From the fading grandeur of the Mughal era to the ruptures of Partition and eruptions of modernity, Delhi has been a city of many ghosts, layered in history and memory
Delhi, the unknowable metropolis, has never been a city of certainties or permanence, no matter what its emperors, architects, and chroniclers may have hoped. To walk through it is to step over vanished footsteps, to hear echoes of voices that were once certain of their place in the world but have since faded into oblivion. Literature, more than history, captures this fleeting essence. The city on the page is always different from the one that exists in stone, steel, and smog, and yet, it is in books that Delhi feels most alive.
Every writer who turns his/her gaze upon Delhi does so with an acute awareness of loss. The city has been made and unmade so many times that writing about it is almost always an act of grief, mourning. Even its celebrations — of power, of resistance, of survival — are steeped in an understanding that what stands today may not stand tomorrow. The best books about Delhi do not attempt to contain it; instead, they follow its changing contours, acknowledging its mutability, its refusal to settle into one story, one narrative.
The dying of the light
If one were to begin at the moment when a certain kind of Delhi, a certain kind of world, began to slip away, then Twilight in Delhi, a novel by Ahmed Ali (1910-1994) — a pioneer of Urdu short story, and the father of modern Pakistani literature — is the inevitable starting point. Written in the 1930s but set in the early 1900s, the novel captures the devastating erosion of an old order — the decline of the Muslim aristocracy, the encroachment of colonial modernity, the slow death of a way of life. The Delhi of Twilight in Delhi is a civilisation in its twilight hours, its traditions unravelling, its poetry turning into lament.
The novel’s protagonist, Mir Nihal, lives in a world where the past is still tangible — where the streets remember the poets, where the walls hold the memory of a lost empire. But the present is cruel, and the future is merciless. Ali’s prose carries the twinge of nostalgia, but there is no sentimentality here — only the realisation that Delhi, in its essence, is a city of departures.
And yet, the novel is not just about the past. It is about time itself, about how a city holds history in its bones, even as it sheds its skin. The reader walking through Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad) today will find little of Mir Nihal’s world intact, but they will feel it, in the cadence of an old couplet overheard at a chai stall, in the hush of a crumbling haveli, in the sudden fragrance of something that once mattered.
Destruction in its foundation, blood in its soil
“The city of Delhi, built hundreds of years ago, fought for, died for, coveted and desired, built, destroyed and rebuilt, for five and six and seven times, mourned and sung, raped and conquered, yet whole and alive, lies indifferent in the arms of sleep. It was the city of kings and monarchs, of poets and storytellers, courtiers and nobles. But no king lives there today, and the poets are feeling the lack of patronage; and the old inhabitants, though still alive, have lost their pride and grandeur under a foreign yoke,” writes Ali in Twilight in Delhi (1940), which was completed soon after the publication of Angaray (1932), his collection of stories which led to the founding of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Movement and Association.
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“Yet the city stands still intact, as do many more forts and tombs and monuments, remnants and reminders of old Delhis, holding on to life with a tenacity and purpose which is beyond comprehension and belief. Destruction is in its foundations and blood is in its soil. It has seen the fall of many a glorious kingdom, and listened to the groans of birth. It is the symbol of Life and Death, and revenge is its nature. Treacherous games have been played under its skies, and its earth has tasted the blood of kings. But still it is the jewel of the eye of the world, still it is the centre of attraction,” writes Ali in the novel that was written in the tumultuous years before Partition, and nearly lost to history.
While E.M. Forster liked the novel, its publication was delayed by the paranoia of the British censor (Hogarth Press, which had accepted it, found it to be ‘subversive’) during the Second World War. When it finally appeared, it was met with acclaim in India. Two decades later, in 1964, American academia rediscovered it, reprinting it for courses in world literature, Asian studies, and history. Even as it remained out of print for long stretches, its Urdu translation — arguably more native to its soul — sustained its readership. That the book became the subject of a linguistic debate, with some arguing it could not have been written in English and others claiming it was untranslatable, only reinforced its power.
