City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

When Shah Jehan moved the court from Agra to the new city of Shahjehanabad in 1648, it was Jahanara Begum who built the Chandni Chowk, the principal avenue of the Old City. Half-way down the boulevard she built a vast caravanserai which, before it was destroyed in 1857, was regularly described by visitors to Delhi as the most magnificent building o

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

‘Learning Persian would give you access to some great treasures. I would not charge you for lessons. I am half a dervish: money means nothing to me. All I ask is that you work hard.’

‘Are you looking for Norah?’ asked a voice from behind me. I turned round. It was Norah’s Anglo-Indian neighbour. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’ ‘She’s dead, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘She’s been dead and buried a while now. The monsoon before last.’ ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘It was her cobra,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘He finally got her. She’d g

‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains ...’ It reminded me of a conversation I had had two years before in a camp near Ramallah on the West Bank. Did I know the orange groves at Bid

Even the Mughal gardens were uprooted and replaced with sterile English lawns. In the place of the marble fantasies they tore down, the British erected some of the most crushingly ugly buildings ever thrown up by the British Empire - a set of barracks that look as if they have been modelled on Wormwood Scrubs. The barracks should have been torn dow

Meanwhile in the court, the dam-burst of treachery unleashed by Aurangzeb left the principal players wading deeper and deeper into the darkness. Roshanara Begum, the Lady Macbeth of Delhi, had taken over the position vacated by Jahanara Begum: chief of the Imperial Harem.

One person whom Aurangzeb never deceived was his father. From an early age, Shah Jehan made it clear that he did not care for his third son, and instead increasingly lavished attention on the more amiable Dara Shukoh. Dara he kept at court, showered with favours and titles, while Aurangzeb was sent to the empire’s southernmost border, the unruly De

‘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.’