Just saw this review: I must begin this review with a disclaimer: I am not a Dilliwali. But I’m drawn to books about Delhi because of that feeling I get when I visit the capital, when I chance upon some monument, and am suddenly swept into another time. It just knocks me senseless. I just have to know more. So it was a given that I’d buy Raza Rumi’s book. And a given that I’d read it with interest. Impressions of a Pakistani traveller? The novelty of that alone would have taken me through the book. But neither my long-standing interest in the subject nor the novelty of the author’s origins had anything to do with the way I felt when I read the book. Once I got past the somewhat awkward first chapter in which the author is far too conscious of his Pakistani nationality to really be himself as a seeker of his roots, I was hooked, lined and sunk. There’s nothing new about books about or set in Indo-Islamic Delhi. There’s a ton of them out there and more are being published every year. I’ve read and been gripped by many of them, and I am beginning to feel that I will soon reach a point where I will have heard it all before. And I was expecting, somewhat cynically, to feel this way when I started reading the book, but though I had actually heard much of it before, it didn’t matter. Because the perspective of this book was fresh. Raza Rumi’s basis for Delhi By Heart was that, since Pakistan has rewritten much of its history because it is undivided India’s history, he needed to dump his old school history texts and find the real cultural roots of his existence. The book is subtitled “Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller”, but though that is relevant to his explorations, for me the Pakistani angle has little to do with it. Rumi’s focus is Islamic Delhi, but his explorations had much the same effect on me, an Indian Hindu, as they did on him. I have no Islamic roots and no one in my family tree till my own generation has ever lived in Delhi, but as an Indian, Rumi’s history is also my history. And I didn’t know my history in this way before. As Rumi explored Delhi, his search became my search. His need to understand became mine too. So I was his enthusiastic companion as he time-travelled the city, where he meandered physically between the older areas and New Delhi while trying emotionally to place his religion in the context of a whole culture that is made up of so very many things. Like him, I learned about the syncretism of the Sufis; like him, I ate biryani and kababs in Nizamuddin and contemplated the history of the cuisine in Paranthewale Gali; like him, I listened eagerly to what people like Khushwant Singh and Qurratulain Hyder had to say about the city they loved; and like him, I shrank back from the distortions of history and wondered again what purpose hatred serves. Delhi By Heart works on many levels – you can see it as a travelogue, or as a potted (and selected) history of a city, and a way of life. But I saw it as a love story, to and about the city. Raza Rumi HarperCollins India, R399 By Kushalrani Gulab on August 30 2013 timeoutbengaluru.net/books/reviews/delhi-heart-impressions-pakistani-traveller
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:18:56 +0000
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