I first came to Gujarat in 2001, when fundamentalists in Dangs district burnt some churches. It was an unpleasant sightHis latest acquisition is a book on Maharaja Sir Sayaji Rao of Vadodara. Donning a half-sleeve blue shirt on a bright Monday afternoon, he comes across as a jovial man often seen wandering amid the lost remains of forts and palaces. But William Dalrymple, a historian and a traveller who brought Mughals in a fresh perspective to the world without delving much into historical dates, has been travelling the country for the last 28 years. Newsline caught up with India’s very own travelling chronicler, as he flipped a few slides of his journey for a talk show organised by the Association of British Scholars, Vadodara Chapter. Excerpts:Ques Is this your first visit to Gujarat? Do you see metaphorical reflections of a besieged and helpless Bahadur Shah Zafar who was his own prisoner in an inexorable time warp, in the current state of the Muslim community in places like Gujarat, particularly after the 2002 riots?I first came to Gujarat in 2001, when fundamentalists in Dangs district burnt some churches. It was an unpleasant sight. I would say there is a direct correlation between the helpless Bahadur Shah Zafar and the current state of the Muslim community in India. In fact, it is not metaphorical. The decline of Muslims started with the siege of the Delhi Sultanate in 1857, which led to the bifurcation of two different schools of thought — one at Deoband and the other at Aligarh. The humiliation of Islam during the siege of 1857 was a repository of what was to come. While Deoband vouched for its pure roots, Aligarh embraced other parallel cultures.Ques Where would you draw the line between a biography and hagiography? What efforts, conscious or otherwise, did you take to avert The Last Mughal from sliding that way?I am surprised I have not come across a review describing it as hagiography. Bahadur Shah Zafar was magnificently well-equipped as an inspiration with his utopian ideals and poetry, but ill-suited for the task of leading the rebels from the quandary of siege. The Last Mughal is neither a biography nor a hagiography. Delhi is the principal character among the cast. Ques Though he has come a long way now from the clichés of snake charmers, magicians, maharajas and other oriental exotica, the archetypal Western reader is still obsessed with an India with a strong sepia tint. How would you reason this?I think that’s what my next novel, tentatively called Nine Lives, tries to bring forth. It is a chronicle of nine individuals who have taken to mysticism in these times. It transcends, what is commonly called Karma in hippy parlance and all other such clichés. That one needs to see how a sadhu lives like I met this one at Goumukh, with whom I spent a week. While talking to him, he came across as an MBA who was selling Kelvinator refrigerators, around 15 years ago or a Devdasi called Ranibai from Hampi, in Karnataka, who was pulled out of the school, driven to prostitution, and ended up as an HIV positive; then also Haridas from Kerala, a Dalit well digger who enjoyed inverting caste structures with exorcism. Ques What is the one thought upper most in your mind when you think of Gujarat? Riots. But if I go by what is being most talked about, it’s Nano. Ques Your niece, Alice, is in India and she just published her first book. We are in the process of setting up our family business here (laughs). She is my first cousin and coincidentally, we are working on similar things. Though we haven’t travelled much here.
