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Search for soul of Delhi

City of Djinns: by William Dalrymple HarperCollins $288 THIS is not a travel book but a diary masquerading as a travel book. And like all diaries, the problem is how to make daily jottings of mundane conversations, random thoughts, reference's to one's recent past, the weather, and immediate surroundings into something interesting, coherent and structured that someone else will want to read. William Dalrymple tries hard but only partly succeeds.

The saving grace is Mr Dalrymple's intense curiosity about the past and his desire to unearth the ghosts of history - the city's Djinns - to see how well the spirits of Delhi culture and court life have survived to the present.

Historians believe that for a continuous period of almost three centuries Delhi has always been inhabited, and never abandoned like so many other great cities.

It was the capital city of the Pandava kings around 900 BC featured in the epic Mahabharata when Delhi was known as Inderprastha. Successive Mughal emperors made it their seat and the centre of Persian and Urdu culture and the British also made it their capital.

As each regime rose and fell it left behind descendants, now no longer the ruling class of Delhi, but still imbued with memories of a once-glorious past and still clinging to the last vestiges of Delhi ''culture''.

In the quest for the spirit of Delhi, Mr Dalrymple delves into libraries, consults scholars, historians and archaeologists and tracks down survivors of bygone eras: the great granddaughter of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafur II still living in the decay of old Delhi; the almost-senile relics of the British Raj, still hanging grimly to their past; great thinkers and Urdu poets living a soulless existence in post-partition Lahore, away from the Delhi of their inspiration and muse.

They are all different, but they are all quintessentially Delhi.

Mr Dalrymple's look at the works of the great chroniclers like Ibn Battuta whose work sheds light on the bloodthirsty 12th century Mughal emperor Mohammed Bin Tughlak, is gripping.

He also unearths some lesser-known diarists such as William Fraser who chronicled the Raj, which make good reading.

But City of Djinns is not intended to be a history of Delhi, more's the pity, for this is Mr Dalrymple at his best.

As if to press the point, he jumps about from era to era whetting the reader's appetite and then unceremoniously dumping that line of enquiry just as the reader is really getting into the narrative.

Most jarring of all is when he surfaces for air in the present, relating conversations with his landlady, Mrs Puri, and his taxi driver that even he admits are banal.

It is as if the expatriate journalist, transported to Delhi for a year, has begun to write his tome on the city before he has really connected with the society around him.

Delhi Wallahs of the present just do not come alive for Mr Dalrymple in the way that Delhi Wallahs of the past do. They are used as foils, for the author to make fun of their accents and broken English in what comes across as cheap shots at the natives.

In this hotch-potch of past and present, history and diary, what is the thread that holds the book together? For Mr Dalrymple it is the weather, the progression of the seasons from grey, cold winter to hot searing summer and pre-monsoon humidity. Hence the book's sub-title A Year in Delhi.

However it is a structure which provides only a tenuous progression from one era to another.

By the time Mr Dalrymple has completed one 12-month cycle it becomes only too clear that a year in Delhi is just not long enough to gain enough insights into the complex, seething historical city to sustain the author for the length of a book.

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