First impressions

I was told as a teenager that first impressions count. Though my wise and giggly friend was talking about romantic love, however, I do believe first impressions count when it comes to business as well; especially when you meet an author-cumhistorian some hours before the launch of his much-awaited book (it took him six years to complete), take his audience (eminent critics, journalists and historians in their own right) through chapters of the tome, all on the eve of his book tour (of five cities of India), and then finish all “bookish duties” to co-ordinate and manage one of the most prominent literature festivals of India. As far as schedules go, William Dalrymple’s calendar was water-tight the day we met him. So, it was no surprise that the man who sat rather uncomfortably in a wooden chair, was looking rather harried. His clothes were crumpled (he had forborne several question-answer sessions with attention) and was parched. The sound checks in British Council yard where the launch was to happen, and people asking (pretty much) the same questions may have added to that overall discomfort. However, coming back to the bit about first impressions—the author’s patience was striking and impressive. He bore it all with a distracted but smiling countenance. That a historian has to be patient to do his work, is no epiphany. But the infinite amount that Dalrymple seemed to possess on that particular day was impressive. Dalrymple’s latest book—Return of a King, an in-depth analysis of the First Afghan War, told through the lives of both British and Afghan characters, using Afghan accounts of the conflict—was a difficult project from the word go. It is a retelling of what Dalrymple states to be, “Britain’s greatest imperial disaster”, a still-pertinent book about colonial ambition and cultural collision which is as relevant as a case study today as it was then. As Dalrymple points out to the oft-repeated line, “People who forget history are bound to repeat it.” And Return of the King stands as a testimony to that. “I don’t know why this particular book had such a difficult birth. Perhaps, because it was a more complex story that we had to pull together, information from all sorts of sources. The book involved Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and India, especially history of the Sikhs. When a historian writes about Stalingrad or the Second World War, everyone knows who Stalin was or who Hitler was. But no one has an effing clue about who Shah Shuja was. So, there was this awful lot of explaining to do, and an awful lot of scene-setting without losing the audience’s interest especially in the crucial first 20 to 30 pages of a book when you have to grip the audience’s attention and drag them into the story. However, the story had such a wonderful narrative arc that once I got going, and by the time we got the troops moving into Afghanistan, it kind of wrote itself,” says Dalrymple. As an after thought he adds, “There was a lot of heartburn and Olivia sort of made that simpler.” Olivia Fraser is Dalrymple’s spouse and mother to their three “wonderfully different” children. Fraser, we were told, was expected in half-an-hour’s time with Dalrymple’s wardrobe. “Nothing fancy, just a coat,” he said. The coat turned out to be a dashing black Achkan. Fraser is an established artist who has been specialising in Indian miniature art (a legacy she inherited from a distant relative James Baillie Fraser of Moniack who started a group comprising miniature artists called Company Painting) and has done occasional illustrations for the Dalrymple’s books. However, Fraser is more than a mere illustrator. “She is my primary editor, a rigorous and ruthless one. I know that almost always she is right. Having said that I really don’t like it when she says page two’s boring or the third paragraph has to go. I wouldn’t know how to write without her,” that is quite a compliment coming from one of the most-recognised authors in India, and indeed in the world. Because, we met him at such a crucial hour, the day he was to present the Return of the King to the world, the conversation rarely veered from writing.

