Delhi: a partial reading list

(This is an old story--compiled this list in 2006 for Outlook, but can't find it in my archives. It needs updating, but I still love most of the books featured here.)

The Delhi reading list









City of Djinns: William Dalrymple (Penguin)



First published in 1993, William Dalrymple's exuberant account of a year in Delhi wears its age lightly. As the writer and his wife meet eunuchs, gently sozzled taxi drivers, nostalgic Anglo-Indians and the mandatory batty landlord, Delhi's exasperations and comforts become theirs to claim. Running parallel to the personal story of the Dalrymples is the crisp account of historical Delhi, from the first city of the British Empire to the heart of Mughal rule to Indraprastha. Necessary reading for the outsider; pure entertainment for the insider.



The Delhi Omnibus (Percival Spear, Narayani Gupta, R E Frykenberg) (OUP)



If you have room for only one reader about the city, this is it. Percival Spear's two books were published between 1945-1950, but still offer an authoritative account of the history of Delhi, and of the city's ups and downs in the twilight of the Mughal Empire. Narayani Gupta's account of Delhi covers the last years of the Mughals, examines Delhi's role in the 1857 uprising, and looks at the city after Independence. The essays collated and edited by R E Frykenberg cover personalities as disparate as Nizamuddin Auliya and Herbert Baker, and look at Delhi's architecture, population and cultural growth.



The Oxford India Mirza Ghalib (Editor, Ralph Russell; OUP)



Ghalib came to Delhi from Agra around 1810, as a newly married man aged thirteen, wrote prolifically if rarely lucratively, sparred with his rival Zauq at Bahadur Shah Zafar's court, and survived the savage upheavals of 1857, dying in 1869 in poverty. Ralph Russell's reader is perhaps the most comprehensive introduction to Ghalib's life, times and work, blending scholarship with lighter anecdotes about Ghalib's famous love of mangoes. If Russell's voluminous tome is too daunting, try Gulzar's slim 221-page life of Ghalib (Rupa & Co), which explores Ghalib's Delhi in detail, from the world of the courts to the crowded Old Delhi mohalla the poet lived in.



Rich Like Us: Nayantara Sahgal (HarperCollins)



Published in 1985, Rich Like Us was Sahgal's blistering analysis of the Emergency imposed by her first cousin, Indira Gandhi. Several of Sahgal's novels have explored the politics of newly independent India, and readers might want to read Rich Like Us alongside A Situation in New Delhi. Sonali, a young, idealistic civil servant, is made to suffer for objecting to the establishment of a new soft-drink factory; the deal exposes much of the ruthless corruption of the Emergency regime. Rose is an Englishwoman here to be part of a family that doesn't want her; when she stumbles across too much information, her stepson, a government minister, seeks to have her removed. Sahgal was scathing about the involvement of the elite, from bureaucrats to lawyers to politicians, in the cruelty and oppressiveness of the Emergency, and she made her points in style.



Delhi: Khushwant Singh (Penguin)



The grand old sardar of Indian literature is something of an icon in Delhi, and his fondness for Scotch, scholarship and gossip is legendary. "I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Bhagmati when I have had my fill of whoring in foreign lands," begins Delhi: A Novel. This bawdy, lubricious, ambitious work fell short of his early novels--I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Train to Pakistan, but it's still fun to read. The narrator is an ageing journalist attempting to cover 700 years of Delhi's history with help from courtesans, eunuchs and the odd foreign lady archaeologist, but as he warns, this often reads like "The Fucking Man's Guide to Delhi".



The Brainfever Bird: I Allan Sealy (Picador)



Brain Fever Bird shifts between St Petersburg and Delhi, and I don't know about the citizens of St Petersburg , but the citizens of Delhi have rarely been the recipients of such a wonderful love letter. The story, a tangled tale of biological warfare, puppetry and plague, pales before Sealy's descriptions of the city, from the "shrunken, much-molested stream"of the Yamuna to the grimy alleys of the Old City, where Razia's ancient story may still be played out through a puppet show, to Dilli, its brashness softened by the "pear-coloured light". "Of all loves city love comes slowest. Compare country love: quick, hot, easy. Or the sudden deep love of a woman." In a later novel, Sealy would write of Delhi that it was a wonderful mistress but a bad wife; but this book commemorated his affair to remember with the city.



