It all began with a chance trip to Delhi, and the rest is history. At the age of 22, just out of Cambridge as an undergraduate, William Dalrymple took an ambitious step to fill in his summer break with a trip that forever marked his life. Retracing the 700-year-old route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia in 1986, he briefly passed through Delhi but, with his eyes for the exotic, the vivid memories of the land that his ancestors once ruled forced him to come back.
And since 1989, the British writer has made Delhi home. Also, out of that epic journey, he began his writing career, with “In Xanadu: A Quest”. Today he is India’s most famous narrative historian, credited for adding layers to India’s identity, making the past approachable by turning it into living history.
“I ended up here [India] through a whole series of accidents ... it’s my home even though I don’t live here all year round ...,” says the award-winning British writer, just back from the Hay Festival, held in Dhaka. “Except for a couple months during the monsoon, I love the country and whatever comes with it — chaos, complexity, power cuts, whiff of spices ... it’s never boring.”
He lives with his wife Olivia, an artist in the Jaipur miniature tradition, and three children in a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of New Delhi — a semi-rural self-sufficient idyll where he grows vegetables and raises goats.
It was tales receding far beyond history in the ruins, crumbling tomb towers and old mosques in Delhi that fascinated him. “India is the source of endless inspiration, I thrive on the stories it offers. There’s always something interesting here,” he says, with a throaty laugh.
And a true testament to his growing fondness for the country, a land with historical antiquities, is his books, “The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India”, “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India” and his three books on Indian history, “White Mughals”, set around 1800, “The Last Mughal”, around 1857, and “Return of a King”, 1839 to 1842.
For the 49-year-old writer and a visiting fellow in humanities at Princeton, life has been an adventurous ride so far — writing one brilliant book after another, following Tamil Tigers, getting shot at in Palestine, Kashmir and Afghanistan, stumbling upon invaluable manuscripts and meeting incredible people on his way to find an interesting story to tell.
“I love what I do, but it is as hard as any other job. Scouring libraries and archives, travelling to some dangerous places ... it’s a lot of hard work.”
“And you slightly take your life in your hands when you go to Kandahar,” laughs Dalrymple, who made two six-week trips into Afghanistan — Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Kabul — in 2009 and 2010 to write his meticulously researched and critically acclaimed “Return of a King”, and escaped sniper shots while digging up material for it. “Return of a King”, a comprehensive history of Afghanistan and the British Raj, tackles the greatest imperial disaster the empire ever suffered in the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-1842.
“It was a complete wipeout ... so whenever other new imperial powers threaten their country, Afghans just remember this war and smile,” he says about the war, one of the first major conflicts during the Great Game, the 19th century competition for power and influence in Asia between the United Kingdom and the Russian empire.
“This battle also had a major effect on Indian history because the regiments that were neglected by the English officers during the Afghan campaign went on to mutiny in 1857.” The rebellion in 1857 is also known as India’s First War of Independence.
The master storyteller, who breathes in vivacity and animation into the historical characters, says writing big a narrative of history is an investment of three to four years. “They are major projects. You only go into them if you are sure that somebody wants to read it .... Going on book tours, doing lectures, popping into libraries, sending e-mails to other historians in the same fields, reading all the stuff that has been put in previous books about what I’m writing about, sitting in archives ....”
He takes hand-written notes, uses card indexes and a dateline on his laptop while writing historical doorstoppers.
“A novel you can knock off in a couple of years. But writing a big history book is like doing a PhD .... In the final year, I am disciplined, get up very early, get fit and I really go for it.” No wonder he makes it all come alive.
“I do travel books as well, and they take a lot less work though they’re often more difficult in their writing. It’s easier with the history books.”
But it’s the history of the Mughal dynasty in India that made his talent really shine, and where he seemed able to bring nuance and vulnerability to even the ill-famed rulers. Stepping into a void, writing riveting accounts of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, infamous for his religious bigotry, and the last Mughal emperor of India Bahadur Shah Zafar, a famous Urdu poet in his times, Dalrymple has been lapping up the admiration of his peers and fans for his fluent knowledge on the subject.