The Shed in the Garden

I am a hugely indisciplined human being in general, in a whole variety of ways. I eat too much. I like chocolates. However, I am greatly disciplined as far as my writing is concerned. Those disciplined bits of my life occur in cycles, every five to six years. The final bit (of a “cycle”) is like the final semester in a varsity—you get up early, drink less, and party no more. When I am writing I am up by six in the morning. I take copies of previous night’s chapters before I go off to bed. In that lovely hour before everyone’s up, I am busy correcting yesterday’s work.” Less of a routine and more of a regimen. Most of the magic happens outside the comfortable confines of home, in a small garden shed where Dalrymple locks himself without Wi-Fi. Not that technology is necessarily bad, but because it is evilly distracting. “Wi-Fi gives me Facebook and Twitter. I can lose hours if I am not careful. You can start searching for Voltaire and five hours later, end up reading about the upper Volga,” he breaks off into peals of laughter. So, most of the writing (of new material) happens in that happy hour between 9am and 11am. “I don’t always manage to write something substantial. Mostly though, the work gets done by lunch. The rest of the day is free for sending out emails and correction,” he adds. But before the writing bit, there is a small, mind-boggling bit called research. It can be exciting, exhausting and exhilarating process. In some cases (especially, in his), it is equally serendipitous. Dalrymple has been an object of envy of other writers we hear, as he has had the fortune of writing in some of the most exotic Indian locations—former palaces and forts now converted into Tory homes for the posh or boutique hotels. The Return of the King, however, took him down a different path altogether. When during the conversation, the author-cum-historian seems deaf to all questions and gets busy with his mobile, we get to just how different it had been. Dalrymple gleefully shows a picture of an SUV with a bullet hole in one of its windows. “This was on the day we landed at the Kandahar airport. There were skirmishes and this was a result of one such,” he says. Not that he has a death wish, but it is hard for him to write without a “context”. “I did this dangerous journey along the route of the British Retreat of 1842, deep inside the Taliban territory, not because I enjoyed putting myself in danger, but because I could not have written truthfully without it.” And he had some serendipitous meetings. One such was with “a giant of a man”, called Anwar Khan, a former Taliban operative and an expert on the tribal geopolitics of Afghanistan. The research also included hair-raising escapes. An overindulgent lunch prevented Dalrymple, to take a trip from Jalalabad to a nearby town. On that very day, the local government decided to burn down poppy crops in that town, a move which resulted in a terrible gun-battle, hostage crisis and deaths. And the next day, when elders from the town came down to Jalalabad for parlay, Dalrymple was the only nonlocal allowed to witness the sessions thanks to Khan again—and Dalrymple received nuggets of information that writers usually kill for. And he has been quite lucky rather persistently. Years ago, Tatler wrote a piece about another such marvellous piece of luck; four years into his research for White Mughals, Dalrymple was on a final visit to Hyderabad. He decided to visit a local bazaar to buy metalwork boxes as presents. In that sleepy bazaar he met a stranger who ended up selling Dalrymple not just boxes but manuscripts bought by the shop owner in the sixties, containing a 650-page autobiography of Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin. With that manuscript and some more files, Dalrymple pieced together the book, originally planned as a general study of late eighteenthcentury British officials who had gone native.

