“These two are the centres of destabilisation. Shifting focus from India though, William’s current interests lie with Pakistan and Afghanistan. I assume that my reader knows about India and is an Indian,” he reveals. Nine Lives got translated in 40 languages, it’s ridiculous! But while it’s true that my first book on India (City of Djinns) mainly catered to international readers, I now find myself explaining less and less. “My books have become amazingly international. They are born and brought up in India and can speak and write Hindi but, they can never be Indians.”Īn award-winning historian and writer, William is a Westerner who has taken India to the world through his exploration of the country’s rich history. It has a very strong ethnicity that I can’t fit into. His latest book is The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.Ask him why he still finds it difficult to call himself an ‘Indian’ despite living in kurtas and cotton pyjamas and lunching on dal/rice, he replies after a thoughtful pause, “India has clear sets of identity. William Dalrymple is the author of numerous travel and popular history books about India. Here I am in my mid-50s, still discovering amazing, world-changing information whenever I open a book about this country. Plus, there’s the way Indian mathematics travelled first to Baghdad and then to Renaissance Europe, giving us the decimal system and the numerals we use today - I didn’t know all this until a few years ago. The book I’m currently working on is about the diffusion of Indian culture out of India: the way Buddhism took over China, and the way Hinduism took over Southeast Asia. There’s an almost infinite amount to take in, see and understand. I feel like a child in a sweet shop or a miser in a bank vault sometimes. India is a continent rather than a country - you could never run out of things to explore here. There are major monuments and mountain ranges, extraordinary places in the Himalayas I’m dying to visit. I’ve been travelling around India for 30 years and there’s still a good quarter of the country I’ve yet to see. In England, on a dreary winter’s day, things can feel pedestrian. It has an amazing classical music and dance scene. Delhi has transformed in the past couple of decades from a government town to a place that’s home to India’s publishing and media industries, and many of its best writers. The Delhi Archives is also located here - housing a lifetime of documents that have barely been read - and when I need a break from my research, there’s plenty going on elsewhere. It has such a tangible sense of history, with monuments lying around on roundabouts, and tombs, palaces and old city walls wherever you turn.

For me, as a historian and a writer, Delhi is fascinating. It’s regarded as a difficult place to live and as a big, polluted city - although it’s been glorious during lockdown. Delhi is much underrated. Even within India.

William dalrymple books in hindi