Book
City of Djinns
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William Dalrymple spends a year exploring Delhi as a city built from successive layers of conquest, migration and memory. Conversations with residents, scholars and survivors lead him through Mughal ruins, Sufi shrines, colonial neighbourhoods and the communities reshaped by Partition.
The book combines travel writing, archival history and portraiture to show how earlier Delhis continue to inhabit the modern metropolis. Its recurring concern is not simply the survival of monuments, but the survival of languages, customs and personal memories after the fall of the Mughal court, the uprising of 1857 and the end of the British Raj.