Dil-O-Daanish: Krishna Sobti (Katha Books)



Translated into The Heart Has Its Reasons, this award-winning novel follows the fortunes of a joint family in the Chandni Chowk of the early 19th century. Sobti knows the twists and turns of relationships in a large Indian family as well as she knows the twisting, crowded, lively alleyways of Old Delhi.



The Last Mushaira of Delhi: Farhatullah Beg



Farhatullah Beg's quirky The Last Mushaira of Delhi is hard to find, but worth the search. Farhatullah used the true account of one of the last great gatherings of poets in Delhi, in the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar, as the backdrop, weaving fictionalised tales of the great masters of the couplet and the ghazal into the picture. The title is sometimes translated as "The Last Candle", referring to the practice of setting a lighted candle before the poet whose turn it is to recite.



Twilight in Delhi: Ahmed Ali (New Directions Press; Norton Books)



Ahmed Ali's classic account of the living city walled off and rendered a pale shadow of itself when Delhi became New Delhi was written in 1940. He follows the tribulations of Mir Nihal, a nobleman living in Old Delhi whose childhood memories of 1857 revive when the British begin to replace the Mughals as the rulers of the city, and when their "New Delhi" gradually leaches Old Delhi of its colour and power. Through shifting relationships, descriptions of kite battles in the skies, tales of courtesans and a poignant account of the slaughter of a pigeon fancier's beloved birds, Ali captures a Delhi that no longer survives except in memory. Anita Desai fans might see a resemblance between Mir Nihal, condemned to see his world crumble around him, and Nur, the ageing Urdu poet of In Custody, who has also found a final refuge in the lanes of Old Delhi even as he loses language, poetry and the past.



Trees of Delhi: Pradeep Krishen (Dorling Kindersley)



There are many reasons to hoard your copy of Trees in Delhi: the beautiful drawings, the intelligent leaf guide that allows even neophytes to identify unusual and common varieties of trees, the dollops of linguistic and cultural history that lace the descriptions of trees. The best reason of all is that this book, almost a decade in the making, allows you to rediscover the city, its avenues, monuments and small pockets of peace, in the company of an enthusiastic and passionately knowledgeable guide.



Altu-Faaltu: Ranjit Lal (IndiaInk)



If Delhi is the city of politicians, migrants, khandaani families and artists, it is also home to monkeys—often more entertaining and better-behaved than any of the above. Ranjit Lal's delightful saga romps through the deserted monuments of old Tughlaqabad and the greenery of the Ridge as you follow the adventures of Altu-Faltu, the insidious Suna Hai and a bunch of simians struggling to establish who will be primates inter pares.

Speaking Volumes: Under construction-the great Delhi novel

(Published in the Business Standard, March 22, 2010)

Drawing a literary map of Bombay, or Calcutta, is a relatively straightforward exercise: writers fall into neat categories, and time periods, and claim their neighbourhoods easily.

But as a recent collection of writings on Delhi indicates, this is the original Trickster City. In most of its centuries, Delhi has hosted more writers than it has nurtured them: the capital has been the resting place, the halt between stages of a writer’s career rather than the inspiration for great writing. Foreign correspondents and old Asia hands pass through Dilli on their way to Ayodhya or Kashmir or Maoist Chattisgarh. After the last mushaira in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s time, Delhi has housed poets, but there has been no great outpouring of Delhi poetry—nothing to match Bombay’s line-up of Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawala and Jeet Thayil.

At Penguin’s Spring Fever festival, a final session was dedicated to the Trickster City. That’s also the title of a collection of writings, translated from Bahurupiya Shahar, which illustrates one of the big problems of writing about this city. Literary Delhi is usually either South Delhi or Old Dilli, with the party palaces, bleak concrete jungles and constantly resettled slums of North Delhi unchronicled, until now.

For some of us, listening to William Dalrymple and Mahmood Farooqui brought in a sense of déjà vu. Dalrymple was at the threshold of his career as a flamboyant historian when he wrote City of Djinns in 1994, and as he said, the city he captured in that book doesn’t exist any more. Mahmood Farooqui began his dastangoi performances several years ago, as a kind of literary curiosity, a revival of the storytelling traditions of the past: his book on Delhi in 1857 will soon be out. For Dilliwallas, much as we celebrate the achievements of Dalrymple or Farooqui, watching them in performances that have become familiar over a decade is a reminder of how few Delhi writers, and great Delhi novels, there have been.

