The Accidental Chronicler of India's Soul

William Dalrymple was supposed to dig up Assyrian ruins in Iraq. Instead, he spent 40 years uncovering the buried truths of a civilisation-and became the historian India didn't know it needed

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There is a particular quality of light in Delhi on a good February afternoon-warm, golden, forgiving-that makes you forget everything the city has put you through. The pollution, the traffic, the summers that melt your will to live. William Dalrymple knows this light well. He has chased it for four decades.

Sitting on his charpoy, listening to peacocks and parrots compete for airspace above his garden, the sixty-yearold Scottish-born historian sounds like a man who has found exactly the life he was meant to lead. Which is remarkable, because none of it was supposed to happen. Not India. Not the books. Not any of it.

In 1984, a teenager named William Dalrymple had arranged to excavate an Assyrian archaeological site in Iraq.

Then Saddam Hussein shut down the British School of Archaeology, and the young man needed a Plan B. He boarded a flight to India instead. He was eighteen.

He had no idea he was walking into a love affair that would define the rest of his life.

"India has so very much moulded who I am and what I am," he said during a wide-ranging conversation on the podcast Expressions. "The world I grew up in feels very distant." He spent that first year travelling on thirty-five rupees a day enough for a cheap hotel room, a thali, a packet of glucose biscuits, and a banana. He had his nineteenth birthday sleeping rough in a temple at Hampi, swimming in the Tungabhadra River at dawn. Next month, he turns sixty-one. He is going back to Hampi to celebrate.

Giving India Its Own Mirror Dalrymple has written about Mughal emperors and East India Company pirates, Sufi mystics and Catholic fundamentalists, the Kohinoor diamond and the fall of Kabul. But it was The Golden Road-his most recent work, a sweeping account of how Indian ideas in mathematics, astronomy, religion, and philosophy radiated outward to shape the ancient world that struck the deepest chord.