William Dalrymple: the 'White Mughal' of the Literary World

A Literary White Mughal:

An exclusive interview with William Dalrymple

Laaleen Khan

With an array of fascinating books and numerous awards to his credit, it’s no surprise that William Dalrymple is esteemed as one of today’s finest historical writers. From The City of Djinns to The Age of Kali, The Last Mughal and his latest, Nine Lives, Dalrymple’s compelling work reflects his love of, and affinity with, the historical heritage of South Asia. A veritable Indophile, this modern day, literary ‘White Mughal’ shares insightful details including the upcoming film adaptation of his bestselling White Mughals:

How does a Scottish born writer immerse himself into the Indo-Pak subcontinent’s past and write with such in-depth authenticity?

There’s no secret. It’s the time you spend in a place. After 25 years, South Asia still fascinates me and provides endless inspiration. I’m here because I love it. I’ve spent my adult life traveling between South Asia, Britain and the Middle East and Central Asia, but its South Asia that remains my base and my focus (he wrote In Xanadu as a Cambridge student after following Marco Polo’s legendary trail).

You have worked on several notable documentaries (including Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam featuring Rahat Fateh Ali and Abida Parveen); how different was it as a medium to writing?

Books are my main bread and butter, and are the real monuments you leave behind you; but it’s lovely to dabble in other things between books. Writing history books is usually a four-year project.  TV and radio make a good break between more serious things.  With TV documentaries, the director does half the work, so I’m not the boss, and as a writer, researcher and presenter, I can take it relatively easy.

Your work has recurring themes, from the British Raj to mysticism. In retrospect, which did you find most challenging to research and write?

My books break down into travel books, where I go on journeys and interview people, and history books, where I spend time most of the times with manuscripts in the library. It’s exciting to research both, but in different ways. With travel books you have the pleasure of the open road. With history books you’re following a trail like a detective.  TV and travel journalism make a lovely change between the big projects, but they are much less substantial than books.

Fans of your books are thrilled that White Mughals (published in 2003) will finally be turned into a movie. What’s your involvement with the project in terms of screenplay adaptation, casting choices, and location settings?

This the third time that the rights have been sold! The first time, the BBC bought and sat on it.  After that, the Oscar winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton got involved” (according to Bollywood reports, Shekhar Kapur and Aamir Khan made unsuccessful bids in the past). Now, Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort) is attached as its director and probable star. He’s a friend. Coriolanus, which he starred in, is his directorial debut and has had fabulous reviews. I’ll be acting as an advisor on the project, but I won’t be screenwriting.

Ralph Fiennes would make an ideal James Achilles Kirkpatrick (the protagonist). How would you ideally cast Khair un Nissa (the female lead)?

I’d love Frieda Pinto to do it. The film would have to downplay Khair un Nissa’s youth. She was, in reality, 14, which was the usual age of marriage in those days, and wasn’t an issue then (in the 18^th century) but it would be very controversial today.  What was controversial then was that she married a white Christian, something that would be less controversial today.

Are there any plans to shoot scenes in Old Lahore? What things ought to be done to tempt location scouts here to Pakistan?

In general, people regard Pakistan as too dangerous to shoot. Mira Nair is shooting her Pakistan scenes in India for The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I have no problems with visiting Pakistan at all. I still come and go. I stayed with Mohsin Hamid in Lahore while researching my forthcoming Afghan book (The Return of a King: Shah Shuja, the Great Game and the First Battle for Afghanistan). I researched the archives at the Punjab Secretariat in Lahore and found wonderful material on the Koh-i-Noor, Ranjit Singh and the Afghan War. The staff there were very competent and helpful, especially Abbas, the director.

What parts of the world inspire you; where will you go next?

South Asia, where I live, inspires me.  But I have vague ideas in the future for the history books set the Caribbean and Scotland.

How long have you lived in Delhi?

I have been here for 25 years with my wife (artist Olivia Fraser) and three children. We return to London and Scotland for a break in June and July.

