Geographical magazine, November 2003

A Scotsman in India

William Dalrymple’s meticulously researched books have made him one of the most popular travel writers of his generation. As he begins the follow-up to the award-winning White Mughals, he talks to Christian Amodeo about Islam, India and international politics

“Unless the context is understood you are never going to win the war on terrorism because the only thing protecting the West is the goodwill of the Islamic world,” says William Dalrymple matter-of-factly. After 17 years of writing about what he calls his “patch” – the large swathe of land between Istanbul and Calcutta – he has found his niche subject is now a global hot potato and he’s telling it how he sees it.

Few would argue with the 37-year-old Scot, whose eminently readable works have established his reputation as one of the best travel writers of his generation. His success has made him synonymous with expertise in Islam and India. There may well be bigger selling travel authors, but few are as well regarded or as consistently good as Dalrymple.

“At no point in history has there been more need for proper understanding and scholarship of the Islamic world than now,” he says. “Never in my life have I come across a subject about which there is such misinformation, such total incomprehension and such a lack of will to try to understand.” He says that he wouldn’t have particularly objected to a campaign to remove Saddam Hussein. “But anyone who knows about the region could see the reasons we were given were wrong,” he says. “One thing that is absolutely clear is that [Iraq] had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, which flourished thanks to money from Saudi Arabia.” He finds the situation frustrating on a daily basis. Not without humour, he blames the “self-appointed pundits, who are awesomely ignorant” for the delay in finishing his latest book, published last year. “White Mughals was delayed six months because I was writing letters to newspapers and sort of ‘harumphing’ around,” he says.

White Mughals, his fifth book, is an ambitious historical novel that turns a revisionist spotlight on what he calls “a forgotten period of history” – the century between the 1730s and 1830s. “It was a time when the British in India did not behave like the British were meant to behave,” he says. “They adopted Indian customs and sympathised with Indian culture, and a third of them had Indian wives.”

A true story set amid the power struggles between the British government and the Mughals, it’s the tale of a tragic love affair between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a Scottish merchant with the East India Company, and Khair un-Nissa, a beautiful Mughal princess.

“With the last book, I have jumped genre slightly. Previously they were travel books with a bit of history, but this is a history book with a little bit of travel,” he says. “It was going to be about lots of different people who had ‘gone native’, so to speak. After I finished my advance, I was all set to start writing the book when suddenly this fabulous material turned up, giving the other side of the story.” Dalrymple had spent three years working on a book in which Kirkpatrick and Khair featured in just one chapter. Only then did he realise that the fellow Scot’s story demanded his writing an entirely different book and taking “a terrific gamble”.

Dalrymple remortgaged his home, took his children out of private education and lived off a “whopping big” overdraft for two years to do it. “I gave my wife and my parents complete kittens,” he says. “I wasn’t so much confident as anxious, but the material was so good that I knew it was going to be a wonderful story to tell.”

The gamble has already paid off. White Mughals has sold more than 100,000 copies – four times more than his previous hardbacks. It has also won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Wolfson History Prize, the prize money for both of these being £10,000. However, it looks set to be a bigger pay day for Dalrymple than he initially expected. The Academy Award-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton has secured the theatre rights to the book, which will be brought to the West End by the Asian theatre company Tamasha. Now, Dalrymple is taking offers from Bollywood and Hollywood, and US television network HBO wants to make a six-hour, US$60million (£38million) mini-series. I ask him if he thinks his epic requires such a budget. “It’s certainly what my bank account needs,” he replies, laughing heartily.

Born in Edinburgh to what he describes as “Scottish provincial landowning sorts”, Dalrymple is the great-nephew of Virginia Woolf. He enjoyed “an idyllic childhood growing up on the beach in North Berwick” and decided when he was seven that he wanted to be either an author or an archaeologist. The youngest of four sons in a devout Catholic family, he rarely travelled, except to attend public school – Ampleforth College on the North York Moors – and to go on holiday “to colder and bleaker parts of Scotland”.

