City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

Increasingly, however, William was not among the diners. Not only did he prefer to be on the move with his troops in the wilds of Haryana or fighting the Gurkhas in the hills above Gangotri, he also found Metcalfe and the bores of the European community intolerable. When in Delhi, he was happy to mix freely with his friends from the Mughal aristocr

When Shah Jehan moved the court from Agra to the new city of Shahjehanabad in 1648, it was Jahanara Begum who built the Chandni Chowk, the principal avenue of the Old City. Half-way down the boulevard she built a vast caravanserai which, before it was destroyed in 1857, was regularly described by visitors to Delhi as the most magnificent building o

When this area was conquered by the armies of Islam in the early seventh century, many of the hermits converted to the new religion and helped inspire a more elusive and mystical strand in Islam, a reaction to the severe and orthodox certainties then being crystallized in the Quran. Impatient for Paradise, these Muslim mystics - known as Sufis, der

During his lifetime, the Sultan had built himself a massive tomb of red sandstone. This he erected in the very centre of Jahanpanah, the new city of Delhi he had first built, then destroyed.

In the middle of this terror, Tughluk decided to send an embassy to China. As his ambassador he chose Ibn Battuta, the man whom he had nearly executed only a few months before. Battuta was still living as a dervish when the Sultan’s emissaries arrived before his cave. The Sultan [had] sent me saddled horses, slave girls and boys, robes and a sum of

‘But don’t your pupils get good jobs? And doesn’t their success encourage others?’ ‘No. They are all Muslims. There is no future for them in modern India. Most become gundas or smugglers.’

‘Of course, people of my father’s generation hated the whole thing. He and my uncle Harcourt thought it was frightfully extravagant, and that those lakhs of money could have been far better used elsewhere. Moreover they always felt that the prophecy — whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it - would come true. If ever anybody raised the subj

calligraphy. In one corner sat a qalander a holy fool - deep in animated conversation with an invisible djinn. He sat squatting on his calves, nodding and smiling, lifting his hands in protestation, twitching his head from side to side.

‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains ...’ It reminded me of a conversation I had had two years before in a camp near Ramallah on the West Bank. Did I know the orange groves at Bid