More than footprints? Magazine - Interview: William Dalrymple

Day12.com

What do you think about modern backpacking?
WD: (banging the table for emphasis) My life was completely changed by my year off. I would not be sitting here talking to you now were it not for my year off in India and with that change in my life has come a complete change in who my friends are, what my interests are, who my girlfriends were, my religious views, political views, everything was completely changed by my year off. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that. Nine months around India like everyone else; a little bit of teaching, a bit of working in a Mother Theresa home and a little bit of travelling. If you use it well, it can be the greatest time of your life. It can be the most fun time. It can be the time of your life that does change everything, that completely revolutionises your view of your life because most people, when they go on their year-off trip inevitably have no experience of life beyond school and where you're brought up and suddenly you're cast into a completely different world. I quite seriously would have ended up a dentist, or a chartered accountant, or a banker but for my year-off. So I can't imagine that a year-off can, in any way, however badly things go wrong, be a bad thing because of the sheer richness of the experience that's available to you and the contrast with everything that will have gone before. There are, clearly, years off which are better used than others (laughs), and if you spend your time in the bars of Goa and never go further than that you'll have missed a chance than if you go to some really out of the way places and let it change your life.

What do you think about the effect that such vast numbers of backpackers have on places? Would you be an advocate of limiting the number of visas made available as they do with work permits in Australia?
WD: No, I wouldn't be an advocate of that because for a start it's wonderful for the Indian economy to have people going in. It's great for the British to see another culture and it's good for people from around the world to see each other. It's true that backpackers can wreck a place. You see it in Manali. You see it in Goa. But I think backpackers travel more lightly on the world than most and they mess the world around less than package tourism does. It's fun to be a student backpacker occasionally; to stop by Pushkar or Goa but for God's sake get off the route. Your guidebook's 800-pages long, don't just go to Rajasthan and Kerala. There's the whole of the rest of India out there. I think most intelligent people do make their own way off the beaten track at some point. You have to be pretty dim and un-enquiring to go to the same place as everybody else; Jaipur, Jodphur, Goa, Kerala, home. Some of my happiest memories of my year off were in Goa doing the whole backpacker thing; staying in a backpacker hostel with a group of unbelievably beautiful girls from South America. Everyone was smoking drugs I'd never heard of before and staying up all night and listening to wild music and naked bodies on the beach and that was very exciting at nineteen - but then you go off somewhere else. Go to Bijapur. It's a day's journey from Goa and you'll see one of the world's great city states, on a par with any Tuscan town like Sienna or Florence with its own school of art and no other single backpacker there.

You began your career about the same time as Nick Danziger. Do you think he puts himself in unnecessary danger?
WD: I do. I have quite a clear idea in my own mind what I'm prepared to risk and I've done some quite dangerous things, often inadvertently, but I'd never knowingly go into a shooting war. I'd never cross Afghanistan, for example, at a time when it was full-scale war like Nick did.

A lot of people might be worried about attempting a lot of places at the moment.
WD: There's always some danger somewhere along the way but I can't think of many places that you couldn't do now. Afghanistan you wouldn't do willingly I don't think and the silk route in China is a complete motorway now. Daniel Pearl was done in because he was representing an American paper and was trying to interview members of Al-Qaida. Don't go around looking for Al-Qaida, it's fair to say, and take advice from people about where to go. At the moment, one of the crucial things is misconceptions of Islam and anyone who has ever travelled as a backpacker, vulnerable in Muslim countries, knows how incredibly kind, hospitable and good ordinary Muslims are. You've only got to spend one day in Syria or one day in Turkey as a backpacker looking a bit shoddy around the ears and people will offer to take you home. The first time it happens you think they are going to cut your throat and run off with your money belt and it just doesn't happen and you learn to trust them, which doesn't happen at first because you've been brought up on generations of Islamaphobic tales of murderers and people who will slit your throat. There is no place in the world that I have travelled in that is more generous than Syria or Turkey and people will, night after night, take you in with genuine and complete hospitality, however poor they are. I think one of the main reasons why America has bought the rubbish that's being taught about the Muslim world, where Europe hasn't, is that Europeans do travel in the Muslim world and they know, because they've been there, that Muslims are not what George Bush tells us, that there is a huge variety of belief in the Muslim world. So I think the best possible way of overcoming the dis- and mis-information that's coming out of America, and indeed our own government at the moment, is to go and see, go to Pakistan, see how incredibly kind the people are, how good they are.

In 'The European Tribe' Caryl Phillips, on his way home says, "In the departure lounge, I heard snatches of the conversations that usually depress me. England always begins too soon". How do you feel about coming home after you've been away?
WD: It depends. I sympathise with what Phillips is saying and there are moments after spectacular trips when you just didn't want to come home. I remember after my first year off being utterly shipwrecked by my return. The thing that really struck me, having arrived home, was going to a big Sainsbury's in London. To see it after India where one hadn't seen any shop bigger than a boot cupboard for nine months was utterly horrifying. I think it's a shame if travelling does destroy your love of home though it often happens. There's a wonderful phrase by T. E. Lawrence saying that he's been 'disembodied' by his travels because, "I spent five years travelling with the Arabs in the desert, yet I can never be an Arab honestly speaking if I'm true to myself, and yet it has quitted me of my English self and I can no longer return here and be as I was before." And that's a good thing and a bad thing. In one sense it's good to be quitted of yourself, it's good to no longer see things through the spectacles with which you were brought up. You may think you're a radical teenager when you grow dreadlocks and put an earring in and get your first couple of girlfriends and you smoke your first joint but you don't realise how much you are the prisoner of the environment which has created you, the set of views in which you've been brought up and the pressures of your peer group. Only through travelling and discovering other worlds can you escape from that monocular vision. But it is a downside that in a sense you can never fully embrace home as totally. The price you pay for the excitement and the opening up of the world that travel gives you is that you can never be quite as comfortable back home again.