The One Big Festival

The expression of going native is a peculiar one—it could be said (just a little bit) about Dalrymple himself. He has made India one of his home. His three children partly grew up here. He has closely collaborated with Indian (and global) writers and experts for his books, and he has been one of the three founders of the Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the most prominent literature festivals in India. In the past few years, the festival has grown manifold, and it has been exploring bolder, different themes and styles of writing—for example a session on prison diaries which was in spotlight the previous year. The focus has been increasingly on Indian writers from the margins, especially Dalit authors. Dalrymple is honest enough to pile praise on the lady who he believes has more to do with the change than he. “Between Namita and I we cut the world. She gets South East Asia, and I get the rest. She gets to invite 180 people and I get to invite around a 70; rather tragic. Between the two of us, Namita is the one who is interested in suppressed literature, whether you are talking of Dalits or anyone else from the margins. I on the other hand, am more into inviting writers who I admire. Personally, I would turn the focus on writers from China and South East Asia, Palestine. I would like to see more biographies. Cutting-edge novels. We make a huge effort to avoid publicity of the frivolous and put focus on books. This year, too, we have Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, really solid thinkers. Hardcore.” For the person who has been giving the microphone to Indian writers, we had to ask; does he believe that non-resident Indian writers can lend an authenticity to the ‘Indian voice’? “The authentic Indian voice is one of those chimeras like the concept of ‘real’ India which is always somewhere else. There are a billions of different Indias and a thousand more varieties thereof. I wouldn’t discount any literature on the account of a writer’s address. Then you lose Jhumpa Lahiri, who I believe to be a strong writer. Her Unaccustomed Earth made me weep me with pleasure, By that same token, Joyce wouldn’t be an Irishman and Ulysses, written during Joyce’s selfimposed exile, should not be considered an Irish novel. So, I believe the entire concept of authentic Indian voice is problematic.” D a l r y m p l e a l s o acknowledges that it is a tricky proposition pleasing all at the same time. His book, The Age of Kali ran into controversy over the interpretation of the word meenakshi. The word allegedly became ‘fish-eye’ rather than ‘eyes shaped like a fish’. “Inevitably you make errors and there are interpretations which people don’t like. I believe that if you are courteous to your critics, the task gets easier. What I believe to be important, and what I do, is send off the script to experts. For this book, it was Russian and Afghan specialists, East India Company experts and people who knew the geopolitical history of Afghanistan. If you can do that, you can pick up an awful lot of errors and controversies before it gets published. Having said that, there will always be some (errors) which will get through. I have a list on my Blackberry of six errors that have already been spotted. You have to be prepared to make errors and be held accountable for them.” What he would vouch for is his style—he acknowledges that it is what he loves and continued to carry throughout his career as a historian-author. “The White Mughal, The Last Mughal and Return of the King, are narratives in the classical historical sense. It is a style in which very few are writing (in India) nowadays with the exception of Ram Guha (Ramachandra), who has been writing on 20th Century political events with rigorous research and turning it palatable for a general audience. At the end of the day, it is lovely that there are so few who are writing like us, because it gives me my little USP,” he chuckles. Mentions of his work is always peppered with mentions of colleagues, peers and collaborators. He speaks highly of historian and journal ist Rudranshu Mukherjee: “a friend who is very, very helpful and extremely generous with his advice.” And Mahmood Farooqui: “Persian and Urdu are the keys to my research and the person who has been closely collaborating with me on the projects has been Mahmood Farooqui.” And then there is the indispensable Bruce Wannel: “He sort of moves into a tent in our garden for six months. In the morning we meet up and work on texts together. We jot down names. Often, names are made more ‘familiar’ in the native tongue, and thus gets a bit garbled. Say, Colonel Hop-a-kins for Colonel Hopkins. We have to pay attention.” In good humour, Dalrymple admits that without translators he would have a tough time. “I am not a linguist. I used to speak Hindi better than what I speak now, after living here for so many years. I do know some European languages. But yes, I wouldn’t trust my grasp over Urdu and Persian with the kind of technical texts that we are dealing over here.”

The Treasure Hunt

For a man who was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth, he seems surprisingly at home in India. Maybe it is time that people stopped writing or commenting on just how comfortable he is. It was in his gap year that Dalrymple first visited the Subcontinent, teaching at a school and working for Mother Teresa. He found it, “a complete shock” but after the first month he “fell in love with the place.” By the time he went up to Cambridge, his future path was set: he was going to be a writer. What fascinated him were the trappings history, and that not knowing it or complete denial of it was dangerous. “There are so many parallels between then and now. The West has installed on the throne in Kabul a man from the same tiny sub-tribe. Shah Shuja (ruler between 1839 and 1842) and President Hamid Karzai are both Popalzai, while the tribe which brought down Shah Shuja was the Ghilzais, who now make up the foot-soldiers of the Taliban. So you have this extraordinary feeling of history just repeating itself. The political geography remains the same, and as you travel around the country you feel the parallels grow rather than diminish.” It is history repeating itself that finds centrality in his books, the rest is made easy because he likes his work. “The methodology starts with the simple act of reading. Then you move to more detailed research; and then to finding the resource which is the maximum struggle. It takes long time. Yet, if you really like what you do it never feels like work. It is like a treasure hunt.” By now contently sipping on his wine and superbly excited as people start streaming in, he leaves with a final word. “With the Return of the King, I received the holy grail for a historian. First, the new material, second a great story with a tight narrative arc and great characters, and third a story with a global and contemporary appeal. I was lucky enough to have all three.” With that, and a nod, he goes on to present one of the best lectures by an author, in a long time.