IPP : As you started out as a history student, what advice would you give to history students who intend to become writers? I would say my work is much more biographical and much more narrative-based. I have always believed that human beings shape events. Quite a lot of history books written in India are analytical and often deal with social and economical forces and the influence of years of dominance and Marxist history here in India.
My books always have a very strong narrative element. There is still a measure of inspiration in the sense – how do you shape this material, how do you write it and how do you form it into a narrative.
With history, you work and labor hard with primary and secondary sources until you think you have understood your subject. William Dalrymple : With history books, it is not so much as inspiration, which is more what happens in fiction where you have some lightbulb moment about the great functional world. IPP : Where do you get the inspiration for your books? It is about the diffusion of Indian and Indic culture, Buddhism going off through Afghanistan to China, Hinduism and Buddhism going South East to South East Asia, and Indian numbers and science going west to the Arab world and then to Europe. That has slowed down now and I am back to my first love, and the book I am currently writing is called The Golden Road which will be out with Bloomsbury next year. What has slightly changed is that earlier I was interested in very early archaeology and early medieval history and I went and spent 20 years writing on the eighteenth century – which I wouldn’t have guessed I would be doing as a teenager or when I was in college. William Dalrymple : I became a historian by studying history and writing history books! I studied history at Cambridge and history has always been my great love. William Dalrymple’s White Mughals and The Anarchy on display at the Full Circle Book Store at Jaipur Literature Festival 2022. They are out now in bookshops near you with Bloomsbury Publishing. It began with the White Mughals in 1999, then came The Last Mughal, then The Return of the King and The Anarchy, and now they will be put into proper chronological order with The Anarchy at the beginning, and the last book at the end. William Dalrymple : I have just produced a book set of my four company books which have taken the last twenty years to write. Indian Printer & Publisher (IPP): Tell us about your latest books. Photo IPPĬ orrespondent Priyanka Tanwar spoke with historian and Jaipur Literature Festival co-director William Dalrymple at the recently concluded 2022 on-ground Jaipur Literature Festival about writing in Covid times, JLF Soneva Fushi, and the challenges in organizing a literature festival in the new normal, and more. William Dalrymple, historian, writer, and Jaipur Literature Festival co-director at JLF 2022.
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