As an expert in Indian history, who is your favourite character you wish more people knew about?
I’d like to go back to the Pallava court in south India in the seventh century, where there was an incredible king called Mahendravarman who is important for art history because he’s the first guy to really start building temples in stone. He started excavating and building little temples in the landscape, incredibly beautiful. But what was fascinating about him was he wasn’t just a ruler and a builder – he was also a playwright. He wrote these Samuel Beckett-like farces which are still performed. In one of them, the god of death swaps the souls of a courtesan and a monk. He was also a great musician and a great drinker. That’s who you want at a dinner party.
What has been your most cringeworthy run-in with a celebrity?
Turning round at a party in Jodhpur and seeing Mick Jagger, who told me he was a fan of one of my books. I’m garrulous and chatty and quite good at instant social chitchat but I was so astonished by this that I sat there gulping like a fish in a fishbowl, unable to muster a reply.
Thinking back to your first travelogue, In Xanadu, published in 1986 – what would you tell the young William in that book now?
Oh, he didn’t need much advice. I’ve never had a better trip. It was pure travelling ecstasy, paid for by my college at Cambridge – I applied for this ludicrous grant which paid for me to hitchhike and walk all the way from Jerusalem to Mongolia. It shouldn’t have been possible but it was one of those rare moments when all the borders were open. Afghanistan was closed but they had just opened the Karakoram Highway up through Pakistan. China hadn’t yet performed genocide on the Uyghurs, so you could see all those incredible desert cities in eastern China and Xinjiang. I remember thinking that I was 100 years too late – if I’d been travelling there in the 19th century I could have been discovering oases and early Buddhist history and extraordinary ruins and remains …
So much that I saw on that trip, in 1986 at age 21, is not there now. A lot of Syria has been destroyed, same with the Uyghur and Muslim parts in eastern China. Afghanistan has had a very bad time. All I’d tell young William is to realise how incredibly lucky he is and how fragile all these cultures and civilisations were.
Who would you like to play you in the biopic about your life?
I look increasingly like the elderly Marlon Brando. Sadly, I’ve never looked like the young Marlon Brando. The elderly Marlon Brando, who was so fat he turned up on set without his trousers on so they couldn’t film him below the neck. So if he was alive …
If there was one unanswered question you’ve come across in all of your research that you could get an answer to, what would it be?
I would love to have a clearer idea of the great Buddhist monastery of Nalanda. I think everyone who has gone through a western education system are familiar with the Library of Alexandria but very few people are aware of the Indian equivalent, which was the Library of Nalanda in the seventh century. It was nine storeys high and people travelled from Japan, Korea and China to study there. It was regarded as not just the greatest library in Asia but the greatest repository of Buddhist texts in the world. There’s only three eyewitness descriptions of it surviving. Only 10% of it has been excavated. So who knows what still lies there? If I had a Tardis, I’d probably head to Nalanda.
Do you know how many times you’ve been shot at?
If I ever want to show off to a nephew, I tell them about how I was shot at in the West Bank, Kashmir and Kandahar. I’ve been jailed in Iran – thankfully only briefly, compared with some people who are now in prison. And I’ve been arrested in Iran, Afghanistan and in eastern China. Three arrests and three lucky missed bullets! If I try telling the nephews about Nalanda, they glaze over.
What is the best piece of advice you have received?
It wasn’t given specifically to me but I was in the audience. It was said by Toni Morrison at the Hay festival: “We will be judged on how well we loved.” That’s it. That’s all that matters.
What’s been your most memorable interaction with a fan?
It is one of the great joys of email and the internet that, when a book comes out, inevitably, in the first six months you will receive 20 or 30 emails containing information that would have much, much improved the book that you’ve written. And it’s always too late. You get all these people who read your book and find the missing piece to all the bits that you haven’t found or know the answers to something that remained obscure to you. It’s a great and constant pleasure.
If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be in it?
I think definitely some sort of Lucknow kebab, which is a finely ground and highly spiced lamb mince. There was a Lucknow king called Wajid Ali Shah whose teeth fell out because he had so many sweeties, so they ground up the meat really finely so he could eat it. The best comes from Tunday Kebabi, in the chowk in Lucknow. It’s now so famous that it’s become a bit fancier. But it’s the most delicious thing. If I had to choose a filling to be named after me, it would be the Tunday kebab.
Which song would you like played at your funeral?
Victoria’s Requiem. Victoria was this Spanish baroque composer who produced some of the most gorgeous choral music ever. Or maybe Allegri’s Miserere. On the other hand, it looks like I’m going to be buried in the Scottish Highlands – my wife’s family have an incredibly beautiful graveyard overlooking the Pewley Firth in the middle of these beautiful rolling hills. I remember when my father-in-law was buried there, all his grandchildren carried his coffin through the woods, looking down on the beauty of Firth, with no less than five pipers from his clan playing. So I’d go for the full baroque Requiem – but I suspect it’ll just be a single piper in the Highlands.
An Evening With William Dalrymple is touring Australia 7-13 November; see here for dates
