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An evening with a white Mughal... .
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R.V. SMITH, himself a long-time lover of Djinns and things Mughal, takes time off to meet someone after his own heart, William Dalrymple -- who as a young man first felt the pulse of Delhi in Mother Teresa's Nirmal Hriday... .
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PAST BACK TO THE PRESENT: William Dalrymple reminds of the times gone by. Photo: S. Subramanium.
MEETING WILLIAM Dalrymple is like going back in time to the 18th and early 19th centuries. He is, of course, a modern young man but put him in period costume -- coat of the East India Company days or a Mughal chugha and see the transformation. The man lives, breathes and exhales the aura of old times.
You could on Halloween night mistake him for William Fraser or Thomas Metcalfe or even Gen. Ochterlony in oriental clothes. Looni Akhtar -- Crazy Star -- as the General was nicknamed smoked the hookah in the presence of his 18 bibis, or drank old Tom as the favourite nautch-girl sat below his `gau-takia' seat and the chief Bibi opposite him. But you don't expect Dalrymple to do that, though he likes to sip beer in company. But one suspects that when he speaks he rolls his tongue a bit too much to strike the palate, and make his comments more articulate.
William is distantly related to the Metcalfes -- Lord Charles Metcalfe and Sir Thomas -- with more traits of the latter, who liked to spend the hot weather in his summer house, Dilkhusha, a medieval tomb converted into a residence at Mehrauli, than of the former). But he's far handsomer than those who exalted brothers, with no hang-ups of racial superiority, though you may not expect him to be on back-slapping terms with an old journalist come to seek his comments.
Incidentally, his wife Olivia Fraser is related to William Fraser, the British resident before Thomas Metcalfe, and one-time assistant to his elder brother, Charles. Almost a precursor of Rasputin, the mad monk of Czarist Russia -- for Fraser too was quite made in his habits -- eventually paying with his life for them but still genius). William Fraser inclined towards native beliefs, specially Islamic, with his love for Persian, Urdu and even Sanskrit. He, however, heartily disliked the Metcalfes, for he thought them snobbish. How else could it have been for a man who had populated the countryside with blue-eyed children from his Haryanvi mistresses and steered clear of the British Party circle?
William Dalrymple too dislikes snobbishness and makes that quite clear. He's frank and open, humorous, witty and highly knowledgeable, who devotes a lot of time to research, but not to courting village belles. His dig at Tom Alter might not be charitable. Alter, the one-time Gurdaspur boy with his knowledge of Urdu and love for ghazals is just as much an Indophile as William, though he may perforce have to act the haughty colonial sahib in Bollywood films. But the celebrated author was only trying to draw the line between himself and the old imperialists with their disdain for India.
Dalrymple has a sensitive imagination no doubt, or how else could Xanadu have inspired him to write a book? Coleridge at his best composed that poem -- as it emerged, not because of his love for Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, but with the opium fumes in his mind. Dalrymple's opiate, however, is stronger than afeem (opium) -- his imagination, of which you can get an idea on seeing his forehead -- as high as the stately dome Kublai Khan decreed into existence! A bit exaggerated, but the comparison is almost true.
As he spoke this past week in the "spacious confines'' of the British Council in New Delhi, he sometimes reminded one of Oscar Wilde and sometimes of Robert Louis Stevenson, for he has traits of both the former's genius and the latter's romanticism, love for adventure and the art of spinning stories that lure the heart of the young David Balfour in all of us.
William loves Khair-un-Nissa, the heroine of his latest book, "White Mughals", just as much as James Kirkpatrick probably did or he wouldn't have got bowled over by the tragic Persian romance of the 19th Century Hyderabad aristocrat. You can make this out from the way he speaks about "Khair", the death of her British lover and son and then her own demise at the age of 27, with only Kitty, the girl born of the union of a Mughal and Brit, surviving in distant England and corresponding with her 85-year- old grandmother in Hyderabad, who sends a lock of Khair-un- Nissa's hair to console the distraught young memsahib.
Listen to him talk and you are convinced that his heart beats in rhythm with the Orient -- its past more than its present -- even though he's as much of a scot as RLS. You stare at him as he talks facing you and try to picture Dorian Gray in him, but are disappointed. He's suave all right, but not one who leads a double life that could show up in the mirror when he shaves himself in the morning.
The author may not have met Pakeezah Sultan Begum's sister -- a Mughal in London now -- nor the other descendants of Babar's in erstwhile Burma (Myanmar), Pakistan, Mecca and Kolkata, but soon he will be going to Myanmar when he begins to write his book on 1857. The focus, he disclosed, would, of course, be on Bahadur Shah Zafar. And naturally some on Zeenat Mahal and Hakim Ahsanullah Khan ("Gangaram Yahudi'').
Another book that may emerge from his pen would be on Anarkali and the historicity of her romance with Prince Salim, a la K. Asif's "Mughal-i-Azam". Not really, because as William says, he'll dissect the tale to separate fact from fiction. Next may be Ghalib because the poet and the gullies of Ballimaran are not unfamiliar to Dalrymple, nor the lingo of the Walled City, "Khari Boli''. And William Fraser too is in line the friend of Skinner (Sikandar Sahib) and a whimsical admirer of Ghalib.
Dalrymple will live in Sundar Nagar -- not with the old landlady of the days when he was writing on Djinns and she kept counting the number of times the flush chain was pulled whenever William and Olivia had guests at night -- and travel up and down town to unravel more tales. You tip-toe towards his chair. He casts a quick glance at the visiting card while autographing his new book. "Oh, Mr. Smith!'', he says and after that you can only stand and stare as you listen to his remarks amid gulps from the glass (of beer, is it?) and come back convinced that you may have met the last of the "White Mughals''!
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