William Dalrymple’s agility and energy belie his ambitions. The prolific Scottish historian and writer, curator and broadcaster, critic and photographer, lives his life the way he always has – learning, researching, travelling, and writing. Winner of numerous awards and prizes for non-fiction, including Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, Hemingway Prize, and shortlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize, he’s also a co-founder and co-director of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

Dalrymple’s legion of followers and ardent admirers make a long list including Booker-winners, foreign journalists, aspiring writers, fellow historians and scholars, film stars and readers for whom he’s the proverbial blue-eyed boy of the Indian literary scene. He has something no other writer can boast of; a dedicated readership among the less erudite.

Dalrymple began his writing career as a travel writer with books like the City of Djinns, In Xanadu, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium before taking lessons in the history of the last days of the Mughals in India down to the advent and departure of the British imperialists. Apart from the trilogy: White Mughals, The Last Mughal and Return of a King – what became a precursor of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company his last book to date – he has penned down Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India and Koh-i-Noor (with Anita Anand).

Clad in a pale blue kurta matched with white pajamas, Dalrymple babbled his way across centuries and continents while launching his magnum opus The Anarchy at the Marriott in Islamabad. The News on Sunday sat him down between sessions to keep pace with his nightmarish deadlines. Excerpts follow:

The News on Sunday (TNS): Being a Scotsman, what exactly got you interested in India, in the first place? Was it a quest to unearth some kind of an ancestral link with the land that made you stay on?

William Dalrymple (WD): I arrived in India at the age of eighteen on January 26 in 1982, with no interest in the country at all. My distaste for it came about after my elder brother (who’s rather my hero and a double Blue at Oxford) – who went off to India and emerged a year later as a hippie with draggled dreadlocks, making South Indian coffee, and filling the house with Tamil tack and pictures of Radha and Krishna – blamed India for his transformation. My ambition in those days was to go to the Middle East. I’d imagine myself as someone with germs of one of the characters in Agatha Christie’s novels in the 1930s, sitting in Mesopotamia, digging up Syrian bowls. I got a job to dig on the Syrian side of the Syria-Iraq border. I’d been out of school, got everything set up, got my blood tested, had all the inoculations and vaccinations done when, at the last minute, someone close to the British School of Archaeology disclosed that it was a nest of British spies. So I ended up going to India, instead, to teach.

I was completely confused that first month in India but soon after that I just fell in love with it – what has remained with me for the rest of my life – with not just India but the whole region; I love this country [Pakistan] and I love Afghanistan. It’s a region that has accommodated me in many different incarnations. First, I suppose, as a traveller, then as a foreign correspondent, then as a commentator, then as a historian, a photographer and as a festival director. I just find it fascinating. Most of my friends in Europe struggle for ideas for their next book. I feel I can live eight more lives and still find new subjects to write about here. I am like a child in a candy shop as far as the subject matter is concerned. I like the food, the landscape, and the people here. I get irritated at times when it’s too hot and the electricity is not running or when it’s a traffic jam and it’s polluted but whenever I’ve been irritated, I’ve never been bored. South Asia is so rich, so strange, so unpredictable that I’ve never felt I’d ever run out or feel exhausted - there’s so much to do.

TNS: Would you subscribe to the notion that your fascination with the subcontinent has anything to do with the colonial master’s romantic and exotic vision of India?

WD: I think this is a very interesting part of the world – I am fascinated with its history and its art. I am from the West, and therefore anything that I do would account for Orientalism, strictly speaking. I would not be, as I am currently, the best-selling fiction writer in the region if I wasn’t speaking to the South Asians. Certainly, my readership now is mostly the countries I write about, and I had it in my mind whether that would be valuable for the British people. As early as The City of Djinns, the majority of my readership has been South Asian. People here, I am very glad to say, have responded with increasing hope for my work. I got the opposite problem in Europe where I had to explain (not that I am assuming they would already know), what a shehzada or qibla is. I don’t explain any longer; I just add it to the footnotes.

This current book The Anarchy sold about 60,000 hardback copies in India, and I don’t know the figures here [in Pakistan] but I can imagine one-third of that, maybe 20,000. My books are largely read by South Asians. If I were distorting the subject, the South Asians would respond to that; the South Asian who reads the book especially about his own country would look at it, and proclaim [if] it’s just exotic nonsense. The books I’ve written have been getting reviews; I’ve been getting awards, doctorates, and [most of] the sales are in India and Pakistan, [which] means I hope I don’t have to worry about that question. Even as an outsider, I’ve been living here for 30-35 years. You do spot things that people there in their place don’t notice. When I go to London, the stuff I grew up with is like wallpaper. That’s why it often does work for someone outside a culture to write about it.

TNS: What made you gravitate to Delhi, of all the cities, and devote a book to it called City of Djinns?

WD: That was my first South Asian book written when I was twenty-four. I remember when I was eighteen, upon my first trip out of university, I went around Delhi to find a good book on it and found nothing substantial except for a few colour guides that left me feeling inadequate. Khushwant Singh had not yet written his book on Delhi. In fact, our books on Delhi came out simultaneously. We used to see a lot of each other and compare notes. There were points we knew in advance, and we would coincide.

City of Djinns has kept me the biggest staple sales in huge quantities in Delhi. I get the same letter every winter from the same set of people, mostly from the University in Delhi saying things like, … I left home and came to Delhi and couldn’t find my way around, etc. Somebody – my mother, my brother, my lover – gave me the book; and now I am in love with Delhi... The book is thirty years old; it came out in 1992. It was written because it’s [Delhi] the city that I liked and was fascinated by, that I had enjoyed exploring and wanted to read about. That’s always the best way to write any book – to write a book that you’d like to read. You do that, whether or not the subject is technically a marketable subject, and if you cannot communicate your passions, people won’t respect it.