Part of this is what might be called the Great Washington Novel conundrum: there are great writers from Washington, but no iconic fiction to match the great New York novels. Nayantara Sahgal chronicled political Delhi in novels like Rich Like Us and A Situation in New Delhi, but it is hard to pull off truly great writing about administrative capitals—it’s like pulling off the great oil novel, as Amitav Ghosh once remarked. It is theoretically possible, but it doesn’t happen that often.

Among younger writers, there’s been something of a shift. An earlier collection of short stories, Delhi Noir, had a rocking premise—capturing the underbelly of a city that has only a thin barrier of gated communities dividing its pleasant surface from its extreme darkness. But its version of Delhi was closer to flabby paunch than dark underbelly; Trickster City with its blend of rough-hewn, unstylised writing and sharp, acute observations offers a much more disturbing take on Dilli.

Aatish Taseer and Mridula Koshy have both produced debut works of fiction that take you into the complexities of Delhi: instead of the seven (or thirteen) cities of its historical past, today’s Delhi offers seven (or more) cities co-existing uneasily with one another. And novelist Rana Dasgupta is working on a non-fiction narrative about the city—it’s hard to capture a city that is constantly reinventing itself, a city always Under Construction, but Dasgupta has the skills and vision to pull it off.

The classic, iconic Delhi novel was evoked by Dalrymple in his reading—Ahmad Ali never published another book after Twilight in Delhi, and was an unhappy exile who felt himself neglected in Lahore. But he refused to come back to Delhi, because his city—the city of his past, and the city of his imagination—no longer existed for him. He didn’t want to see what it had become.

In the Delhi of the 1980s, bahurupiyas could still be found in the Old City. A bahurupiya is, literally, a person of many faces, an inhabitant of many avatars. Most bahurupiyas stuck to imitating the gods and goddesses—more money in that—but sometimes, they also commented, behind their shifting masks, on the political scandals and struggles of the day. In the Delhi of 2010, there are few practicing bahurupiyas left, but few images capture this city better. It’s a trickster city, a shapeshifter, occupying many versions of itself at any given point of time—and it may finally be finding its chroniclers.

If It Is Sweet--a personal note

Reading Mridula Koshy's stories for the first time, almost a year-and-a-half ago, fresh into the publishing job I left this January, I had two distinct thoughts. The first was that these were the Delhi stories I'd been looking for; the second was that if all I managed to do was publish another three books like this, I'd have justified my time in publishing.

If you live in Bombay and write, the city looms behind your work, inevitably and naturally. But Delhi seems to elude writers, especially those who work in English--the great Delhi novels I can think of were written by Krishna Sobti and Ahmed Ali, with a few exceptions. (I Allan Sealy and Karan Mahajan have both used Delhi as an interesting backdrop, but the author who's probably captured Delhi best was Vandana Singh, in an SF short story.) Most writers see Delhi through the lens of history--it's a wonderful place to set a certain kind of tourist historical novel--or through the lens of a camera--the picture postcard view.

Mridula's stories in the collection that became If It Is Sweet (Tranquebar) captured the many levels at which Delhi works, her curiosity and her open-mindedness as a writer allowing her to examine the lives of people too invisible, too ordinary to be considered worth writing about. Perhaps it's her background--she used to be a trade union organiser--that makes her such an acute observer, perhaps it's the many places that she travelled between as a young child that gave her an ability to imagine the lives of strangers in richness and detail.

A large girl who is simultaneously lover and liar, a teenager fruitlessly hawking discount coupons for covetable, unaffordable jeans, the koodawallah's intricate romance, a carpenter uncovering his Delhi world through the mysteries of plaster of Paris, a child of the footpath making an unexpected connection at the traffic lights, mothers, tourists, drifters--all of them captured in Mridula's compassionate but unflinching vision. The Good Mother, for instance, isn't about Delhi--it's about tragedy and the harsh, inescapable fact that life will continue to go on even after the worst you can imagine has happened. But here's a tiny aside that reveals a slice of Delhi, the architecture echoing the lives of the people:

She had not noticed from the outside, but the houses are built with no space between them, just the superfluity of two sets of walls in a tight kiss, so that they are suctioned, one to the other. But neither do the two balconies, nor do the houses themselves, bear any relationship of symmetry or accord any thought to each other.

