City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

‘In the text of the Mahabharata it says that the epic started off as a poem called Jaya - Victory — with only 8800 verses. Then it became the Bharata, with 24,000 slokas, before being transformed into the Great Bharata - the Mahabharata - with 100,000 stanzas. For all we know, before the Jaya the poem might well have started off as an even smaller,

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.

I once complained to Dr Jaffery that so many of the Sufis in Old Delhi appeared to be blatant fakes. The doctor said he agreed with me, although he added: ‘But William, my friend, you must remember one thing. Fake Sufis are like any other kind of counterfeit. Forgeries only exist because real gold is so incredibly valuable ...’

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

‘What the Hindus call the Kali Yuga?’ I asked. ‘Exactly. The Hindus believe that in history there have been epochs of creation and epochs of destruction. An empire is built up and then, without warning, it quite suddenly falls apart. They say that now we are in a cycle of decay - that we are too sinful and that everything is cracking up.’ ‘What do

‘It was all great-grandfather Aurangzeb’s fault,’ said Pakeezah Sultan Begum, rearranging her cardigan. ‘If it wasn’t for him we’d still have the empire.’

‘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

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

Today the passages are only blocked with a small plug of concrete; it should not be difficult to remove that plug and investigate what lies beyond. The problem would be to motivate India’s impoverished and bureaucratic Archaeological Survey to take an interest in the matter. As Mr Prashad explained when we were leaving: ‘You see actually in India t