City Improbable

Delhi has been conquered, plundered, abandoned and rebuilt more times than most cities can count. Over some three thousand years it has served as a capital for one power after another, and it remains a place of sharp contradictions, loved and resented in nearly equal measure by the people who know it. This collection, edited by Khushwant Singh, gathers writing about the city from those who lived in it, fled to it, passed through it or came to seize it.

The historical section ranges widely. Amir Khusrau, Ibn Battuta, Samsam-ud-Daula and Niccolao Manucci write about rulers from Anangpal Tomar to Shah Jahan, recording both their achievements and their blunders. Timur gives his own version of his violent invasion. Singh contributes a story about an untouchable living under Aurangzeb, William Dalrymple writes about the earliest Englishmen to settle in Delhi, and Ghalib and Hodson each describe the upheaval of 1857 from opposite sides.

Alongside the great events are glimpses of ordinary routine: a Jat household in the nineteenth century, vendors and housewives in Ballimaran during the Second World War, couples and joggers in Lodi Garden, and the party crowd at the discos.

Most of the modern pieces were commissioned for this volume, and they treat present-day Delhi with a mix of affection and exasperation. Ruskin Bond, Manjula Padmanabhan, Anees Jung, Mrinal Pande, Dhiren Bhagat and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, among others, write about Punjabi joint families, the fading food traditions of the city, its maddening bureaucracy, its Sufi inheritance, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and the residents of a capital that has lost its way. The tone moves between grave and very funny, much like the city it portrays.