20 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA | MAY 2018
THE ITINERARY CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM DALRYMPLEPHOTO COURTESY:WILLIAM DALRYMPLE/TASVEER AND DAUBLE(MOSQUE), DAVID LEVENSON/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTY IMAGES ENTERTAINMENT/GETTY IMAGES(WILLIAM DALRYMPLE)‘I’M BOTH AN INSIDER AND AN OUTSIDER’
WRITER AND HISTORIAN WILLIAM DALRYMPLE RETURNS TO HIS FIRST LOVE—PHOTOGRAPHY—AND
REVEALS WHY AFTER 30 YEARS OF TRAVEL INDIA STILL SURPRISES HIM BY BHAVYA DORE
T
hree years ago William Dalrymple
began travelling across India
to chart the ruin of the Mughal
empire and the rise of the East India
Company. Following in the steps of
Mughal emperor Shah Alam, the central
character of his book
The Anarchy, Dalrymple visited
battlefields, mosques, ruins, palaces
and barracks across Srinagar,
Srirangapatna, Jaipur, Lucknow,
Lahore, Kolkata and elsewhere. He
also explored the art and culture of the
period. The journeys resulted in “The
Historian’s Eye”, an exhibition of black-
and-white photos shot on a cell phone
that opened in Mumbai in April and
will travel to other cities including Delhi
and Chennai in the coming months.
Scottish-born and Delhi-based
Dalrymple has written on travel
(In Xanadu, From the Holy Mountain)
and history (White Mughals, The
Last Mughal) but his early passion
was photography.
Condensed and edited excerpts from
an interview about his teenage hobby,
travelling in India and why visiting sites
is the key to his kind of history writing:
CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE
ABOUT HOW YOU GOT INTO
PHOTOGRAPHY?
It’s in my blood. My great-great-aunt
was a woman called Julia Margaret
Cameron, who was a famous Victorian
photographer. We had her albums
at home and I remember as a child
leafing through and seeing the power
of photography. My grandmother left
me some money and when I was 16, Ibought a camera. As a teenager this is
what I did. I used to disappear into the
school's dark room on weekends and
come out clutching sheets of my prints.
I loved that. People who knew me at
that stage remember me as someone
who was mad keen on photography.
Then I got into writing, and the camera
sat in its bag unused. I rediscovered
it when two things happened. First,
I got a really good smartphone and
found you could take remarkably good
photographs. Then a friend pointed me
to some good software, which allowed
me to turn all the photos into the same
style of photographs that I was working
on in the dark, in black-and-white, at 17.DO YOU ONLY SHOOT WITH A
PHONE CAMERA NOW?
I do have a regular camera but haven’t
used it for two or three years. [With
phone cameras] you can’t get the
high shutter speed and I particularly
miss the ability to zoom in seriously.
But weighing against that, you have
something with you the whole time.
It’s immediate. No one knows if you
are taking photographs or pretendingIndia completely
changed me. I would
have been very different
had I gone off to London