Swinging Blue Djinns

WILLIAM Dalrymple was only 22 when he lived in an Oxford house and wrote his celebrated and bestselling book In Xanadu. Messy-haired and fun, Dalrymple was definitely An Oxbridge Character, the sort who could once ask a woman from the American Deep South: "How on earth did you manage to escape from Alabama?" Since then his adventurousness and lively scholarship has taken him from the Middle East to old Delhi and today, after four books and two film series he is a new interpreter of the Raj, part of the growing legion of India Hands.

Interpreting India has always been a great Occidental pleasure. The western India Hand is surely the recipient of much awe in London and Paris salons, when, tanned and mosquito-bitten, he tells baffling tales of hirsute sadhus and caste battles, horrific poverty and stomach upsets in pagan villages.

But Dalrymple, now 33, kurta and chappal-clad, of piercing gaze and loud, un-English laugh, of prodigious energy and boundless love for this country, is not simply just another Englishman-in-the-tropics. He drinks not only the chai but sometimes even the water. "After an astonishingly sheltered childhood, I came to India first as a backpacker and after two weeks of bemusement, couldn't tear myself away," he says.

He's an affectionate Orientalist, unabashedly devoted to the Irrational East, part of the same tradition of intrepid Company adventurers and post-Enlightenment historians who once scoured the burning plains looking for 'The Other', at the cost, sometimes, of personal certitudes.

Of course, we natives sometimes tend to be a little touchy nowadays and accuse our new interpreters—as Dalrymple was in a recent showing of his films—of "peddling exotica" or "reducing India to a set of stereotypes" or "using India as an excuse for Raj nostalgia". But Dalrymple says there's a complete misunderstanding among Indians about British attitudes and says he simply cannot understand Indian Anglophobia.

"As far as the British literary intelligentsia or the middle class is concerned, India is an object of worship," he shouts. Back in London, his sculptor friend Robert Jones could not find a gallery to exhibit his works, until he changed his name to Hamish Patel! Once armed with a politically correct name, the showrooms queued up. "Even bad books like Upamanyu Chatterjee's The Last Burden are raved about in England even as they are panned in India. Look at the 50-year celebrations, Britain was celebrating long before India had even made preliminary plans, curry's still the favourite food, this is the first year in several that an Indian's not on the Booker shortlist and the majority of backpackers who come to India are English. India doesn't realise how much it's losing by its hostility," he argues.

"I write about what I see," he says firmly. And to be fair to him, not all of it is exotic, unless Laloo Prasad Yadav and Benazir Bhutto are to be classed in that category. Dalrymple's a chronicler a little like Colonel James Tod, author of the authoritative Annals and Antiquities. He's an encyclopaedia of lesser-known names and family histories, is able to provide formidable details of the men and women who participated in one of the greatest cultural fusions of the 20th century. His writing is accessible and anecdotal, his huge success a result of his easy scholarship and racy descriptions, as he flits smoothly between centuries. It was this characteristic Khushwant Singh noted in his review of the City Of Djinns. "He has an extremely attractive way with words," says Singh, "and is clearly a man of letters."

Dalrymple is contemptuous of the later Raj as "starch-shirted and stiff-lipped", but rejoices in the architecture, language and food produced by the colonial experience in India. He maintains that beyond the strictures of empire, the estate of human interaction was most exciting. "I relate to my Indian friends much better than I would to say, a French or a German of the same age. Of course, it is a love-hate relationship, 200 years of imperial history does get in the way, but we speak the same language here." Dalrymple's loyalties lie with myths and ruins rather than 'progress' and 'normalcy'. "Some people may say I should write about the silicon chip industry in Bangalore rather than the Kumbh Mela, but the fact is that the Kumbh is just about one of the most extraordinary events in the world." To insist, out of some sort of political correctness that one should not write about it, lest one be accused of "exoticisation" is simply jejune.

But he does seem a little disappointed at the rapid disappearance of almost every remnant of the Raj. "There's amazingly little left of the Raj, no sola topees or crinoline dresses," he says, a little sadly. He hates Indian nationalist history almost as much as he dislikes the pomposity of the Victorian Raj. The Golden Age of the Anglo-Indian encounter was, he believes, from 1780-1820, a period ignored by Indian historians.

This was the time of William Fraser, who had an Indian harem, subjugated brigands, went lion-hunting on foot and cultivated a Rajput moustache. It was the time of James Achilles Kirkpatrick who converted to Islam, married Zebunissa of Hyderabad and of relatively unknown figures like Ochterlony. His next book, The White Mughals, will concentrate on figures who have been ignored by mainstream history, he says, because they did not fit the conventional notion of "English colonisers".

Indeed Dalrymple's admiration for Fraser (incidentally also an ancestor of his wife, Olivia) seems to illustrate his admiration for a sort of liberation from British-ness. "It's only in the struggle between competing identities that the great cultural epics are built," he says. The Middle East was culturally supreme when it was the meeting ground of different people and contemporary Britain is witnessing, according to him, a cultural renaissance because of the multi-culturalism that now dominates its life. As soon as a country becomes mono-ethnic, it becomes culturally dull. Which is why, he says, the BJP's project of homogenising India would mean cultural stagnation. "If homogenisation succeeds, then for the first time, India will close its doors and turn inward and that would be tragic," he says.

HE's written three books since In Xanadu. From The Holy Mountain, City Of Djinns and his latest book, a collection of articles on India and Pakistan, At The Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess. He was foreign correspondent in India for The Sunday Times Magazine, the Spectator and The Observer magazine, he's made four short films for Channel 4 on India and is now filming for a BBC series on the Kumbh Mela and his two books, From The Holy Mountain and City of Djinns, which he is in India to film.

He says he grew up surrounded by white Catholics but India almost converted him to Sufism. Just before getting married he went on an ancient and rigorous Catholic pilgrimage, to Santiago de Compostela, in northwest Spain where St James the apostle is buried. "It was a rite of passage," he says. "A few weeks before I got married." Now he quotes from the Sufi Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, and says he believes "sab ek hain" (there is only one god).

Like most aristocratic British families, several of his forbears danced at the Tollygunge Club. "Dalrymple's a rare name even in England so it was strange to find a graveyard in Murshidabad with the name on several gravestones!" His great-grandmother was a famous Calcutta beauty by the name of Sophia Pattle, "a name which everyone assumed was Patel". His grandfather was an officer in the ICS and ADC to Curzon; another relative was a writer in the Writers' Building. He says he has Indian blood flowing in his veins from an Indian ancestress: "Sometimes, I think I look quite Bong!"

Sure, he's romantic about India. " I'd much rather be sitting in a 16th century tomb in Mehrauli, than in Greater Kailash," he says rather sternly. But listening to this passionate partisan of India's past, one can't help feeling it would be a little churlish to accuse him of being a propagator of the old elephant-and-sadhu routine.