Abstract
Delhi(1990), a novel by Khushwant Singh is a historical account of the
anonymous narrator duration showcase the tremors and troubles faced by the city
Delhi, a place iconic of the historical changes which at times has been created,
destroyed and recreated. The narrator's relationship with the eunuch Bhagmati is
a scope of deep analysis as Bhagmati impersonates Delhi. Cultural meme is a
term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book 'The Selfish Gene' that culture is
composed of memes which can be defines as a 'cultural unit shared and passed
down in different periods'. Dawkins’s concept of memes represent culture
through semantic word fragmentation, word frequency statistics and synonym
merging methods. They construct dynasty cultural meme vectors. In other words
they resemble biological genes through which culture can be identified in a fine
grained way. In Delhi, Khushwant Singh through a historical narrative style
reflects the historical exploits of Delhi and his sexual exploits encompassing
historical events related to the creation of Delhi, its golden chapters with Mir Taqi
Mir to the times of Nadir Shah and Aurangzeb and the devastation Delhi Sikh
riots, treating cultural units of India shared and passed on in different periods as
cultural memes. The idea of Bhagmati impersonating Delhi has been analysed in
magnum opus of contemporary cultural units.
'Cultural memes' was a word coined by Richard Dawkins in his book 'The Selfish
Gene’ followed later by definitions given by Sperber, Blackmore, Dennet and
Olesen. In the words of Dawkins