Getting Dressed: William Dalrymple and Olivia

Getting Dressed Our passage to India

Writer William Dalrymple and artist Olivia Fraser love Indian clothes brigid keenan

Shortly after William Dalrymple posted the opening chapter of his first book to the publisher, he found a curt message on his answering machine.

‘I am assuming this is a first draft,’ it said. ‘If not, we will have to seriously reconsider your advance.’

Dalrymple, 24 at the time, began again. In Xanadu was published in 1989, winning plaudits – as all his ten books since have done.

Olivia Fraser, his girlfriend, then also 24, decided to put a cosy and secure future at risk. She abandoned her scholarship to Chelsea Art School to join him in the great adventure of making a new life in India.

Today her mystical paintings, using Indian miniature-painting techniques on a large scale, hang in galleries around the world.

Their Indian venture started badly. The day Fraser arrived in Delhi, ‘excited and terrified’, Dalrymple (who had gone ahead to find somewhere for them to live) developed viral fever and a temperature of 1040F. Turkish Airlines had sent her luggage to Istanbul, there was nothing to eat in the fridge and she was too scared to try street food.

A lustful landlord meant that, for their first ten years in India, they pretended to be married. ‘This worked well but it made it a bit embarrassing with friends when we really did get married ten years later,’ grins Fraser.

They survived the landlord, bailiffs and swarms of attacking bees (‘I have never run so fast in my life’) and had three children. Thirty-three years later, Delhi is still home.

‘I have always assumed I will die in India,’ Dalrymple laughs. Fraser is not so sure: ‘Mmm … I have my eye on a lovely graveyard in the Highlands.’

Their lifelong love affair with the subcontinent is not surprising – both have Scottish forebears who made their mark in the country. Fraser’s kinsman James Baillie Fraser commissioned the famous Fraser Album of Company School paintings.

‘The vastness of India has given me so much,’ says Dalrymple. ‘It has made me a traveller, historian, photographer,

Left: William’s cotton kurta pyjamas, waistcoat and shawl from Afghanistan; sandals from Greece. Olivia’s layered skirts and top from Anokhi; Dr Martens boots. Below: in 1989 in the Lodi Gardens, Delhi, where they later got engaged

appreciator of art, feature-writer, curator … everything. I love the people, the food, the climate, the lifestyle and all the different cultures mingling together.’

Fraser agrees: ‘You can never be bored in India. It is endlessly stimulating, and endlessly challenging in a crazy way – the electricity goes off, the traffic can be appalling. You need immense patience.’

Both agree that India’s pollution and politics are worrying, and that the climate is changing. ‘Our well water ran out earlier last year and we had to order tankers.’

Both Dalrymple and Fraser are happiest in Indian clothes. Fraser buys all her hand-printed skirts and tops at Anokhi shops in India, and layers them according to the weather. Dalrymple’s favourite tunics and trousers were originally made by a tailor in Peshawar and are copied in Delhi – ‘Bespoke kurta pyjamas for the fuller figure,’ laughs Fraser. When the weather gets chilly, he adds a waistcoat and woollen shawl.

After being locked down in England, they are relieved to be back doing daily yoga classes with their teacher in their Delhi garden. In London, lack of space meant they had do them, one by one, with the teacher on a mobile phone.

Dalrymple is writing his next book, The Golden Road, out next year. His photographs and Fraser’s paintings were on view in London last year. Dalrymple continues his work for the Jaipur Literature Festival. His 1997 book, From the Holy Mountain, is to become a film. And The Anarchy, his 2019 history of the East India Company, is being made into a TV series.

Fraser is preparing a major exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York next year. She is back painting in their house on the edge of Delhi. ‘My art brain works better there, and I have all my bits and pieces around me. I like to work with the light, starting at nine and stopping at six, at dusk – what they call cow-dust time in India.’

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