Reading City of Djinns, by William Dalrymple

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple, 1993, 350pp

I first read this many years ago and decided to re-read it again after I finished Rudyard Kipling's Kim with my book club. 

The subtitle, A Year in Delhi tells you pretty much exactly what you get - an account of Dalrymple and his wife's time in Delhi. Like most travelogues, this book features a few of the  trials and tribulations associated with travel and living in a new place, but it offers much more than that. During his stay, Dalrymple delved into the history of the city, and the reader is treated to a book that weaves back and forth in time, telling us what the city as like way back when, an then revealing it again in 1993. 

He covers a wide variety of topics, from historic people and places to the state of modern eunuchry, partridge fighting, and sufism. And the book has some great characters, like partridge aficionado Punjab Singh (whose name is surely an Indian version of Indiana Jones) and the archaeologist B.B. Lal. For a GM like me who likes to infuse their made up worlds with the verisimilitude of the real world, these characters are inspiration gold. It's these characters and some of the situations they find themselves in that I'd like to share with you here today.

One of the more interesting characters in the book is Pir Syed Mohammed Sarmadi, a very successful fraudulent dervish. Dalrymple describes him as -

"A hugely fat sufi with a mountainous turban, and elephantine girth, and a great ruff of double chins, he operates one of the most profitable faith healing businesses in India. One of Sarmadi's forebears was beheaded by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb after he wandered into the imperial presence stark naked, shrieking out sufi poetry."

"Everyday, Sarmadi sits cross-legged in his surgery between ten and five, with a short break for a kebab at lunch. It is a small room, and Sarmadi fills a great deal of it. Its walls are lined with powders and sacred texts, framed monograms of Arabic calligraphy and pictures of the Ka'ba at Mecca. There is a continuous queue of folk waiting to see him, and Sarmadi keeps the queue moving. Each petitioner gets about two minutes of his time. Sarmadi will listen, breaking his concentration only to clean his fingernails or to gob into his golden spittoon. When finished, Sarmadi will wave his peacock fan and blow over the petitioner, recite a bit of the Quran, write out a charm or a sacred number, and place it in an amulet. He will then dismiss the supplicant, having first received his fee of fifty rupees, a week's wage for an Indian labourer."

Sarmadi seems to come from a long line of such Sufis, so with a little research, one could round fill out a full faction of them: https://reflectionsofindia.com/2014/07/22/sufisarmad/

Dalrymple also relates some of the stories of past visitors, like Dargah Quli Khan, who visited the city between 1737 and 1741 and reports on the local orgies:

"Hand in hand, the lovers roam the streets, while [outside] the drunken and debauched revel in all kinds of perversities. Groups of winsome lads violate the faith of the believers with acts which are sufficient to shake the very roots of piety. There are beautiful faces as far as the eye can see. All around prevails a world of impiety and immorality. Both nobles and plebeians quench the thirst of their lust here."

Dalrymple later reflects on the modern city: 

"Modern Delhi is thought of either as a city of grey bureaucracy, or as the metropolis of hard-working nouveau riche Punjabis. It is rarely spoken of as a lively city, and never as a promiscuous one. Yet, as I discovered that in December, the bawdiness of Safdar Jung's Delhi does survive, kept alive by one particular group of Delhi-wallahs. You can still find them in the dark gullies of the old city, if you know where to look."

Through Dalrymple, we are  exposed to the 17th Century writings of Niccolau Manucci, son of a Venetian trader who ran away from home at 14 to become a con artist, trickster, and artilleryman in 1660's India. It is partly through his eyes that we learn of Shah Jahan and his in-fighting children Dara, Aurangzeb, Jaharana, and Roshanara.

Of Aurangzeb, he says:

" Although Aurangzeb was held to be bold and valiant, he was capable of great dissimulation and hypocrisy. Pretending to be an ascetic, he slept while in the field on a mat of straw that he had himself woven . . . He ate food that cost little and let it be known that he underwent severe penances and fasting. All the same, under cover of these pretenses he led a secret and jolly life of it. His intercourse was with certain holy men addicted to sorcery, who instructed him how to bring over to his side as many friends as he could with witchcraft and soft speeches. He was so subtle as to deceive even the quickest witted people."

