William Dalrymple is acclaimed for his meticulously researched books on the Indian subcontinent. Judy Duckworth met him to discuss his research methods.

Vivid illustrations are the trademark of Dalrymple’s writing. It is this ability to paint word pictures that brings texture and perspective to his work, setting it apart from other travel writers. And the sights, sounds and stories that spill from his pages are the result of methodical research.

Methodical research

Dalrymple’s attention to detail and his methodical research have smoothed the transition from travel writing to historical non-fiction. Such is his commitment to historical accuracy that he relocated to Delhi, with his wife and young family – he spent four years researching The Last Mughal, which details the 1857 mutiny against the East India Company and the Siege of Delhi which led to the demise of the Last Mughal Emperor, the renowned poet and patron of arts, Bahadur Shah Zafar the 2nd.

Dalrymple unearthed accounts of the siege and massacre, detailed in the Mutiny Papers in the Indian National Archives, which have never been published. The papers include eye-witness accounts from Hindu and Muslim sepoys (or soldiers), members of the Mughal royal household and from ordinary inhabitants of Delhi, providing a new perspective on events which had previously been reported only through the eyes of the British. He enlisted the help of his friend, Mahmoud Farooqi to translate the texts from Persian and a rare, obscure form of Urdu, Skikastah.

"I don’t think my work as a travel writer is any different from any other travel writer," he notes. "What is unusual is that today, you find so many people writing about this who haven’t ever bothered to go anywhere, which is appalling. You don’t employ a plumber who’s never mended a sink."

Making notes

"Nine-tenths of the art of travel writing is in the note-taking," states this master of the art, and he advises "getting down detail as it happens in an unordered fashion: details of landscape, faces, verbal tics. You should try to get down dialogue as it’s spoken. Dialogue is the heart of travel writing."

Indeed, this aspect of his writing is the most time-consuming, says Dalrymple. This is his take on it: "The research and travelling should take a long time but the writing of a book should be done in the least possible time. The key is to organise yourself so that when you’re writing you can easily access information. It’s like Chinese cooking; you can spend hours preparing all your ingredients, but the actual cooking process should be concentrated.
Then there should be a very painstaking process of rewriting, rewriting and polishing. It’s like a piece of woodwork; you have your raw piece of wood, you then rub it with sandpaper and polish it. …I think writing prose is not a process of magical inspiration so much as fanatical polishing. Hemingway wrote 63 versions of the final chapter of Farewell to Arms and it’s one of the most perfect endings of any book I know…”