The world I wrote of no longer exists: William Dalrymple

Historian and author William Dalrymple is in the odd yet interesting position of seeing his work become a record of the past while he lives. “As a writer of history, I find it interesting that the world I recorded travelling through Syria, Iran and Pakistan is not there anymore,” says Dalrymple, 51, who will be reading from his early books, In Xanadu and City of Djinns, and reflecting on travel writing at the Times Lit Fest Delhi at India Habitat Centre on November 26-27.
In Xanadu, his first book, published in 1989, traces 13th century explorer Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to Mongolia — a 16,000-mile, three-month trip for Dalrymple, then a 21-year-old undergraduate. Of the countries he travelled through, Syria and Pakistan are no longer the safe, beautiful places he described. “You can’t go to those places anymore. Back then, the Middle East had a large Christian population. In Xanadu is a record of a world and a time that no longer exists,” he says.
It’s not just the world that has changed in the last 27 years, Dalrymple says he has too. Despite the fondness for those days, he has mixed feelings about In Xanadu, the book that gathered a clutch of awards and launched his writing career. “I had a lovely, early start to writing, but I have an ambiguous relationship with my early books. I look at In Xanadu with mild disapproval. I consider it very cocky writing, a young person quick to judge,” he says. “When I was starting out, I wrote primarily for foreigners, now I write for Indians and most of my readers are in India.”
Since then, Dalrymple has written four travel books and, in 1999, switched to history, and has written four history books. “History takes far longer to write than travel. The two are related — when I read history, I want to travel and when I travel, I want to know history — but the writing is vastly different,” he says.
While travel is largely about one’s own experiences and observations, history requires one to work from existing sources, looking for fresh material that will provide the thread of a new story. “Writing history is a massive organisational project. I have lots of old-fashioned card indexes, and you go over it all and spot the material like a hawk,” he says.
Dalrymple has just finished co-authoring a history of the Kohinoor diamond with writer Anita Anand, which will be released early in December. What he’s working on now, a five-year project that still has about 18 months to go, is a history of the East India Company. “I’m loving it. It was a mighty corporation, an entirely private company that conquered an entire country. It’s a very relevant book in these times of corporate excess, when you have people like Trump and the Ambanis playing the kind of role they do in government,” he says.