A bawdy terrain, a soliloquy in exile
But what of the Delhi that exists outside of its grand ruins? What of the city as it is lived in the margins? In Delhi: A Novel (1990), Khushwant Singh’s bawdy and irreverent take on the city, is narrated through the eyes of a cynical, ageing degenerate man who returns to Delhi as he does to Bhagmati, his hijra lover, a character who lives the city’s contradictions: half man, half woman, neither fully one thing nor the other, yet possessing the seductive power of both. Through this profane and passionate relationship, Singh builds an audacious metaphor — Delhi, like Bhagmati, is alluring and grotesque, wounded and resilient, endlessly violated and endlessly desired.
Singh’s Delhi is a city of blood and betrayal, excess and entropy. He moves across six centuries of its history, from the sultanate to the British Raj to the postcolonial present, encountering poets who sang its praises and rulers who sought to possess it: Timur, Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is a city built on seduction and subjugation, each conqueror imprinting his own desires upon its body, only to be overthrown by the next. But this is not a history lesson; it is a rollicking, unsanitised plunge into the underbelly of the city — where power is wielded in bedrooms as much as in courts, where emperors and eunuchs, saints and seductresses shape the city’s identity.
Unlike Ahmed Ali’s mournful elegy for a dying Delhi, Singh’s novel is a brash, carnal celebration of its ability to endure. It refuses to romanticise or lament; instead, it revels in the city’s filth, violence, and vitality. The Delhi of Twilight in Delhi is slipping away, fading into colonial usurpation; the Delhi of Delhi: A Novel is in perpetual motion, always being torn apart and stitched back together, a city that defies both purity and permanence. By the end of this odyssey, Delhi remains as it always has been — desired and desecrated, loathed and loved, never quite belonging to anyone yet claimed by all. Singh does not immortalise it in grandeur but in grime, in the sweat and dirt of those who have lived and died within its walls. It is a novel as chaotic, shameless, and unforgettable as the city itself.
Similarly, Delhi: A Soliloquy (2020) by M. Mukundan, originally written in Malayalam as Delhi Gathakal in 2011, brings a different lens that sees Delhi not as a city of emperors and poets, but as a place of displacement and alienation. It is the story of the Malayali community in Delhi, of people who come to the city in search of something — a future, a livelihood, an identity — only to find that Delhi is a city that welcomes and erases in equal measure. Translated into English by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K. and set in Delhi through the 1960s to the mid-1980s, the novel draws on Mukundan’s own experiences in Delhi for 40 years: he worked as a Cultural Attaché at the French embassy.
Mukundan’s Delhi is unmoored, restless — a city of migrants, indifferent to those who walk its streets. The novel captures the violence of migration, of being in a place but never belonging to it. The protagonist, Mataparambu Sahadevan Nambiar (shortened to M. Sahadevan), ‘the eldest male member of a starving familym’ watches as the city shifts around him, as its politics tighten their grip, as histories are rewritten in real time. This is a Delhi that offers no solace, only the endless negotiation of survival. It dwells on Delhi’s more contemporary anxiety — the sense that the city is not meant for those who are merely trying to live in it. Arriving at its gates without the trappings of power, they become the city’s part.
City in the cracks, and its ‘eruption’
Some cities are best understood through the spaces where they refuse to be seen. Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi takes the reader into these invisible corners, these lives lived on the periphery of visibility. It is a Delhi far from the polished opulence of Connaught Place or the nostalgia of old havelis; it is a city of daily wagers, of small-time dreamers, of people who live in slums that exist on borrowed time. The three stories in the collection each deal with a different kind of erasure, a different kind of deception.
In the titular story, a man finds a hidden fortune but cannot claim it; in ‘Mohandas’, a man’s identity is stolen, rendering him non-existent; in ‘Mangosil’, a Dalit academic’s intellectual labour is dismissed, his presence in the corridors of power unwelcome. These are stories of aspiration and annihilation, of a city that makes promises only to revoke them. If Twilight in Delhi and Delhi: A Soliloquy trace the city’s losses, The Walls of Delhi reveals the mechanics of its exclusions. This is not a city that is fading — it is a city where survival is a matter of endurance, where the walls are not just physical structures but barriers to belonging.