This is what Rana Dasgupta had to say about the book:

In brooding, otherworldly prose, Mridula Koshy tells us the stories other writers overlook, or do not wish to tell: the household thoughts that must always remain silent, the disavowed dramas of the city, the heartbreaking proximity of opposite emotions.

There'll be other books from Mridula Koshy; she's here for the long haul, and I look forward to reading them. But I'll always have a soft spot for this collection of short stories, so intense, so rewarding, so revealing of the inner life of this city I've known all my life, loved and hated, and never seen captured quite like this before.

Rap, cafes and writers

(Published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, December 19, 2006)



Between the weddings and the concerts, most Dilliwallas know that winter in the capital belongs to the poets. In an era now forgotten, this meant the grand mushairas where scores and hundreds of poets gathered to match their wits and their metres. In our time, you could start with rap and end with dastangoi, as many did last week.

Malika Booker, like many of today’s poets, blurs genres: she’s a fantastic story teller who can either recite a poem straight, use rap to get her message across, or act out a dramatic monologue. She’s fun to watch, her black boots tapping an absent rhythm, her silver-and-black stole accentuating her hand gestures: “I’m writing about taboos,” she had said at one point, giving herself the freedom to reinterpret family histories with humour instead of anger.

At one point, she reads along with fledgling rapper Taru Dalmia—who, typically of this generation of poets, has his own MySpace page (www.myspace.com/delhisultanate). Though Dalmia’s act has a few rough edges, he brings the house down with his “dark skin girl”, a plea to all those cinnamon-coloured, coffee-coloured, nutmeg-hued women out there to throw away their Fair & Lovely tubes. Some of his rap attacks the people who live their lives according to Page Three, switching between confusion and “yoga fusion”. One of the private pleasures of watching this at the British Council is noticing that the people who laugh the hardest are the ones whom Dalmia’s angst is aimed at.

Next door, on the lawns of the IIC Annexe, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and K Satchinandan did more conventional—but just as entertaining—poetry readings. Allan Sealy had joined them, along with several other writers, the previous day, but there was considerable confusion over whether the readings were open to everyone or only to invitees, and the audience was disappointingly small.

But by the second day, Delhi’s finest had decided not to wait for an invitation and showed up in force for Mehrotra, one of India’s toughest critics and most sensitive poets (I love these two lines from ‘Genealogy’, for instance: “Each man is an unfinished fiction/ And I'm the last survivor of what was a family..) Mahmood Farooqi, who used to set the stage on fire in his Delhi University days, and Daanish Husain were next. By now, their performances of ‘dastangoi’—the venerable Mughal tradition of storytelling from a body of work that jumbles legends, myths and the literature of that time with admirable carelessness—have become fixtures on the Delhi menu, and they didn’t disappoint their admirers.

And if poets weren’t enough, all you have to do to find Delhi’s other writers in winter is to have a cup of coffee. Jeet Thayil—yes, he’s a poet, but he’s working on a non-fiction book-- Indrajit Hazra and a dozen younger writers have been quietly reinventing the age-old tradition of writers working in taverns, as Shakespeare and Co did, or cafes, as Baudelaire in Paris and Arun Kolatkar in Bombay once did. Step into a Café Coffee Day or a Barista or any one of the dozens of coffee shops that have sprung up around Delhi, and if it’s the middle of the day, chances are high that the quiet chap working on his laptop is a writer.

Thayil explained once that he liked the sense of working in relative peace while fragments of conversation revealed tiny chapters of other people’s lives to him. Other writers say that cafes provide an environment that falls halfway between the comfortable informality of home, without the distractions, and the impersonal workspace of an office, without the annoyances.

A friend in publishing asked me recently why I didn’t work out of cafes myself, seeing that my home is a cross between a zoo and a dharamshala. I had to explain that while the space works for me, the coffee is a bad idea—I drink so many cups in an absent sort of way at a Barista clone that I come home twitchy, insomniac and broke. She shrugged in a be-like-that sort of way. “Now that it’s winter and more writers are doing this,” she said, “I fully expect to find my next four manuscripts somewhere between the Arabica and the Jamaican Blue Mountain beans.”