“More than any other Islamic dynasty, the Mughals made their love of the arts a central part of their identity. Humayun lured Persian masters to his court. His son, the emperor Akbar, did the same and emphasised that he had no time for ultra-orthodox Muslim opinion.
“I am fascinated by Mughal history and there is lot more to write, but my subject of specialisation is East India Company, a company that unleashed a beast on the world.”
Needless to say, using the tools of literature to retell history, his talent is spot-on. One of the nice things about writing a historical narrative and other people reading it, Dalrymple says, is having “the presence of this whole cast of people who died 170 years ago in your life.”
“After the book is written, suddenly you have readers who chat to you about Shah Shuja (the last Sadozai Durrani ruler) or Dost Mohammad (founder of the Barakzai dynasty). And that’s a great treat when you can have conversations about your friends that you’ve been hanging out with...”
And something that helps him, in a way, to artfully recount tales are his two writing desks, he chuckles.
“Columns, e-mails are written on the one inside, which is my study. No book-writing ever takes place there.” His books are written outside, on the writing desk at the end of his garden.
“There’s no wi-fi there. I am not against social network. Like others, I am on Facebook and Twitter, but when it comes to real writing, you mustn’t have wi-fi because as soon as you’re online you can eat up hours easily.”
His day begins at 6am, making corrections on the previous day’s writing. “By 10am I’m working on new material and writing through till 2.30pm.” After a few hours’ break, it’s back to writing between 5pm and 9pm.
Dalrymple, who has done for Indian history than many seasoned Indian academics, says though India has a glorious past, it has had no reliable historical account of it.
“It is sad that there less than 10 people in India who can read and translate ancient works in Persian language. Young researchers should take more effort to appreciate the history of their country.”
Indian history has not been recorded like the European, he says. “Except a few, the country lacks native historians. Indians have not even taken keen interest in recording the history after its independence in 1947 ... Very few are interested in taking up history as a profession. They prefer to be engineers, doctors and management professionals.”
Reacting on the concerted attempt made by politicians to rewrite the history textbooks used in Indian schools, Dalyrmple says, “Politicians are inconsequential to improve the quality of India’s history. Historians must learn to make their work attractive to a wider audience. Archival institutions, historical research centres, pre-colonial libraries are in a shambles. The vast manuscript wealth are badly damaged ... there is lack of historical sensitivity here.”
Co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, the region’s largest literature festival that is fast becoming a global cultural gala, Dalrymple is chuffed with the strongest international line-up in its upcoming edition, beginning January 25.
“ What I do is the international list, and it is quite easy to do as any writer seems to accept the invitation immediately. There’s a lot of excitement in bringing V.S. Naipaul, Eleanor Catton, Paul Theroux, Neel Mukherjee this year. It’s one of my ways of giving back to India...”
A gentleman that he is, he even invited me to the lit fest. “It’s a must visit for those interested in writing and literature,” he says.
From humble beginnings in 2006, which was attended by just 18 authors and drew a crowd of around 100 people, the lit fest held in the western desert state of Rajasthan has become a major event that attracts star writers.
“It is a properly festive festival, with hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts milling around. We bring in major international names and provide a platform for regional literature as well. In the evening, the writers give the stage over to music and dancing...”
Talking about his favourite writers who, in some way, influenced him, he fondly remembers the great American writer Peter Matthiessen, who died in April after a prolonged struggle with leukaemia. “Matthiessen lived an enviably courageous life and was one of my great literary heroes. He was a versatile and truthful writer.”
“Chatwin, I thought, was simply astounding,” he says of English writer Bruce Chatwin, whose best known works are “In Patagonia” and “The Songlines”. Although he was often referred to as a travel writer, Chatwin was also a novelist who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and died of Aids in 1989.
