Intelligence Squared - William Dalrymple on Delhi

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William Dalrymple on Delhi

05 Oct 2009

Speakers: William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple, a twenty five year resident of Delhi, discusses the city that he describes as the ‘most complicated city he knows’.

Dalrymple divides his lecture into two parts. Firstly, Delhi in the time of his 1994 travelogue City of Djinns which, he argues, is a Delhi which vanished long ago. Today it is a city diametrically at odds with its historical reputation, and a deeply uncultured philistine city. He asks the question ‘where is the city of the Mughals?’. The Delhi of today is instead, a massively vibrant media centre, and a magnet for people from the south and Mumbai seeking employment.

He reads from City of Djinns about meeting the author of Twilight in Delhi, which he describes as one of the great examples of Indo-Islamic culture in Delhi, and the lifestyle of the old Mughal elite.

Secondly, he discusses the Delhi of his 2006 historical book The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. He begins by reading an excerpt which describes 1850’s Delhi – that being a place lacking in any real political power, yet still having a strong sense of its own self-confidence and power as a centre of manners, poetry and civilization.

He continues by discussing the role and history of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, and concludes by outlining the the anti-colonial revolts, and the final downfall of the last Mughal.

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William Dalrymple

Writer and historian

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William Dalrymple on Delhi

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