It
was during lunch at one of those typically stuffy, coat and tie
London restaurants, where William Dalrymple breathed the fresh air of
photography, liberating him from being just a writer to a visual
aggregator. That was the day when one of India’s most adorable
“gora” historians and travel writers, who is at much at ease in
Kannauj and Varanasi, as he is in his home in Chiswick, met his
childhood hero Bruce Chatwin, poet, journalist and travel writer.
While he remembered the conversation, gaping in awe, he realised,
after Chatwin’s death, that he was a remarkable photographer too.
Dalrymple
also imbibed another of Chatwin’s traits – the art of
restlessness. It is restlessness which defined Chatwin’s writings
and it is restlessness that made Dalrymple retrace Marco Polo’s
journey from Jerusalem to Mongolia to stamp his arrival, as a travel
writer.
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But Chatwin
did leave a stamp on William, like indelible ink. Dalrymple took to
photography with ease, without buying a fancy cameras but realising
the joys and benefits of taking pictures on his phone.
Many
books and continents apart, and before he finishes his next magnum
opus, The
Anarchy,
a treatise on annexation of India by a corporate, The East India
Company, seen with contemporary eyes, William did one of his many pit
stops in Goa. This time, it wasn’t to showcase a book, but his
photographs. At a lull during a dinner party in Goa when everyone was
busy with their own chatter, Dalrymple casually showed his photos on
his phone to his friend and writer Siddharth Shanghvi, who
conceptualises and curates world class work at Sunapranta Centre for
Arts in Goa.
And
then there was no looking back. Shanghvi told Café, “They were
beautiful pictures, evocative, each telling a story.” This led to
the opening of The
Writer’s Eye,
an exhibition of Dalrymple’s travel photographs in Goa on March 18,
2016 at Vadhera Art Gallery on March 29 and will open at the
Grosvenor Gallery in London on June 23. ‘Isn’t it wonderful at an
acclaimed exhibition opened right here in Goa, thanks mainly to the
huge support of Dattaraj and Dipti Salgaocar,” asked Shanghvi,
author of The
Last Song of Dusk and The
Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.
The Salgaocar couple are the spirit behind the Sunapranta Centre for
Arts.
The
photographs tell you things that even Dalrymple himself
doesn’t. Café had
a conversation with him a couple of days ago, after several attempts
to get the busy bee on the line, by asking him why his
breath-stopping pictures were stark, at times serious and some
actually bleak. He actually did agree they were, because they were.
“Well, I’m a pretty gregarious chap, who laughs easily (he does).
These are spontaneous photographs, all of them taken in the last one
year.” He has been very mobile, travelling across Afghanistan,
Iran, Europe and in Ladhakh and Lucknow and places in between in
India. And the pictures were taken then.
The
photographs, quite obviously tell their own stories. Children playing
in the forefront of the giant broken Buddha statues, destroyed by the
Taliban at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, a young boy with a cricket bat at
the Paigah Palace Hyderabad, the tomb of Cyrus the Great, at
Pasargadae in Iran and series of wonderful landscapes. All the
pictures are in black and white, adding to the starkness and
admittedly, the bleakness.
This
exhibition is also a giant leap forward for phone photography. “I’ve
never really used a fancy camera and my phone camera works really
well,” Dalrymple said. Well, if you have an exhibition in Goa,
Delhi and London, of those photos, that perhaps settles it. By the
time you read this, Dalrymple will be back in his Chiswick home, for
the summer, before he returns to his Mehrauli farm in the winter. For
more books, and surely to the joy of his late guru Bruce Chatwin,
more photographs.
