‘Basti and Durbar’: This fiction anthology paints a comprehensive picture of Delhi and its people

Edited by Rakhshanda Jalil, “an unapologetic Delhiite”, Basti & Durbar: Delhi-New Delhi is a collection of 32 stories about the city. Through stories from five different languages – those written originally in English as well as those translated into English from Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Malayalam – and featuring a generous number of excerpts from novels, Basti & Durbar is an anthology that gives its readers a fairly comprehensive picture of the city and its inhabitants, capturing the spirit of Delhi/New Delhi through the ages. Jalil has included voices from different eras in the anthology that help the reader navigate through Delhi as it was during certain points in history, and also be a witness to those gradual waves of change that have turned the city into its present avatar. In fact, in one of the latter tales, readers even get a glimpse of Delhi as it might be in the future.

In and out of Delhi

Basti & Durbar opens with The City that Was, an excerpt from the Hindi novel Basharat Manzil, which is set in the late 19th and early 20th century and presents Delhi through the eyes of a character who has left it behind. The story describes the glory of a city which now...

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