My Delhi book is out

My new book, Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History, is out from Hay House India:

The megacity that is today’s Delhi is built upon thick layers of history. For a millennium, Delhi has been at the crossroads of trade, culture, and politics. The stories of its buildings and great historical personalities have been told many times, but this book approaches the past of India’s capital through its literary culture. By focusing on writers and thinkers, we meet a colourful cast of characters only glancingly mentioned in political histories.

Many Delhiites are surprised to learn that the language of their city’s cultural heyday was Persian. Despite first being brought to India by invaders, it eventually became an authentically Indian language used in both administration and literature. Although it was cultivated by an elite, it was also a widely available language of aspiration and opportunity, like English today. It connected India to the wider world, and the Indian Subcontinent, particularly Delhi, was once a place where talented poets and scholars from the whole Persian cultural world – from Turkey to eastern China – came to make their fortunes. Its traces remain everywhere but Persian is effectively a dead language in India today.

Scroll.in ran an excerpt from chapter two on same-sex love in Persian literature.

Purchase information:

The publisher's page for the book is here. It is for sale on Amazon.in and Flipkart.com, and in some bookshops. It is not unfortunately yet available outside of India. You can now get it shipped outside of India at Abebooks.com or Abebooks.co.uk, or from DK Agencies.

"This light and darkness in our chaos join'd"

I re-read Alexander Pope's longish poem An Essay on Man after a decade and a half. I know the world hasn't stopped long enough for us to give poetry its due (murdered cartoonists in particular are weighing on my mind though I could choose from half a dozen other world events that make sitting down with a poem feel wrong). But let me quote the second section, which begins:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great

They don't write like that anymore. The critic Harold Bloom hated An Essay on Man (calling it "a poetic disaster"), which is probably in itself a good reason to have a read. Various other great thinkers through the centuries have either adored or hated the poem.

Didactic poetry, whether the underlying philosophy is solidly formed or shaky, is a genre I have always loved. Pope's expressive power is at its peak ("darkly wise" and "rudely great" are phenomenal turns of phrase), and yet he is presuming to think through the meaning of being human. We haven't solved that one yet, but would someone dare to write a poem of that scope today with such a direct engagement with philosophy? Literary fashions have changed, of course, but the reason is deeper: Our thought is too compartmentalized. 

Noor Inayat Khan (1914-44), code-name Madeleine

The BBC has a radio documentary on my favourite spy, Noor Inayat Khan. She's probably the only spy who was also a harpist and a Sufi. (Her father was the Sufi teacher Inayat Khan and her mother was his American wife who had taken the name Ameena Begum.)

She spent her tragically brief career working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied France, relaying information to and from London and aiding the French resistance. She kept her cool after the collapse of the SOE's network in Paris but was betrayed, tortured, and eventually shot in Dachau.

On nice days, I visit Noor in Bloomsbury. In 2012, a bust of her was installed in Gordon Square. As it happens, I've also spent a lot of time at her father's dargah in Nizamuddin in Delhi.

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The recent BBC documentary on the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra was also great.

Things that Only Happen to Other People

The evening we came back to Berlin from Poland, there was a new lock on the door, a no-frills standard-issue lever that no one would have chosen if given a choice. A notice from the police did its best to be warm and friendly (signed, “Ihre Berliner Polizei”—Your Berlin Police), but the fingerprinting dust smeared all over the door suggested otherwise. We walked into the apartment tracking more of the sooty dust down the hallway into the other hallway and into our room. My friend held back because while it was a given that my computer, which I had left sitting on the desk, would be gone, she could only guess at the fate of her viola. (She had taken all of her valuables—camera, computer and iPod—to Poland with her.)

Plane Language

Air travel is now unpleasant in so many ways that you can hardly list them. In economy class, the romance has been drained out of the experience by a couple of decades of cost-cutting. The horror has a precise starting date, according to The New York Times, and it’s earlier than you might think:

“Industry experts trace the problem back to 1987, when American Airlines removed a single olive from its salads to save a little money.”

I take the comedian Louis C.K.’s point that we complain too much about air travel, which is really a marvel if you think about it (“you’re sitting in a chair in the sky”). The one indignity that I’m becoming less and less tolerant of is the language of the airport and the skies. Lots of communication happens—from the fine print telling us whether our tickets are refundable to the flight attendant’s cheery “would you like a beverage, sir?”—but very little at a human level. The language used by airlines and the Transportation Security Administration is often distorted, plastic, unidiomatic, excessive and generally frustrating.

Perspective, Lego-men and skulls

In the early fifteenth century, the painter Masaccio did something amazing: He painted frescos that made use of linear and aerial perspective. (Regrettably he died at age 27, like the singer Jim Morrison--now that I am 28, I find myself keeping lists of "people who died younger than my current age who did important things" and that's probably not healthy.) Scientific perspective, which was perfected by painters in the later decades of the fifteenth century, changed the way art could represent the world. As if by magic--though really through a better understanding of optics--things on a two-dimensional surface could appear to be in three dimensions. I am not an art historian so I am not sure how this was received historically, but it was probably akin to when someone in our time sees a 3-D film for the first time. I vividly remember myself as a ten year old at my first IMAX film almost shrieking as a salmon seemed to swim through the head of someone seated a few rows in front of me.

The most amazing perspectival drawing I have come across recently is not a canvas at all but a painting on a road in Florida. It is (or "was" since it must be erased by now) the entry by Leon Keer, a Dutch artist, and his team in the Sarasota Chalk Festival. Inspired by the Qin-dynasty Terracotta Army, the drawing represents Lego-men marching in the pavement. It has to be seen to be believed. But there is a problem that I had never really considered but which must always be a problem with perspectival drawing to a greater or lesser degree: From another angle the Lego-men look strange and elongated. The deeper and richer the perspective, the more restricted the viewing angle for the 3-d effect to work. Even stranger than the lanky Lego soldiers is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger called The Ambassadors. All looks well with the two elegantly dressed young men and their assortment of allegorical objects, but then one notices the highly distorted skull in the foreground. It looks like a crudely done Photoshop project and yet is actually an experiment in perspective. The skull only looks natural if you view the picture from far to the right. I was never able to get it to work on the computer screen but the next time I am in London I'll pay a visit to the National Gallery to approach the painting from awkward angles. 

The Scourge of Internet comments

Prof Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log (one of the blogs I read the most) has a fantastic explanation of why he usually disables comments on his posts. Vogon poetry is invoked. Passive voice is explained. And so on. I don't bother closing the comments on this blog because, luckily, not enough people read it to leave soul-sappingly stupid comments.