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Swimming Up the Down Current: Sophie Cunningham talks to William Dalrymple

November 22

William Dalrymple’s engagement with, knowledge of and respect for India is extraordinary. He has lived, on and off, in and around Delhi since 1989 and is the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple has received numerous awards for his books, which include In Xanadu (1989), City of Djinns (1993), From the Holy Mountain (1997), The Age of Kali (1998), White Mughals (2002), and The Last Mughal (2006).

For our September issue, Sophie Cunningham caught up with him at the 2010 Sydney Writers' Festival, which he attended to promote his latest book Nine Lives. A brief extract is below and you can read the full interview on our editions page.



Sophie Cunningham: Do you make your living as a writer?

William Dalrymple: Yes, I play with telly, radio and film and so on, but I’m extremely fortunate that the kind of books I want to write are also books which people want to read. I know writers who, for example, are interested in eastern Europe, and there is very little market for that kind of stuff.

Sophie: How did you find working in longer form, as you did with the history White Mughals, compared to the collections of shorter pieces, such as The Age of Kali and Nine Lives?

William: There’s only one collection of work really until Nine Lives … The Age of Kali is the only collection. In Xanadu is a travel book.

Sophie: But White Mughals is much denser, and longer, than any of your other books.

William: White Mughals was my first encounter writing narrative history as opposed to memoir and travel, and I spent five years completely obsessed. I made the classic mistake of putting everything in or not cutting enough out, certainly.

That’s how, in a sense, Nine Lives happened. There is so much going on in India. Even so, Nine Lives hasn’t got any Jews in it, it hasn’t got any Sikhs in it, no Parsis. It hasn’t got any Christians in it. All these religions have stories that are profoundly interesting.

Sophie: Is there still a large Jewish community in Fort Cochin?

William: Not huge, but they’re slightly clinging on. The biggest Jewish community is in Bombay, it’s a fascinating history. A very good book on that is Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign. She grew up as a Muslim Pakistani and then discovered that she had a Jewish grandmother. It’s a rich and fascinating story of how a Bene Israel Bombay girl ended up marrying a Pakistani Muslim. A great story …

Sophie Cunningham: I was interested to read, in the introduction of Nine Lives, that in the past you’d always been encouraged to write a travel narrative with you at the centre.

William Dalrymple: That was how travel books had been written, it was all about you.

Sophie: But in Nine Lives, you’re giving other people voice, and I wanted to know why you made that decision to move away from the convention. Do you think that writing from the ‘I’ position is a Western construct?

William: I think that’s bollocks. I think the history of travel writing in other countries, whether it’s Li Po or Xuanzang or any of the great Eastern travel writers, they use the same approach. One of the nice things about travel writing is how similar it is across different traditions. Many of the traits that are sometimes judged in postcolonial writing to be exclusively orientalist, European and imperial are completely present in, for example, the writings of Persian travel writers visiting India in the eighteenth century—all these half-naked savages wearing loincloths read very much as if written by a colonial bigot. One of the things that’s interesting about travel writing is it’s something that’s universal across a huge range of cultures.

Sophie: It’s almost an oral form of storytelling, isn’t it?

William: Well, certainly it’s as old as epic poetry. It depends how you define travel writing: if you include things like The Epic of Gilgamesh then you can take it right back to man’s earliest oral outpourings. It certainly predates the novel and literary fiction by a couple of millennia. So I think that the basic idea of writing down a journey that a human being has done is one that has occurred to people for a variety of motives in a variety of cultures throughout human history.

Think of the voice of Usamah Ibn Munqidh, a thirteenth-century Syrian writer who wrote Memoirs of an Arab Syrian Gentleman, regarded the Crusaders as complete barbarians. His descriptions of a hunting expedition and how he regards it as a military expedition where there should be no talking is very like the way my father would go shooting in Scotland on the moors when I was growing up, aged eight. And Ibn Munqidh does have wonderful stories about how the Franks refused to shave their pubic hair and used to wander around the bathhouses in Syria stark naked with a ‘forest attached to their lower bellies’ and this sort of thing.


 

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