Well, we Scots have exactly the same. The guy who wrote the great accounts of Scottish history, was a Canadian. So there’s a precedent in my own country. So I’m getting my revenge now.

• You know history fascinates me, but it also confuses, confuses me because, look at 1857. Reading your book, there is this whole touching section of the destruction of Delhi’s Mughal monuments. Monuments, but mostly Mughal. By the British. And you write about it with a great deal of pain. You make the Raj out to be the villain there. It’s amazing that how little we read about that. We read about Jallianwala Bagh, we read about other atrocities. We know that Muslim invaders destroyed many Hindu monuments. But there is so little mention of what the British did to Old Delhi in 1857.

I think there’s a very interesting story here. Because, I think in that sense Savarkar has kidnapped your narrative of 1857. He emphasised strictly Mangal Pandey in Barrackpore and Rani of Jhansi in Jhansi. Now, they are great heroic figures and great national heroes, but ultimately, in the story of 1857, they are frankly side-shows because of the 1,39,000 sepoys who rose against their Britsh officers, 1,00,000 went straight to Delhi. Now these are upper-caste Hindus, and who do they get to lead the rebellion — the Mughal emperor.

• The Mughal emperor who was emperor only in name.

But still had enough prestige. That’s even more surprising.

• Shahanjah-e-alam Dilli sey Palam.

Now, he didn’t even have up to Palam. He just had the walls of the Red Fort. Zafar, by 1857. And yet, the prestige of the name is such that these Hindus from the opposite end of— now remember, these guys are from eastern UP and Bihar, they are not local guys from here — they go to Delhi and they ask Zafar to lead them. And the contrast of that with 1992, with the destruction of the Babri Masjid, is very striking.

• The fascinating thing is that here is this army, the majority of which is upper-caste Hindus.

Eighty-five per cent.

• Eighty-five per cent upper-caste Hindus who need a symbol, and this symbol for them is the Mughal emperor in Delhi. No matter how decrepit he is, but they want that symbol and they have no problem with the fact that he is a Muslim. Right?

Sure. What it implies is that the big division with the two great religions took place after 1857. Took place in the second half of the 19th century and not before. And I think that’s really important.

• I’ll come to that, but the other thing you talk about is how — a fascinating thing — how clerics are calling it a jihad. And you mentioned stirring lines of poetry where somebody says “now the sword of Islam has risen and now the Christian infidels are being driven out and destroyed”. And this is the end of, so to say, the Christian sway over the world.

This is Azad. The great Azad.

• And yet, 85 per cent upper-caste Hindus.

Absolutely. I think this — some of this, has been slightly misreported. I think it is worth making quite explicit what the argument is. I am not saying 1857 is the jihad. Period. What I am saying is that within the uprising in Delhi, there’s a substratum of jihadis.

• No, no. I am not saying that. What I am saying is even when the clerics are calling it a jihad and the ruler is a Muslim, an army that is 85 per cent upper-caste Hindus has no problem with it.

Well, that is not entirely true, because certainly the court and the sepoys and the city of Delhi managed to keep together on Hindus and Muslim lines. There was no divide, but the jihadis do create a problem, actually. Because when they raising a flag from Jama Masjid... they are only about 10 per cent of the fighters.

• They are always only 10 per cent.

Nonetheless, they do create division. And particularly, one of the kind of key moments in the uprising in Delhi is on August 1, which is Eid, when the jihadis and Arabs, they want to slaughter a cow. Now Zafar, who is not known for being very proactive, and is called a sleepy guy, when he hears this, he realises this is catastrophe. I mean, if the army divides on Hindu, Muslim lines and the city divides on Hindu, Muslim lines, the uprising would be over. What he does is — he can’t arrest the jihadis for he hasn’t got the power — but he can arrest the cows. So there is this long stream of documents in the mutiny papers, which are letters from Zafar to the Kotwal saying go and arrest the cows in the city. The Kotwal says fine. Then somebody says there is barely room in his Kotwali for 100 cows and there are a thousand cows in Delhi, at least. In the end, they take a census of the cows instead. They didn’t actually have to arrest them.

• If one reads your book, until 1857, Delhi under the Mughals is great symbol of inclusivist, pluralistic Islam.

A pluralistic culture where you find Hindus and Muslims sharing the same poetry, enjoying the same mushairas.

• Then, it begins to change. Can I give a conspiracy theory?