“Even as an outsider, I’ve been living here for 30-35 years. You do spot things that people there in their place don’t notice     anymore. When I go to London, the stuff I grew up with is like wallpaper. That’s why it often does work for someone outside a culture to write about it.”

TNS: How would you respond to being called a ‘multiculturalist’ vis-à-vis the White Mughals?

WD: The White Mughals is about the degree to which two cultures intermingled in the way they were not supposed to…east is east and west is west. There was a huge amount of adverse… what [Salman] Rushdie calls chutneyfication.

The modern connotations of multiculturalism I find different from the existence of mixed families, mixed races, marriages, etc. As a general principle, I put my ally with impurity against purity, with mixture against singularism. I do believe in multiculturalism in its broader sense of different cultures co-existing and mixing together, something, which is an important part of history and art history and the cultural process, from Gandhara through to Mughal Art, which is a very hybrid form of art. It’s often in the mixture of cultures that most things that you see happen in cultural purity then come out as mixed hybridity.

White Mughals was not an ‘attempt’ at multiculturalism: it was a recording of a piece of history of a period that existed for about 40-50 years, which produced mainstream results like Company School Painting (what I’ve been writing about). Even the exhibition Forgotten Masters is about hybridity in making art and the mixture with Company Painting. It’s a very similar process that happened in Gandhara two centuries earlier.

TNS: Was the exhibition and then the publication Princes and Painters, a continuation of the same initiative?

WD: I have always had a taste for hybrid art. From about my first years in South Asia, I began stacking this kind of stuff. In those days these things weren’t that expensive, and I bought a beautiful Gandharan piece from London, for about 2,000 Pounds in 1989. At the same time, I got my first Company School painting as a fee for writing a text for Spink’s. I got paid in kind rather than in cash! I have a lovely collection of Company School Paintings, which I keep in London. Some of the pieces are in the book. The piece I wrote about for Spink’s in 1988, (and that was the first of the Company Period paintings I wrote about) is the direct descendent of the introduction that led to Philip Masters line of descent from one piece to the other.

I didn’t use the phrase Company School Painting anywhere in the exhibition – although it’s a useful phrase because nothing else adequately describes the genre. We flirt with such ideas, as Indian Export Art. It’s like saying that the Sistine Chapel is Vatican Art rather than the work of Michelangelo or Raphael. The paintings of the old masters are [there] to try to give honour and respect to major Indian artists who happened to work for Company patrons. Very little of any of the paintings by any of those masters was commissioned by the Company; they were commissioned by individual Company patrons or employees who were interested in botany, architecture, or whatever it was, and used their salons to commission late Mughal artists to paint pictures. The reason why it worked is that it’s the last greater art of Mughal painting before 1857 finishes it and photography takes over.

Artists like Sheikh Zainuddin, Padma, Bhawani Das, Ram Das, Mazhar Ali Khan and some of the greatest Mughal artists who existed like Mansur in the court of Jehangir, they deserve to be remembered with the same honour and respect as Michelangelo or Raphael or Leonardo, who students should know [of] at school.

The project was to identify the artists. The whole bunch of scholars I worked with: JP Losty, Malini Roy, Henry J Noltie among the botanical staff; Yuthika Sharma and Sarah Lukas – all five of us worked together. Some of them have been [well-] known, like Ghulam Ali Khan but, [there are some artists] for instance, Yellapah of Vellore who’ve never been written about before this book. His work’s been known but he remained [largely] unidentified.

TNS: How did you decide to take to photography seriously?

WD: I’ve worked with Prabuddhadas Gupta, Steve McCurry, David Bailey, etc. I’ve done quite a lot of introductions to photographic works. As a teenager people remembered me as a photographer – I was a mad keen photographer. And I came back to it in my 50s, after a gap. My subjects have been primarily architecture, landscape, and a bit of portraiture. The first book The Writer’s Eye was a book pointing towards different stuff, but the second book The Historian’s Eye is clearly focused around the search for The Anarchy. You have pictures from Sirangapatnam, Calcutta, Agra, Delhi, a little bit from Lahore, particularly, and Lucknow. It was very much focused around the research trips for The Anarchy.

TNS: Why has your last book to date been called The Anarchy – trade leading to loot and plunder?

WD: Because the period has been as odd historically; it used to be gold and then became known as the anarchy. Then it went out of fashion. Since the 1970s, scholars have appeared to be emphasising the richness of the economic and cultural life of courts like Lucknow, Hyderabad, Murshidabad, which, of course, is right. These courts were rich and rose to greatness by scavenging off the Mughal courts. But, in a sense, it went too far. The travellers’ accounts make it quite clear that in moving from Delhi to Agra, you needed an armed body of men to protect you on that road, like the route from Delhi to Allahabad. These were major and tricky expeditions. While in the Mughal period you could go safely unarmed up and down the country.

The book is about the decline of the Mughals and the rise of the Company, and the two are put together. So Clive’s counterpart is Shah Alam. Clive is ruthless, uncultured, but deeply effective while Shah Alam is gentle, kind, good, chivalrous, but deeply ineffective, and fails and dies in misery.

Shah Alam is the single central character but it isn’t just about him – it’s a true story, and is about the rise of the Company against the decline of the Mughals. While the anarchy as a cast of historiography first came about as a post-Mughal curse, I wanted to say that it was the Company that fostered and enhanced the anarchy.