Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city's Muslim landscapes. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city's spiritual and physical landscapes. In petitions deposited to jinn-saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy, a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape.
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