Please go ahead.

• It is said the British figured it and they figured that their future lay in pushing ahead that divide. If not creating a divide, then widening the divide. And divide and rule begins then, leading to the partition.

Well, you have references to divide and rule earlier, but what I think really is the case is that you get much more self-consciousness of Hindus and Muslim identities. Among Muslims, you have Deoband growing up. Among Hindus, you have the Arya Samaj.

• And the British thrived on it.

The British thrived on it but they didn’t have to discourage it very strongly either. I am the first to criticise the British. This book in the West has been accused of West-bashing and Brit-bashing. But I think there were enough willing collaborators to make divide and rule possible. It’s an important point to remember.

• But the story of the subcontinent’s marginalised Muslims, or the demonised minority begins in 1857? The marginalisation of Muslims begins in 1857.

What you get after 1857 is that the prestige attached to Mughal culture disappears. People are no longer interested in the whole gamut of Mughal attributes — the old Mughal politeness is regarded as elaborate nonsense. Mughal poetry loses its high prestige and people want to write like Wordsworth and there’s a wonderful description by Azad when he says — and the same thing you could say about America — that once the British won in 1857, suddenly everything about them became attractive. Clothes that were laughed at before suddenly seemed very attractive, their modes of education and so on. And you find that the Mughal culture shrinks in prestige and shrinks in its attractiveness and more and more people want to go into English language education. The most crucial thing is that the same year Ghalib dies is the year when Mahatma Gandhi is born. So you have one world going down and there is this new English educated, English-speaking world rising up. It’s that world which wins India’s independence. It isn’t the old feudal elite. It is the products of Anglicised schools and using, in many ways, the Western political methods, political parties, protest marches rather than, you know, a mass uprising.

• And the decline of Muslims that begins in 1857, then in some ways is completed in 1947, when the elite leave to go to Pakistan.

I was reading one of your essays after 9/11. You talk about an inscription from Jesus at Buland Darwaza at Fatehpur Sikri and then you say “The Islam I love seems to be in danger.” The inscription on Buland Darwaza is worth pondering on because this again is one of the great Muslim entrances. An entrance to a mosque, a fantastic monument of Islamic architecture and yet it quotes Jesus: “The world is like a bridge. Cross over it but do not build a house upon it.” There has always been this tradition in Islam of quoting sayings of Jesus and Jesus has been revered as a prophet. I think the relationship between Christianity and Islam is like a half-empty glass of wine. Do you look at it as half-empty or half-full?

• Well, that’s more complicated because we have lived together also for a long time.

But you lived sometimes in bloodshed and sometimes in harmony.

• And sometimes in both.

This is true. See Akbar is also the most spectacular example of a Muslim ruler who is pluralistic, liberal, looks to all religions.

• I found it more interesting because people have to figure it out that Islam is not all Taliban.

Well, there are many Islams.

• And the way to understand Islam is not just through the car bomb or the human bomb. It’s more complex.

Well, and the same is true of Christianity and the same is true of Hinduism. Not every Hindu is Bal Thackeray. But what is certainly true is that at the moment is that certain extremists of the Islamic world are getting over headlines. And people forget about, in the West people are not aware of the Sufi traditions.

• Tell me, if Ambika Soni were to call you tomorrow and say, “William Dalrymple, you know more about Delhi’s history than the rest of us. Name five spots that we need to preserve and build and we’ve got a blank cheque.” Which five?

First one is of course the saddest monument in Delhi, the Red Fort. The damages were mainly done by the British. It’s not your fault that it is in the state that it is but it badly needs...

• And we had sixty years to fix it¿

You had sixty years of fix it. And you haven’t done anything about that. Tuglaqabad is still decaying, Purana Qila, any of these.

• What others?

Well, there are so many. Roshanarabagh, which is a great Mughal garden, is in terrible state now. What other monuments? I mean Zafar Mahal could do with a facelift. May be Coronation Park in the far north, one imperial monument. But I hope with the 1857 anniversary some money would be put to preserve some of the 1857 sites. For example, way out on the Rohtak road is the Badli ki Sarai which is now next to the new sabzi mandi, the new vegetable market. Now this is the site where one of the most important battles of 1857 was fought but there’s no signpost to it. It is used as a public urinal.

• I only hope Ambika Soni is hearing and reading your book. I think your book should be the essential reading for our children and grandchildren.

Thank you.