“Chatwin’s description of Buenos Aires at the beginning of “In Patagonia” is one of my favourite evocations of place. Though it was not his most commercially successful book, it is probably the most influential travel book ever written. He also knew and loved the Islamic world — and such writers are now badly in demand.”
While on the subject of Islamic world, Dalrymple says the magnitude of the crisis with resurgent jihadism, which has shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, will have dire consequences for all. “While the human cost of the war and the human pain inflicted by torture is immeasurable, the people of the region will end up having no past and future. Astonishing archaeological and architectural heritage is disappearing. Once a monument is destroyed, it can never be replaced. Years of concerted shelling have reduced the history of an entire people to rubble.”
With anti-Copt riots, killings, rape and church burnings, he fears, like many others, Christianity is under threat in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, despite a sizeable Christian population holding on in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. On the other hand, Palestinian Christians in Gaza and the West Bank are uncomfortably caught between Israel’s pro-colony government and their increasingly radicalised Sunni neighbours, says Dalrymple, who wrote “From the Holy Mountain”, a study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland.
“If the Islamic state proclaimed by Isil turns into a reality, and if the Christians continue to emigrate, the Arabs will find it much harder to defend themselves against radical Islamism .... At the same time, one can’t deny the fact that the terrible tragedy of Iraq is entirely a mess of our own creation.”
Iraqi Christians in Mosul, Basra and Baghdad, who prospered under the Ba’athists he says, are emigrating now. “In the past decade, thousands have made new lives in Europe and America.”
Recalling harmony in Syria over a decade ago, where one would find five or six different religions surviving side by side in villages across the country, Dalrymple says, “Hafez Al Assad (president of Syria from 1971 to 2000) kept himself in power by forming a coalition of Shias, Druze, Yezidis, Christians and Alawites through which he was able to counterbalance the weight of the Sunni majority.”
Today, three years after an open-ended civil conflict, Syria is traumatised by its 190,000 dead, half of whom are believed to be civilians — and nine million people displaced.
“Until a few years ago, Syria was the only country in the Middle East to retain its mixed Ottoman inheritance. Look at it now ... the sense of loss is catastrophic. Terrible damage has been done to some of the country’s most spectacular monuments and crusader castles, including Umayyad mosque of Aleppo and the greatest of them all, Krak des Chevaliers. The old city of Homs has been levelled ....”
A patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dalrymple, who also attended the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008, hopes for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which, he says, would come through only if Israel upholds the Palestinians’ rights and eschew its “oppressive policies”.
“Israel had done enough to Gaza with the weaponry gifted to them by the US, killing thousands of Palestinians and many of them children ... These illegal colonial cities would have to be removed if there is to be any hope of peace. Everywhere the odds are still heavily against the peace, but I do hope for peace to come soon.”
Notwithstanding the many awards and recognition — including the “Sunday Times” Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Asia House Award for Asian Literature — Dalrymple is a tad disappointed for not being able to bring home the UK’s most prestigious and richest nonfiction award, worth £20,000 (Dh114,345).
“Being shortlisted for The Samuel Johnson Prize for “Return of King” but not winning it is not a good feeling ....” he says, with a big laugh. Author Helen Macdonald has won it for “H is for Hawk”, a book about how becoming a falconer helped her deal with grief.
So what’s next? “It is about the rise of the East India Company from a private company to a coloniser of nations.” The book is a prequel Dalrymple’s last three works — “White Mughals”, “The Last Mughal” and “Return Of A King”, all of which unfold from 1790 and 1850, chronicling the relatively “unwritten time” between the fall of the Mughals and the rise of the British.
“What inspired me is the fact that it was not the British that took over India, it was a multinational corporation, which employed only 30 security guards in 1739. Yet by 1803 they had an army twice the size of the British army, and took over an entire continent!”
Needless to say, it will be a sweeping cultural history of India.
“What I love about India is that it has accommodated my changing interests ... Indian Muslim history, Buddhism, Hindu spirituality, Bhakti, and now the East India Company.”
Suparna Dutt D’Cunha is a writer based in Pune, India
