in its entirety.
Yet here I am, sharing a piece of my struggle to collect words, perspectives even my cluelessness to close yet another book that I deeply enjoyed.
If however, one reads it as a chronicle of the author’s counter-argument with the city’s history itself, I am at best a novice audience without tools or intelligence at her disposal to critique it on its academic or literary merit. As a travelogue, it is by far the most interesting one I have read since I can marginally see through the evidence, not that I can deconstruct it any better. Can an average random reader judge historical non-fiction by an eminent historian? That’s the first of few anxieties that cropped up in my mind while thinking about how best to review City of Djinns by William Dalrymple.
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