City of Djinns by William Dalrymple – A Book Review

          William Dalrymple, in one of his interviews says, “If I had five more lives, I would have lived all of them in India.”

I have travelled to Delhi many a times. If you ask a non-Delhiite about the city, though they would awe at the roads and structures, complain about the filth and crowd in some parts of the city, one common thing that they would say is ‘it’s a city of snobs’ and so would I.

Delhi – a city like any other city in the world; what’s the fascination attached to it? History, I would say and so says WD; a beguiling city built from a scratch and then destroyed, reduced to a scratch. And built again only to be destroyed again, and again, and again; like a potter’s creation at the wheel, marvelled at for some time and then thrown again to the hearth by the vagarious potter who doesn’t want anyone else to see its beauty.

Conquered by the mightiest of conquerors the world has ever seen, Delhi, apart from being their capital of power, was like a beautiful princess that every king or emperor vied for. It held a certain enigmatic love for them; a love, a masculine, salacious consummation that these monarchs couldn’t possibly find in their harems.

            WD’s research of the city is absolute. His travelogue extends from the epidermal surface of the current unconcerned multitude of the Delhi people, and excavates to scour layer upon layer of treachery, annihilation, love and power; an era long buried in the city’s abyss. WD talks of the mammoth structures the city hosts, their comparison to facades in the west, their historical bearing and the neglected state that they are in today. The ‘Red Fort’ receives a special mention and righty so; the throne from where was ruled most of India, all of Pakistan and great chunks of Afghanistan during the time of the celebrated Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan. WD writes, it was the apex of Moghul power, the golden age of unparalleled prosperity.

            The story of Delhi is incomplete without the mention of three important entities; the Moghuls, the Britishers and the bloody partition. Powerful and obstinate rulers like Timur the lame, Muhammed –bin-Tughlaq, Nadir Shah, Shah Alam, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb, WD says, had their own doctrines, their own laws to abide by, each so different from the other. Some respected the saints, the others abhorred and beheaded them. The city’s story is replete with acts of deceit, treachery, barbarity and incest too. How many people would believe that the great emperor Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife Mumtaz was salaciously close to his eldest daughter Jahanara Begum. Needless to say, each king had his own harem, decorated and filigreed with the choicest of women.

            “As you sow, so shall you reap”, probably was quoted of Shah Jehan, an emperor who, though liberal than the others, conquered his place to the throne by killing his brothers and their children and capturing his father. Not surprisingly the barbarous Aurangzeb, one of his neglected sons imprisoned him, killed his own kin  and presented to him on the dining table, the lifeless head of his favourite son and successor to the throne Dara Shukoh.

WD meets historians, researchers, knowledgeable people, old members or their descendants from that time in history. With the changes in the throne, the language of Delhi has come a long way though the transformation isn’t a pleasant one. From Persian to Urdu, an immaculate language delivering and demanding respect, the language of the poets, the city now has to do with Hindi. Delhi, once was the land of poets like Mir, Jalal-ud-din Rumi, Ghalib and the likes, and the greatest gift to a king would be the latest verses from the great Mir than any jewel or tapestry.

While meandering around the streets of Delhi, WD meets some interesting multitude like the eunuchs, the masters of the pigeon fights, the leftover Britishers and their families, now called Anglo Indians, the survivors of partition like his landlady and the driver. The eunuchs, though in the present time are rebuked, they had a stronghold in the days of the emperor; they were a part of the courts, caretakers of the harems. At the Nizam-ud-din mosque, a place thronged by both the rich and the poor, the saints tell WD about the Djinns, their existence since God created man, how they can be captured and used.

Delhi, as WD rightly points out, post the India-Pakistan partition is itself divided into two conspicuous parts; old Delhi sporting the remnants of the Moghul era in bits and pieces and New Delhi, a facade of Lutyens’s brilliant architecture and now a house to the Punjabis. India, always has been an easy country to be besieged because of its religious differences. The bloodbath of partition is a horrific tale where entire villages were annihilated, people burnt alive, women raped – a crowd has no face, or rather has the face of a terror. As Dr. Jaffery, a historian tells WD, “In this city, culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It doesn’t take much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed.”

            WD’s research is excellent; he presents facets of the city which a tourist would normally miss. If you ever happen to visit the city, sitting on the ramparts of a fort or marvelling the intricate designs of a palace, or being blessed by the saints in one of the mosques, the djinns will most definitely bring to life snippets from this book. And as you relive the glorious incidents of that era, you would shudder at the thought of living under the rule of a monarch.

The worst part about reading history is that it’s almost always a biased, colourful story written by sycophants; WD’s travelogue isn’t that, it is unbiased, written without any obligation or pressure.

My rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 7/10

Image copyright:

Book Cover - http://www.amazon.in/City-Djinns-Delhi-William-Dalrymple/dp/0143031066
WD image - http://gulfnews.com/culture/people/william-dalrymple-if-i-had-five-more-lives-i-d-live-them-all-in-india-1.1152542

William Dalyrympe

 

 

The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt – A book review

 

Only if life were a story....

But life is a story, isn’t it; every moment lived, of everyone’s life, some glorious, some plain, some recounted by grandparents, some cherished, some not so cherished. Some events make it to the history books, almost often quoted to the best of imperfection; others exist as individual or collective memories.

A historical fiction, Byatt’s story is a mammoth one, a tapestry upon which are woven intricately, colourfully and carefully, a design, a pattern that appeals to the readers for its individual portraits as much as for the entire landscape it creates. It’s a universe where the worlds of fairies, gnomes, sylphs and spirits have as much importance as the flesh and bone of myriad visible humans.

Olive Wellwood is a story teller, a writer rather; a writer of children’s books, a respected and admired one. She writes imaginary stories for each of her children, publishes them to the world; she hunts for her characters in museums, in vases and historical portraits, in puppet shows, in her children. Tom, her favourite son seems to be trapped in his story, hers and can’t get out. Like the prince who lost and can’t find his shadow, Tom seems to be lost and can’t find himself, can’t place himself in the word like everyone else so easily does, or so it seems.

It’s a difficult life for adults, but more so for children, especially the ones getting out of their cocoons of infanthood to find a place in the world. Unlike fawns and calves, we can’t start walking a few minutes after being pushed out of the womb; fortunately or unfortunately, we are humans. We need to be nurtured to get a grip. Who should they imitate, what’s good and what’s not, is it okay to be themselves – a plethora of unguided, often misguided, at times unanswered questions haunt the teenager as every single day proves to be a different one as they saunter towards the path of adulthood. It’s bad to have no options, but worse to have enough of them.

Though at the Wellwood household and the entangled families of their near ones, the children are treated as growing adults and their choices are honoured, the children find themselves at most times in a midden of deception. And in the midst of this treachery, they fall, grope, struggle, rebel to get away. They discover, things that should have been best left to the slothful beast of ignorance; but they do, they discover the frightful things they shouldn’t, that others shouldn’t about them.

Like the vagarious genius of Benedict Fludd and his apprentice Philip, Byatt creates them and her other characters from clay and like their beautifully carved, intricate and meticulous vases and pots, she moulds and shapes them. But the pots don’t be themselves without going through the hearth of the furnace and so does Byatt, put her characters, children and adults alike through the conflagration of life and relationships. Some are broken, some shine like a gilded blaze – a delight to the senses.

At times, it feels like you are reading newspaper excerpts of a bygone era. The Fabians, the Quakers, the Socialists and the Anarchists, the Nihilists, their thoughts, their ideologies and idealism run like veins through the story. Byatt’s canvas is replete with the arts and crafts, puppeteers and their wooden dolls, music and festivals, museums and extravagances, the rustic beauty of the countryside, the wilderness, cultures and their nuances, the dangling sword of war and then the war itself. As is the sagacious disposition of geniuses, in this labyrinth too, the author, like a master puppeteer pulls and loosens the strings of her marionettes to perfection and woos her audience, who keep their hands glued to the page, refrain from letting their eyes to wander and yet let their heart and mind to. The era is one where heterosexuality isn’t abhorred, where age is no barrier, where a single episode of intimate, salacious closeness is forgotten as easily as it happened, though it results in the placement of a seed in a womb; doubtful parentage isn’t disturbing. A girl you treated as your friend, a sister, is asked to be called your mother the next day!

The story also deals with the plight of women of that time, of all times, their fight to their entitlement to suffrage, to individualism, to find their feet in the land of men. As the frustrated Florence says,
“The truth is that the women we are (readying to be doctors, researchers, educated) – have become – are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if we change, and they don’t, there will be no help for us. We shall be poor monsters.”
“A woman has to be extraordinary; she can’t just do things as though she had a right.”

A delightful read, Byatt’s characters, their rawness, their eccentricity, their plight, their vagaries, their love, their disgust will stay with you for a long time after you’ve turned the last page. At times, one might feel lost, frustrated with the neglect of a character (there are many), but Byatt ensures that her marionettes are not hanging from the stand for too long – she brings them to life when you think you are on the brink of letting go and moving on, asking, begging for more!

My rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10

Picture copyright:
ASByatt image - http://readingsubtly.blogspot.in/2012/04/madness-and-bliss-critical-vs-primitive.html

The Children's Book image - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Book

 

A. S. Byatt