If Prakash shows Delhi through its cracks, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi turns its gaze on the lava beneath. This is a book about Delhi in the 21st century, a city of billionaires and slums, of unchecked ambition and unregulated chaos. Dasgupta moves through Delhi like a forensic investigator, unearthing the contradictions that define it — a place where fortunes are made overnight, where histories are bulldozed, where violence is just another currency.
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Unlike older books that mourn what has been lost, Capital is about what is being made, and what is being made is not necessarily something to celebrate. It is a book about power, about the city’s transformation into an economic juggernaut, about the cost of that transformation. Delhi, in Dasgupta’s telling, is a spectacle that reshapes everything in its path.
‘Whoever ruled Delhi wore a crown of thorns’
To read books about Delhi is to realise that it is never just one city. In Delhi Reborn (2022), Rotem Geva, a scholar of South Asia, revisits Partition and Independence not merely as a moment in history but as an ongoing process that shaped the city’s politics, demography, and identity well into the 1950s. She places Delhi at the centre of the decolonisation story, showing how the city was not just a witness to national events but a battleground where questions of citizenship, governance, and belonging played out with an urgency that continues to resonate today. Early in the book, Geva quotes Intizar Hussain, who was born and raised in United Provinces, from his autobiographical account, Chiraghon Ka Dhuan (Lamp Smoke, 1999), in which he reminisces on his early life in India and later in the post-partition Pakistan.
“Delhi has always, repeatedly, made her children cry. Having been wrenched from her protective lap, they spend the rest of their lives wandering and wailing. Drenched in dust and blood, Delhi comes to life again. She changes her dress, embraces the newcomers, and is filled with renewed happiness. When Maulana Hali was telling the story of the late Delhi, a new Delhi was awakening from the earth, and when here in Pakistan], Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi was crying over the destruction of his forefathers’ Delhi... over there, Delhi opened her empty lap for the new, uprooted people,” Husain writes in his book.
In Dilli ki Khoj (1964), an anecdotal history of Delhi and its monuments, Brij Kishan Chandiwala, an eminent Gandhian, chronicles the city through its people and monuments, and the rise of a national identity. Out of print for several years, it was translated into English as In Search of Delhi by by Jitender Gill and Namita Sethi in 2023. “The word Delhi is strangely compelling. Once you hear it, you are immediately captivated. It is possible that Delhi was actually “Dil hi”; it truly deserves the honour of being called the dil, heart of India. Although there are numerous places of great historic significance in India, as there are many holy and commercial centres each of which has a well-deserved reputation, Delhi is unique,” writes Chandiwala in the original preface.
“Who first founded and populated Delhi, has been a matter of great interest and conjecture for historians. Whatever may be gathered from the pages of history and tradition, except for a few cities which are mentioned in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, there is none older than Delhi. If we believe that Delhi came into existence during the Mahabharata period, when the Pandavas burnt the Khandava forest and established a city known as Indraprastha here, it makes the city 5,000 years old. Heaven knows under which inauspicious star (saayat) had the city been founded by the Pandavas that this land has never let anyone live in peace. Whoever ruled Delhi wore a crown of thorns and was forever on edge,” Chandiwala writes.
Delhi, as seen through the books written about it, is a city of history, exile, migration, or destruction. No writer can claim to have captured it entirely, and perhaps that is the point. The Delhi of Twilight in Delhi is not the Delhi of The Walls of Delhi; the Delhi of Capital is not the Delhi of Delhi: A Soliloquy. Each of these books adds another perspective, another vanished footprint. The city, as always, refuses to fit into a particular frame, refuses to be known. But in its books, in its stories, it leaves behind a map — of where it is, where it has been, and where it might be going next.