What are your current projects, in addition to writing?

I’ve written one third of the Afghan book. In February, I’ll be co-curating an exhibition of Late Mughal Art, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi for the Asia Society in New York and attending the Karachi Literary Festival. And I’m working on my health. I lost 10 kg on the Dukan diet in three weeks. I now eat only fish and chicken. No alcohol, chawal or naan!

(Interviewed via telephone from New Delhi)

Screen adaptations of books set in the exotic, romanticized era of the British Raj explored inter-racial identities amid turbulent political change: 

Bhowani Junction
This 1956 Hollywood epic, adapted from John Masters’ saga of a Partition-era love triangle—between Anglo-Indian WWII Nurse Victoria Jones, Anglo-Indian Patrick Taylor, and dashing Col. Rodney Savage—was memorably shot at Lahore’s Shah Alam Gate aka today’s boisterous ‘Shahalmi’ market.

A Passage To India
E.M. Forster’s 1924 classic was adapted to an Oscar nominated David Lean film exploring the unlikely friendship and eventual mistrust between a trio of Britons headed for India and their fellow traveler, Dr. Aziz, personifying uneasy relations between the two cultures.

The Far Pavilions
HBO’s first TV series was adapted from M.M. Kaye’s 1978 novel of forbidden romance between the Indian-raised Ashton ‘Ashok’ Pelham-Martyn and the Indo-Russian Princess Anjuli, against the backdrop of British-Russian colonial rivalry and the Second Afghan War.

The Jewel in the Crown

The first novel of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet explores the tragic love story of Daphne Manners and English-educated Hari Kumar, vilified and tortured by police officer Ronald Merrick, demonstrating racial prejudices in British Colonial India to a western audience.

Mon Dieu! A 'beta' (son) for Bruni-Sarkozy

Mon Dieu! A ‘beta’ (boy) for Bruni?

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/6767/a-beta-for-bruni/

Life in the upper echelons of European society can sometimes be as gender biased as it is on our side of the globe. On the one hand, there’s Drottningholm Palace of Sweden, that has followed equal primogeniture in their law of succession since 1980, while Buckingham Palace that plans to do the same to enable William and Kate’s firstborn boy or girl to succeed to the throne after the future King William. Then, on the other hand, there’s Èlysée Palace, home to President Sarkozy of the Republic of France, where (as reports suggest) the First Lady, Ms. Carla Bruni, is desirous of producing a mini-Sarkozy to uplift their public image and help her husband win another presidential term.

According to various sources, the glamorous, 44-year-old Carla Bruni prayed to specifically conceive a baby boy when visiting the shrine of Hazrat Salim Chisti in Fatehpur Sikhri, India, with her 56-year-old husband last winter. Why would an accomplished, wealthy celebrity, one-half of progressive France’s power couple who already have a total of 4 sons and 1 grandson between them, be so interested in producing yet another male child?

After all, the celebrity world does not reflect a partiality toward little boys in its obsession with celeb baby bumps. In fact, the paparazzi seem more ‘focused’ on female celebrity offspring: the media’s darling is little Suri Cruise and her million dollar wardrobe and antics and, probably, Baby Beckham #4 (David and Victoria Beckham are ecstatically expecting a baby girl this week after producing their mini-football team of three sons, and we can expect her to be photographed a lot more than her brothers).  

On the global political arena, there are no less than twenty female heads of state in office at the time of this article (twenty eight if you count monarchs). In many Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries with an inherent machismo culture, an infant phallus is often preferred to little female bundles of joy. One can even assume this to be the case in some traditional Italian families, where men continue to live with their mothers well into their middle age so there is a strong maternal longing for producing sons. However, this is hardly expected in très libéral, unconventional France, where hejab is illegal, extramarital affairs are an acceptable mode of society, and where women are certainly not pressured to produce sons. So it’s flabbergasting that the country’s First Lady inexplicably prayed for another son at a Sufi mazar.