 And Dalrymple tells us of Ibn Battutah, who resided for 8 years in Delhi in the 1330's and 40's with Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluk as a patron. Now, the sultan was a complete bastard (in a pique of anger at the citizens of Delhi, he once gave the entire citizenry 3 days to completely remove themselves to another city 40-days walk away, and when a blind man and a cripple were found still in the city, he had one ejected by catapult, and the other dragged to the new city behind a horse (only his leg arrived). But the sultan liked Battutah (mostly) and at one point decided to send him on a diplomatic mission to China.

Battutah found himself at the head of an entourage of 1000 mounted bodyguards and a long train of camels carrying gifts, such as 100 concubines, 100 Hindu dancing girls, gold candelabras, brocades, swords, and gloves embroidered with pearls. Behind the camels came the most valuable gift of all - a thousand thoroughbred horses from Turkestan.

But only 100 miles into his journey, his train was attacked by Hindu rebels (the country was full of rebels) and Battutah was separated from his group and captured. He managed to escape and re-join his party. At Calicut on the Malabar coast, he loaded everything onto four dhows to sail to China, but lingered on shore for Friday prayers. A sudden storm blew up, grounding and breaking up the boats. The slaves, troops, and horses all drowned. Not daring to return to Delhi, he hightailed it to China on his own.

I'll return to Ibn Battutah in a future post, and maybe we'll also look at another travel writer - Tim Mackintosh Smith - who not only wrote an annotated translation of The Travels of Ibn Battutah, but also Travels With a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah.

As for Dalrymple,  he's an evocative writer and I found this book a pleasure to read. It won two awards, has been adapted into a play, and (I'm quite sure, though it doesn't say so on Wikipedia) was turned into a television series in the UK. Here's the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Djinns

 Book Review: The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger, 1959, 233pp

Wilfred Thesiger was an English traveller and explorer. He was born and spent the early part of his life in Ethiopia where his father was the Consul General. He would later go to Oxford and join the Explorer's Club. He served during WW2, after which he spent much of his free time in remote places in North Africa and western Asia. He seems to have craved quiet and lonely stretches, where he would integrate himself and get to know the locals. He was the quintessential traveller, and he wrote many books about these places.

His most famous book is Arabian Sands, which is quite a brilliant book about his time crossing the empty quarter of southern Arabia. The Marsh Arabs is his second most famous book, and covers his time in the marshes of Southern Iraq in the 1950's. At that time, the way of life in the region seems to have changed very little since the earliest recorded times - models and plaques have been found depicting Sumerian boats and reed houses that look very much like what Thesiger photographed, so I think we can rely on the idea that at  least some of what he reports of the culture has a long pedigree in the area. Others have pointed to the Bedouin as another possible place of cultural origin.

Ancient and Modern Marsh Houses

Thesiger spent seven or eight seasons with the Marsh Arabs, returning year after year. He loved the region and the way of life. Here's how he describes it early in the book:

"Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy's voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reedbeds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the marshes. A naked man in a canoe with a trident in his hand, reed houses built upon water, black, dripping buffaloes that looked as if they had calved from the swamp with the first dry land. Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine. Once again I experienced the longing to share this life, and to be more than a mere spectator.

This book, though short, is a loving portrait of the people and their way of life. It is well illustrated with photographs depicting people, boats, reed construction, wild pigs, and water buffaloes. Most interesting for me, as a student of ancient Iraqi history, was to see Thesiger record a way of life that has materially still the same as it was in the year 3000 BC, and likely even older than that.

More surprising was Thesiger's thoughtful observation of sexual mores and genders in this region, because in this I think there's something here for everyone to learn. The Marsh Arabs recognized transgenderism within their communities, and had no trouble acknowledging that some women were born with male bodies, and that some men were born with female bodies - and that seems to have been all there was to it.

  Silver boat from archaic Ur

Overall, as a travelogue, The Marsh Arabs is not quite as good as Arabian Sands, and it ends rather abruptly, wanting, I think, a little more reflection from Thesiger after his journeys end. But just like Arabian Sands, it's wonderfully written and evokes a place that few people knew, and will never be able to know again. Thesiger was lucky, in a sense, to travel to these places before the modern age caught up with them. Between the two Gulf Wars (1991-2003) the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were diverted from the marshes by Saddam Hussein, and the Marsh Arabs were displaced. Since 2003 this has been reversed somewhat, and the ecology of the region seems to be recovering, but it will be a long and uncertain road.

Link: National Geographic: Marsh Arab Update

Photograph by Thesiger