William Dalrymple came to Delhi for the first time in 1984, when he was 18, and since then, the writer-historian has had a near-obsessive fascination for Delhi — which he describes as the finest city “between Constantinople and Canton”. His City of Djinns also has Delhi as its theme. He lives between London, Scotland and Delhi, with his artist wife Olivia and three children. He has also written and presented three TV series, one of which, Indian Journey, won an award at the BAFTA in 2002.

Dalrymple is a passionate advocate of historians and intellectuals consciously stepping out of their academic confinement and “making sure that their work is widely available and accessible to the general public, in a true democratic spirit”. His sixth book, The Last Mughal, a chronicle of Bahadur Shah Zafar and Delhi in the nineteenth century, was out late last year and drew its share of controversies, with Dalrymple reportedly referring to Indian historians as “lazy” in press interviews just before the launch. However, he told Express staff this Friday that he was misquoted and was at pains to emphasise that “India has many, many thousands of dedicated historians” whom he respects. Excerpts:

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE: I think the Last Moghul stirred up controversy on two quite different fronts — one was the method and style of writing and one was the contents, what it actually said about 1857. As far as the style of writing is concerned I think The Last Mughal stylistically and in approach was something very unremarkable taken within the context of my contemporaries in London. There has been in the last 20 years a return to narrative. A move away from the pure analysis with which historians tended to deal with historical issues, till the ‘70s. From the ‘80s onwards, there was a return to how history writing had always been done from the time of Gibbon and so on. Which was the way that one would expect with a word that actually contains the word ‘story’ within it. History is the telling of things past. Now there are many ways of doing that. History is a city with many mansions. And I think that people living in one historical mansion can learn a great deal from other mansions. What I think is unusual in the situation in India is that there is only analytical history, very, very few people are writing narrative at all. And there was a certain amount of confusion among critics about what I was doing which simply wasn’t a question that I was asked anywhere else.

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