National_Geographic_Traveller_India-May_2018

22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER INDIA | MAY 2018

FENG WEI PHOTOGRAPHY/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES

(LAHORE),

FRANK BIENEWALD/IMAGEBROKER/DINODIA PHOTO LIBRARY

(KASHMIR),

ASHRAFUL AREFIN PHOTOGRAPHY/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES

(KOLKATA),

to check your email. In the same way
that Henri Cartier-Bresson never used
the big large format Hasselblads and
3X3 cameras on tripods that serious
photographers used in the 1920s and
30s. He used a tiny Leica that was
no bigger than a phone camera with
a tiny lens. He and that generation
of photographers used to love the
freedom that this light mobile guerrilla
photography gave them. I am still very
much in that tradition.

AS A HISTORIAN WHY DO YOU
THINK IT’S IMPORTANT TO VISIT THE

PLACES ONE IS WRITING ABOUT?

It’s central. It varies with the sort of

history you are [exploring]. It’s less

important if you are commenting on

post-colonial theory or something. But

it matters, if your work is rooted in

geography and narrative, as mine is,

and places and stories, in the sense I

try to write my history. So despite four

or five years of research and primary

sources, I still want my work to read like

literature with characters and narrative,

and a beginning and end; using the

techniques of the novel but using it for

what is strictly non-fiction. For that

sort of history, to know the landscape

and to know the places you are writing

about seems to be absolutely essential,

as essential as going back to primary

sources. It seems to me if you spend

your whole time in the library but don’t

know the landscape, you are as much

at sea as if you know the place but don’t

know the primary sources.

IS THIS SOMETHING HISTORIANS

NORMALLY DO?

There are surprisingly few historians in

India writing the sort of history I write.

History is still very much the craft of

the university and the academic. In

this country they normally come from a

Marxist background and therefore often

concentrate on social and economic

history, of which India has a strong and

brilliant tradition with great masters

such as Irfan Habib. But that’s not the

kind of history I write.

Non-fiction as a whole in India is in a

sense a fairly new venture. Most of the

great Indian writers are fiction writers

and novelists. And still history is the

preserve of academics who tend to write

economic history with a Marxist edge,

out of academe, for other academics;

which is a wonderful tradition but not

the one I belong to or not what I do.

So if you’re writing [certain kinds of

history] it’s perhaps possible to do it

only from the archives and to not know

the land. If you’re writing narrative

history then of course you have to

go to places. There will be a deep

inauthenticity about your writing if you

don’t go and see it.

Clockwise: Lahore, Kashmir and Kolkata are some of the places that William Dalrymple keeps
returning to. Previous page: For his current exhibition, Dalrymple (inset) captured this image
of Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid on a rainy day, brimming with clouds waiting to burst. It was taken
from a hidden chamber in the Shahi Darwaza, where princesses prayed.

THE ITINERARY CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM DALRYMPLE