Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhis centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven “dead” cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city-todays Delhi. Underlying his quest is the […]
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of Firth of Forth. He is the author of five books of history and travel, including the highly acclaimed best-seller City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. […]
of beauty – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army – what we would now call an act of involuntary […]
On a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, ??No vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.? Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last […]
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet – then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. […]
White Mughals is the love story of lovers James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa, two people belonging to diverse cultures and races at a time when India was under the colonial rule of the British. Their love transcended all the political, social and cultural barriers as James married Nissa and converted to Islam. But is […]