Dalrymple explains that by the age of 17 he had become a rather eccentric character. “When everyone else was going to nightclubs or busy wenching in the bars of York, I was going round on a bike with a pudding-bowl haircut visiting churches on the moors,” he says. He had only been abroad once, to Paris, and he suspects that this is why the nine months he spent in India before going to Cambridge University had such a “hypnotic effect” on him.
India has been a constant in Dalrymple’s life since that “electrifying” introduction. The country, he says, offers him a deep and limitless well of inspiration. “There’s a lifetime of things to write about,” he says. “The sheer density of its culture is such that you can never really know it. Every town in every state has its own forms of art and dance, school of music, cooking traditions and military school. I feel I can travel for another 20 years and still have a great deal left to see.”

Dalrymple still divides his time between London and Delhi, where he keeps a flat and spends around three months of the year. He first lived in Delhi for six years from 1989, so he barely knew about the fuss that was made about his debut, In Xanadu: A Quest, which was published when Dalrymple was just 22. “You never quite believe it,” he says of the book’s success. “Obviously it was lovely, but in India nobody read it.”

A humourous, award-winning travelogue, In Xanadu recounts his journey along the Karakoram Highway between Pakistan and China, following in the footsteps of Marco Polo along Asia’s Silk Road through remote regions of Iran, Pakistan and China. It made Dalrymple, as one critic put it, the new Theroux.

He followed this up in 1993 with City of Djinns, which described his experiences of Delhi. Like all his books since In Xanadu it was illustrated by his artist wife, Olivia Fraser. This book won him the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
So has Dalrymple ever been tempted to turn his erudite writing to another subject? “I can easily see myself never budging,” he replies. That said, he admits that when in Italy or the Caribbean, he is tempted. But he isn’t likely to change in the near future – his multiple book deal comprises all India-related titles, and his ideas file is bulging, he tells me. “It’s a relief,” he says. “I have writer friends who just don’t have ideas for their next book.”
When I visit Dalrymple’s idyllic retreat of a home in West London, the bulging file is nowhere to be seen in his compact and slightly ramshackle study. A stack of music CDs piled high above his computer threatens to topple onto his cluttered desk. It seems a somewhat disorganised place in which to produce such lucid prose, but Dalrymple is having a break from writing when we meet, having just returned from a week’s holiday in rural Tuscany. He seems to be enjoying la dolce vita, content and relieved that his latest book was the success he needed it to be.

With the same editor and publisher for the past 17 years, Dalrymple has won many of the top awards, and last year he was given the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal for his “outstanding contribution to travel literature”. “I have a nice clean track record,” he says. “What I am proud of is that I have received the top awards in all the different genres in which I have worked.”

Meanwhile, Dalrymple’s television documentary Stones of the Raj and Indian Stories won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at the BAFTAs in 2002, and his BBC Radio Four series on early spiritualism in Britain – the follow-up of which will air this month – won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting. “It’s nice to feel that I can do different things, that I have more than one trick,” he says. But writing is his bread and butter, and it is this that has a chance of standing the test of time. “There’s nothing nicer than getting a letter fresh with tear stains from somebody who’s just a read a book you wrote ten years ago… A book is a very small form of immortality.”

But it’s not all about prizes or securing immortality – at least, not always for oneself. Last year, Dalrymple also edited and introduced Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes. An Englishwoman who lived in India for 24 years from 1822, Parkes is known as the Jane Austen of India. Her undying enthusiasm for the country clearly struck a chord with Dalrymple. This project wasn’t just a labour of love derived from a wish to bring Parkes the belated credit her writing deserves; it can be seen as an author who relies so heavily upon the historical record giving something back.

Dalrymple’s next book, on which he is currently working, follows on historically from White Mughals. Based once again upon historical writings, it will describe the period under the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who organised a mutiny that culminated in genocide by the British in Delhi. “It was rather like Stalingrad set in the ruins of Renaissance Florence,” he says. “If White Mughals is about the forgotten love affair, this is the story of the divorce.” Dalrymple is excited about his “fabulous” Indian sources. Written in a difficult late-Mughal Shikastah script, they tell the story of the doomed mutiny and were used by the British as evidence during the emperor’s trial.

This next book will, perhaps, be even more pertinent to these times. Periods of understanding and tolerance such as that described in White Mughals are found throughout history, explains Dalrymple. But sooner or later they all end. “I fear that we are coming out of a period of liberalism and respect for other cultures and entering a period of narrow intolerance,” he says. “It’s only ten years since the translations of the poems of Jalalud-din Rumi was the number one bestseller in the New York Times list. It’s impossible to imagine that now. It’s unlikely to be the case again in our lifetime.”

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