The author of Kohinoor talks about his passion for ittar

Ittar is a big passion of his. Who knew? What interest does a Brit have in what could well be described as old-fashioned perfumery?

William Dalrymple is quite comfortable in his chair. "I'll just sprawl this way," he says cheerfully. He is being hosted by Amit and Renu Judge, who own the elegant jewellery and collectibles salon, Lotus de Vivre in City Walk.
I detect a scent of ittar, traditional Indian perfume based on oils extracted from flowers through a laborious and delicate process. He confirms my guess, saying "Oudh," and whips a tiny bottle out of his pocket, that he's bought in a lane in Old Delhi.
Ittar is a big passion of his. Who knew? What interest does a Brit have in what could well be described as old-fashioned perfumery? Dalrymple talks about how sophisticated the Indian tradition is, going back to the Vedas - more than 2000 years.
Intrigued, he went travelling through India looking for the ittar manufacturers. Kannauj is the centre, he says, just north of Lucknow, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. "It's very blood-stained soil, it's seen centuries of all sorts of atrocities in that area. They say the sweetest smelling roses grow in the bloodiest soil in India. The place is at a bend in the Ganges, with very fertile silt - they grow the best jasmine, and the best roses there."
Because jasmine releases its scent mainly at night, you have to get the flowers delivered at about 2am. And you have to stop the distillation by sunrise. But with roses, it's the opposite - the flower releases its perfume at the first light of dawn. So it's delivered only at about 5 in the morning and you can distill it till about 8am. It's fascinating. They let him watch the process without sharing the family's secret recipes, refined and purified over generations. Over millennia. "It's oddly a dying art, because no modern Indian manufacturer has taken up ittar. It's a middle class thing - unlike here in Dubai, where a lot of young people will wear it - in India, ittar is something that old folks in the old cities wear." India's duty free shops have Guerlain or Chanel, but not a single serving of ittar.
Is there a book here? I ask him.
"Easily!" he laughs out loud.
For his wife, he picked out an ittar made from the exquisite jasmine variety that comes from Mysore. "I'm here (in Dubai) as her plus-one, he volunteers. She's here to take part in the art fair. Olivia Fraser has taken India's traditional miniature art form and given it a modern interpretation. "She's on a roll...," he says, adding with a grin, that he's looking forward to retiring on the sun-deck.
Delhi is home for Dalrymple. Like many people, he says he lives multiple lives. Scotland is home too, and so is London, but it's still nine-to-ten months of the year in India. He landed in the country at the age of 18, for a year off, exploring... "It's the longest year off in history," he says, "30 years!"
That's long enough for me to ask his opinion about the growing intolerance in India. As a young correspondent, Dalrymple covered communal riots through UP and Tamil Nadu. "The rise of the BJP looked very frightening in those days. but it hasn't been nearly as apocalyptic as some thought. There hasn't been another Gujarat. Equally, there hasn't been a revolution in infrastructure. The trains aren't miraculously improved, crap bijli and internet, terrible roads. Modi's neither been the saviour that his followers hoped nor the demon that liberals feared."
The method before the madness
Practically everybody who has read Dalrymple's work, comments about the depth of his research. He uses real persons from history and real historical facts, and weaves them together in wonderfully readable stories.
"It all stands on getting that level of detail," he says. Most of his books are four-to-five year projects. The key, he says, is to organise the journey, "to find ways of absorbing and filing it, so when you need to pull it up, it's there."
When he started writing the history-heavy books before the travel writing, he went to see Antony Beever, reknowned military historian as well as Amanda Foreman another well-known historian and biographer. Says he, "I sat down with a notebook and asked them the same question." So he took notes (what a relief!) He adapted what he learnt from them to suit. "It's a process of learning, like anything else - it's like learning how to drive."
Over a period of time, he has developed a system of card indexes and a dateline that grows to about 600 pages. "In that is diced what I do - the references and page numbers; also the quotes are already there, cut up into nice usable bits." Once you learn how to file, the writing becomes a pleasure, he assures me. And then comes a year of lockdown. "Hopefully not a whole year, if I concentrate, six-seven-eight months. You're not going out, you're not drinking, you're not partying. It's like taking exams. You get up early, get to bed early and just focus - completely, 100 per cent - on the project. Live it, dream it. Wake up with it in your head. It's strange what a good night's sleep will do. I print out every chapter before I go to bed."
At 6 in the morning, he's already on the terrace, with a cup of coffee - and without the mobile phone. Quickly focus, read through the printouts, correct it. If you've thought it through, and prepared for it, the writing, he says, should be a relatively easy process.
Though sometimes, you get weeks when you've written yourself up a blind alley. "But in general, I know how to do these books now. Avoiding nice junkets like this helps."
Kohinoor
This book sprung from the research that he did for The Return of the King. He found reams of material while accessing Afghan sources which he had not used before. It turns out the sources were extremely good for this period, many of which had been reprinted and edited very well in that forgotten period when Kabul was a little Switzerland, north of India. In the '60s and early '70s when Kabul had a thriving University scene, much work was done gathering these texts. "In 2006-7, I gathered 18th and 19th century texts, helped very much by the then chancellor of Kabul University (Ashraf Ghani), who is now the President of the country. I met him on the very first day and he literally got them from his own personal library." Ghani pointed him towards an old bookshop in Jame Shia in the old city "where this old guy bought up all the libraries when people were leaving in the '70s and '80s." And he got about half his material in one morning. "Best morning of research I've ever had. All of it refers to the Kohinoor - it was glittering in the background of that story."
Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary was writing about the Kohinoor, approaching the subject from the angle of Maharaja Duleep Singh's (the last owner of the diamond in India) daughter Princess Sophia. Dalrymple's approach was from his research on the Durrani dynasty for his book The Return of the King.
He says, "She was an Indian living in London. I was this Brit living in India." They would connect over their research with new facts every day. The collaboration "wasn't an enormous slog." The light book (only 200 pages, according to him) has done very well in India, going straight to the bestseller lists - selling 30,000 hardback copies in just two months. "It's been a very pleasurable little jeu d'esprit." I ask him to describe it for someone who doesn't know anything about it. "It's a good old story. Reads like Game of Thrones: some terrible tales, violence, murder, bloodshed, envy, destruction, greed, fratricide, matricide," he guffaws.
He did go to see the crown jewels, for the first time incidentally, while writing this book. Funny thing is, two of the biggest diamonds sit in the same chest, Cullinan 1 and Cullinan 2. "All the desis in front of the display are walking back on the travellator, shouting chor! chor!" Plenty of them get it wrong - they're pointing at the Cullinan, not the Kohinoor. He's tickled at the thought.
His next project is on how the East India Company took over India. People think the British empire took over, but it was a multinational corporation - a good subject for the age of Trump.
Harveena likes nothing better than curling up with a good book
harveena@khaleejtimes.com