I read through some parts of a 500-page historic tome and then stop to wonder what the writer, William Dalrymple, himself would be like. A hearty, jovial Scotsman was definitely not in the reckoning, but there he was, merrily sipping wine and chuckling away at every opportune moment.

"'Why India and why Delhi', is a question that always intrigues me," muses William Dalrymple. "It implies that India and Delhi are not places where one would naturally prefer to live. One doesn't think that way about New York or London. It implies as if India is second best!" He laughs heartily at the fact that English journalists never ask him this question. But scribes from Delhi and Mumbai often have this query and seek answers from him.

The Last Moghul, on the sepoy mutiny during the British Raj, was drawn from a collection of 20,000 Urdu and Persian documents stored in the National Archives in Delhi. Dalrymple collaborated with two other scholars who helped him unravel the material written in these languages and scripts. "The physical writing is mine, but the actual work, thoughts and ideas that we thrashed out over many cups of National Archives' chai and Kareem's kebabs was equally Mahmood's [Farooqui] as it was mine," he states unequivocally.

As we discuss the nature of religion affecting the uprising, Dalrymple suggests that every historian writes history imprisoned in his own time. Like he himself discovered that, in the aftermath of 9/11 and Ayodhya where one sees religious matters animating people to resistance and violence, the Delhi documents were overwhelmingly one of religious causes. To his surprise, he also found a latent jihadi element: the Delhi uprising didn't talk about the angrez, as much as it discussed the Christians and the kafirs (infidels).

Though Dalrymple disagrees that this book serves to talk about the present or the future, he does believe that history repeats itself. There are clear lessons, and while sitting in the library researching this, the story had been played out every day in the newspapers. "At the basic level," he says, "if in the West, you mess around with the East, invade it, the chickens will come home to roost!" He is bemused by the Americans' surprise: it is not shocking if one country takes over people of another nation, impinges on the freedom of people, dominates their economies and their lives, it is bound to have repercussions. "So," he emphasises, "you find a completely erroneous depiction of history of unbridgeable divides of civilisation, of eternal clashes between a free, democratic, liberal, Judeo-Christian West and the imperial, aggressive, irrational East."

It took a Scotsman passionate about Indian history to notice the wealth of information lost to people in the dusty archives. Dalrymple is shocked that 75 per cent of material that they uncovered from the department had never been requisitioned before. He exclaims, "This is the National Archives in the Indian capital, with documents on practically the biggest event in 19th century history where the anti-colonial vote was the largest in this city than anywhere in the world, and there was no interest in exploring it. That to me is utterly, utterly extraordinary!"