ABSTRACT
Khushwant Singh’s Delhi is a novel spanning the histories of the city from the Sultanate period to the colonial period, contrasting the past and present through a wide range of antiquarian anecdotes and prescriptive authorial narration. Despite the unfavourable reviews from critics like Madhu Jain for its subtle erotic undertones, the importance of it is undeniable in the context of urban literature. In the vast spatiotemporal narrative framework, the author aptly images the past and the present of the city, its zones, and culture and narrates the experiences of those who had owned the city for an extended period. The city of Delhi has been playing a pivotal role in the sociopolitical scene of India since the eighth century. It is like a palimpsest onto which several rulers had inscribed their stories of love, lust, and gratification again and again as if the city is like the body of a hermaphrodite, which can be used, abused, and misused, whenever the desire overtakes the emotion.
