William Dalrymple on India, Ancient and Modern

I thought we might start by discussing the non-fiction books you’ve chosen. Perhaps we could start with the Alex von Tunzleman book, Indian Summer.

Alex made an extraordinary debut. She was a girl more or less straight out of Oxford, writing in an extremely well-worked field – there are hundreds of books about Partition in India and Pakistan – and to have written a book fresh out of university, which says a lot of new stuff, incredibly well, in the most palatable form I’ve ever read about Partition, is an incredible achievement. I really love the book.

Partition is a very complicated story. Many people have tried to tell it before, but this is far and away the best book I’ve read on Partition. I don’t think she had particular access to any brand-new material. She certainly didn’t get her hands on the material she would most have liked, the love letters between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten [wife of Lord Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India]. Because she does two things at once: she’s telling the love story of Mountbatten and Nehru – this extraordinary love triangle at the close of British India – and the extraordinary end to 300 years of what was often extremely violent imperial conquest. To have it ending with India’s first independent prime minister falling in love with the wife of the last viceroy – it’s an utterly amazing and extraordinary story. It’s not terribly clear whether their love was consummated at the time, although most people tend to believe that it probably was consummated at some point later.

So Tunzleman tells her narrative history by foregrounding the personalities of the people involved.

Exactly. Most of the books on Partition are pretty heavy going. There were long periods of meetings, missions … it makes for quite clumpy reading. Although you are obviously dealing with an epic turning-point in history, the path to it is so tortuous it doesn’t naturally lend itself to narrative history, yet she’s managed to do it. For a woman who was, what, two years out of college, it’s an enormous achievement.

The next book you’ve recommended is based more recently, Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods.

Like Partition, this story has been much told, but Edward Luce’s account is authoritative, balanced, sensible and enjoyable. If there is a businessman going to India who wants to get a hang of the economics of the country in an accessible form, this is the book, no question. Luce was the Financial Times correspondent, married to an Indian, and really got under the skin of the place, really travelled. And most of all, he can write. A rare combination. I’m a non-economist. I don’t really understand money but he explained it to me most lucidly, more so than any other book.

He touches on the IT explosion in India, but he’s not convinced it’s the answer to all their problems, is that right?

Well, he makes comparison with China, where there is a completely different model of development. The Chinese model is, in a sense, a sort of mass manufacturing – everyone’s making car parks and industrial things. India is a culture in which huge swathes of the workforce are illiterate and so on, yet you’ve got this small, super-clever, over-well-educated, incredibly ambitious middle class who are doing the pernickety bits – the software, the fancy finance, the high-value stuff. But there’s a much smaller proportion of the population who are doing this.

So there are these two models of development, and at the moment the Chinese are pulling ahead. They’re educating their people much better. India is always the elephant, you know, moving slowly. But immovable once it gets going.

I visited South India a couple of years ago. You’d come across these IT cities rising out of the paddy fields, in the most unexpected places.

Yes. Even the flagship, Electronics City, outside Bangalore, is more or less impossible to get to. There’s a Sanjeev Bhaskar joke about Bangalore: “Honey, I’m only a mile from home – I’ll be there in six hours!”

Amartya Sen, author of your third recommendation The Argumentative Indian, is an economist. Is this another discussion of Indian financial future?

He is an economist, but this is not a book on economics. It’s a book of essays on history and culture. It’s definitely not the first book you should read on India, it’s for someone who knows the country well, but it’s a wonderfully erudite, discursive, witty, clever book.

He writes on a range of topics, including the extraordinary atheist tradition in India, which is often forgotten about, taking on the V S Naipal Hindu fundamentalist line, of India being this pure Hindu land. He’s very good on the degree to which India is shared between Muslims and Hindus. India is multi-faith, multi-cultural, multi-lingual. And it’s this pluralism and then endless debate going on between these different ways of looking at the world, different value systems: Islam, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, atheist. It’s a wonderful vision of India, and of how India has this long, argumentative tradition of fighting about everything. So it’s a great title, it’s very true.

Definitely a book for someone who knows India well.