Pregnancy rumours:

“I would love to have children with Nicolas. I hope to, if I am young enough. It would be a dream.” (Carla Bruni, Vanity Fair magazine, 2008).

Gala magazine reported Bruni’s desire in 2009 to have a male child with Sarkozy in 2012 and, failing to do so, planned to adopt one. This year, Bruni fuelled rumours by replacing her slinky gowns and stilettos with looser silhouettes and ballet flats.  She also declined to attend the premiere of her Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which led to further speculation in the French media. The June cover for Elle magazine (French edition) only served to confirm the pregnancy, depicting Bruni with a generous abdomen and a glowing complexion.

A brood of boys:

From their previous relationships, Bruni has eight-year old Aurelian, and Sarkozy has 25-year-old Pierre, 23-year-old Jean (whose wife Jessica has had a baby boy), and 12-year-old Louis—a considerable amount of testosterone as it is! The President’s father, Pal Sarkozy, expressed the hope that couple’s future child would be “a girl as beautiful” as his daughter-in-law even though the couple reportedly seems disinterested in having a daughter.  Carla herself was born from a love affair between her mother, concert pianist Marisa Borini, with a young Brazillian classical guitarist, Maurizio Remmert. Carla grew up thinking that her step father, the late Italian billionaire Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, was her biological father. An heiress, model and pop star, Bruni has had several high profile romances with celebrities including Mick Jagger, and her son Aurelian was the result of a relationship with then-married philosopher Raphael Enthoven.  After being introduced to Nicolas Sarkozy at a dinner party by advertising executive Jacques Seguela, the divorced President Sarkozy said to her, “You’ll be my Marilyn to my JFK” (as described in Seguela’s biography). Eighty days later, they were husband and wife.

Mujhe larka de ('give me a son'):

Last winter, the Sarkozys made an official trip to India and paid a visit to the mazar of Hazrat Shaikh Salim Chisti in Fatehpur Sikhri, famed for assisting childless people with conceiving male children including Emperor Akbar, whose wife Jodha conceived Prince Salim (later Emperor Jehangir) soon after visiting Salim Chisti and built the shrine afterwards. With Bruni wearing a shawl atop her head, the couple wore soft soled socks and carried a blanket of roses as an offering and tied a kalava at the latticed marble windows of the dargah before requesting a qawwali from Aziz Chisti. The Sarkozys also spoke with the mazar’s ancestral guardian, Peerzada Rais Mian Chisti:

“I told them this (shrine) grants wishes to (the) jobless, unmarried and childless. He (Sarkozy) asked me to pray for him and wish him success ... Carla said ‘Pray for me, I want a son’ and I prayed for them…They followed the customs and seemed very happy...Begum Sarkozy (is an) extremely family oriented lady” (Sources: PTI, The Telegraph and Sufitimes.com).

Un petit garçon:

In recent months, Bruni’s mother mentioned that she was expecting a grandchild, while the couple’s matchmaking friend, Jacques Seguela, confirmed that it was a boy in an interview with Le Soir magazine.

A political tool?

The Sarkozys aren’t exactly the most popular couple in France at the moment; last year, Carla Bruni was voted France’s most irritating celebrity in a poll, while Sarkozy came in fourth in France’s most irritating politicians. European media mostly agrees that the birth is ideally timed before Sarkozy begins campaigning for the presidential elections in May 2012:

·      Le Post mocked the pregnancy with, “Is this child going to appear at birth with a press release aimed at disproving everything ever said about its parents?”

·      Gala magazine reported, “The child would also be a way of silencing everything that has been said and written about their relationship in the French media.”

·      Le Parisien newspaper stated, “Carla Bruni's constant presence in the media clearly gets on a lot of people's nerves.”  

·      In a biography on Carla Bruni, author Besma Lahouri described her as being one of her husband's biggest handicaps to getting re-elected.

Can a Bruni-Sarkozy beta change all that? We’ll have to wait and see.