As an expert in Indian history, who is your favourite character you wish more people knew about?<\/p>\n
I\u2019d like to go back to the Pallava court in south India in the seventh century, where there was an incredible king called Mahendravarman who is important for art history because he\u2019s the first guy to really start building temples in stone. He started excavating and building little temples in the landscape, incredibly beautiful. But what was fascinating about him was he wasn\u2019t just a ruler and a builder \u2013 he was also a playwright. He wrote these Samuel Beckett-like farces which are still performed. In one of them, the god of death swaps the souls of a courtesan and a monk. He was also a great musician and a great drinker. That\u2019s who you want at a dinner party.<\/p>\n
What has been your most cringeworthy run-in with a celebrity?<\/p>\n
Turning round at a party in Jodhpur and seeing Mick Jagger, who told me he was a fan of one of my books. I\u2019m garrulous and chatty and quite good at instant social chitchat but I was so astonished by this that I sat there gulping like a fish in a fishbowl, unable to muster a reply.<\/p>\n
Thinking back to your first travelogue, In Xanadu, published in 1986 \u2013 what would you tell the young William in that book now?<\/p>\n
Oh, he didn\u2019t need much advice. I\u2019ve never had a better trip. It was pure travelling ecstasy, paid for by my college at Cambridge \u2013 I applied for this ludicrous grant which paid for me to hitchhike and walk all the way from Jerusalem to Mongolia. It shouldn\u2019t have been possible but it was one of those rare moments when all the borders were open. Afghanistan was closed but they had just opened the Karakoram Highway up through Pakistan. China hadn\u2019t yet performed genocide on the Uyghurs, so you could see all those incredible desert cities in eastern China and Xinjiang. I remember thinking that I was 100 years too late \u2013 if I\u2019d been travelling there in the 19th century I could have been discovering oases and early Buddhist history and extraordinary ruins and remains \u2026<\/p>\n
So much that I saw on that trip, in 1986 at age 21, is not there now. A lot of Syria has been destroyed, same with the Uyghur and Muslim parts in eastern China. Afghanistan has had a very bad time. All I\u2019d tell young William is to realise how incredibly lucky he is and how fragile all these cultures and civilisations were.<\/p>\n
Who would you like to play you in the biopic about your life?<\/p>\n