Dalrymple can always be trusted to create poetic travelogues, and his year in Delhi in this book is not a letdown! He traverses the lines between anecdotal story telling and lessons in history easily, although not as masterfully as his other books.
My own visits to Delhi — short days in mid-2000s — made some of his 1980s references feel distant; I also hadn’t realized the depth of Mughal influence in Delhi. One passage to me, in particular, captured the way Dalrymple weaves history, legend, and the enduring presence of the mystic in Delhi:
“Standing there in the dark temple, as the rain lashed down on the ghats, I realized that of course it must have been the sadhus here on the banks of the Jumna who had preserved this most ancient of Delhi legends: the story of the Ten Horse Sacrifice and, long epochs before that, the tale of the sacred shastras emerging from the river flooded by the monsoon cloudburst. It was a wonderful legend: the mythical story of Delhi’s first birth linked with the undeniable fact of its annual rebirth in the monsoon rains.
Indraprastha had fallen; six hundred years of Muslim domination had come and gone; a brief interruption by the British was almost forgotten. But Shiva, the oldest living God in the world, was still worshipped; Sanskrit – a language which predates any other living tongue by millennia – was still read, still spoken. Moreover, the sadhus and rishis – familiar figures from the Mahabharata – remained today, still following the rigorous laws of India’s most ancient vocation: giving up everything to wander the face of the earth in search of enlightenment; renouncing the profane in the hope of a brief glimpse of the sacred. In these wet and dishevelled figures sitting cross-legged under the neem and banyan trees of the river bank lay what must certainly be the most remarkable Delhi survival of all.”
Perplexed Potatoes 