Delhi

About the book

Delhi, published in 1990, is the biggest of Khushwant Singh's novels and the one he worked on longest: he said it took him almost twenty-five years to complete. It is a historical novel built like a double exposure. In the present day, an ageing journalist, a figure close to Singh himself, returns to Delhi from abroad and takes up with Bhagmati, a hijra he picks up on a deserted road after her release from Tihar Jail. Around that frankly bawdy, funny and tender relationship, the novel opens chapter after chapter of the city's six hundred years, alternating the modern story with the past told in the first person by the people who lived it.

Singh was open about his method and his aim. History, he joked, provided the skeleton, and he covered it with flesh and blood. In the foreword to the paperback edition he put it more simply: his only aim was to get his readers to know Delhi and love it as much as he did. The book runs to 391 pages in its first Penguin edition, opens with a couplet of Mirza Ghalib asking what Delhi is, and answers the question with a whole civilisation.

What is Delhi about?

It is about the city of Delhi itself, treated as the true main character: built, looted, burned and rebuilt across six centuries, loved by the people it keeps disappointing. Bhagmati is the city's mirror. The narrator says the two have much in common, that both reveal their true selves only to their lovers, and the novel keeps the parallel running: the city misused by a long line of rough masters, concealing its charms under an unlovely surface, sterile and yet endlessly desired. Critics describe the book as a palimpsest, a parchment written over again and again by successive rulers, and that is exactly how it is structured.

History in other voices

The historical chapters are given to witnesses rather than to a narrator's summary. The reader meets the city through Musaddi Lal, a Kayasth serving under Sultan Balban in the thirteenth century; through the invaders Timur and Nadir Shah, who plundered her, and Aurangzeb, who ruled her; through the poets Meer Taqi Meer and Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, whom Delhi in the novel's phrase destroyed. A Sikh soldier, Nihal Singh, helps the British crush the rising of 1857. The Punjabi contractors who built Lutyens' New Delhi appear in person: among them was Sir Sobha Singh, the author's own father, who won British contracts and raised the imperial capital.

The twentieth century closes the circle. A young Hindu refugee from western Punjab, whose sister was abducted during Partition, joins the RSS in Delhi and finds himself an accidental witness to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The novel ends where its frame began, in the narrator's own city: Bhagmati, who has been his protection and his undoing, saves his life in the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, while he watches Sikh neighbours burned alive after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Six hundred years of Delhi, the book insists, are one story told many times.

The author

Khushwant Singh (1915 to 2014) was born in Hadali, in the Punjab now in Pakistan, and educated at St Stephen's College, Delhi, Government College, Lahore, and King's College London. He practised law in Lahore, served as a diplomat, edited The Illustrated Weekly of India into India's most read magazine, and sat in the Rajya Sabha. His other books on this shelf of the Kosh are Train to Pakistan (1956), his Partition novel, and A History of the Sikhs. Delhi draws on both sides of that career: the historian's command of the record and the journalist's eye for the telling, disreputable detail.

Reception and legacy

Reviewers and scholars have treated Delhi as Singh's magnum opus on the city, vast, erotic and irreverent in the publisher's own words. Literary studies keep returning to its structure: V. A. Shahane's summary of Singh's art, the capacity to capture reality in its magnificence and horror, is quoted again and again in readings of this book, and journals such as Muse India have devoted long essays to its layering of history and place. It was translated into Urdu by Irfan Ahmad Khan of Lahore, with the first Urdu publications appearing from 1998. For readers of this Kosh, it is the natural companion to Train to Pakistan: the same writer, the same honesty about violence and desire, turned from one Punjab village in 1947 to six centuries of the capital.

Read it if

You want one novel that carries you from Balban to 1984 without letting go of its story; you loved Train to Pakistan and want the bigger, looser, funnier book; or you are going to Delhi and want its past told by the people who, in Singh's telling, lived it.