Scotsman in a kurta

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William Dalrymple "" the writer who makes history compulsive reading "" walks into the auditorium dishevelled, by design, in a cotton kurta pyjama, making an impeccable impression for his address titled "Mughals in Kilts: How the Scots adapted to India". The speech is a carry-over from Dalrymple's last work, White Mughals.

The forward-looking march towards universal tolerance can use a reference or two from history, and few knew 18th century India could produce such extreme cases of "trans-culturation", as Dalrymple calls it.

He tells tales of eccentric Britishers "" until then unspecified as Scots "" who were particularly sympathetic to Indian culture. Often the indication of integration was clothing, inter-marriage, or a thriving harem! Hindu Stuart stole Hindu idols to furnish his personal temples, meanwhile persuading English memsaahibs to eschew the corset in favour of the sari.

Ochterlony, a British resident in Delhi, travelled everywhere with his 13 Indian wives (each on her own elephant), and James Kirkpatrick, a British resident at the court of Hyderabad, and the tragic hero of White Mughals, secretly wed an adolescent noble woman in purdah.

I ask him what it is about the Scots that enable them as such adept adapters. It's easy to forget Dalrymple is a Scot himself. He is as much at ease in his Delhi farmhouse as he is in his London home and his accent, from years spent at a private boarding school in Yorkshire, then studying history at Cambridge, and 20-odd years in Delhi, gives away nothing.

He smiles. "I have always kept a leg in both camps. Scotsmen like Kirkpatrick went much further than I did. The Scots have always travelled outside of Scotland for work; in fact, much like Goa or Kerala, the Scottish economy is run on remittances from abroad."

The audience is fully engaged... Dalrymple's manner of speech is brisk, elegant and witty. Plus, the subject pleases all "" the British in the audience are relieved to see that not every one of their ancestors were racist plunderers, the Indians pleased that their culture found so many takers.

The oration also sets the stage for Dalrymple's next manuscript, The Last Mughal, ready for release in the UK. Dalrymple joked in an interview that this book would likely be less popular.

"The Indians are politically confused, disunited, and make a complete hash of the uprising, and the British respond in a vengeful, nasty, racist, genocidal fashion, so nobody comes out of it well at the end," he said.

Contrary to the word on the street, The Last Mughal is not a sequel in plot, but it is a sequel in chronology. He explains, "From a period in the 18th century when the British and Indians shared an easy, amicable co-existence, The Last Mughal gives way to the hatreds and racism of the high 19th century Raj."

And what were the series of events that led to the death of all that goodwill? "Principally, on the British side it was the sheer sense of untrammeled power. In the 1780s they were still a coastal power clinging to Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and there was no indication that they would be the hyper power. Then came Wellesley, and he took out the French, then Tipu, and three battles later the Marathas. After the Sikh wars, there were no more contenders. Parallel to that was the rise of evangelical Christianity and a whole moral framework, which made the British keen to convert and spread Christian laws and education."

The Last Mughal was originally meant to be a freestanding book about Bahadur Shah Zafar, but in the course of researching it, Dalrymple decided it should be a serious four-volume project from Babar to Zafar.

Dalrymple, a huge fan of Runciman's The Fall of Constantinople that records the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, knows that for a historian-writer there's nothing quite like the fall of a great empire for winning material. The Last Mughal is the first of the quartet. "The prequels will come later, like Star Wars," he laughs.

This will be Dalrymple's third book inspired by the Indian capital. "Well, really my "patch" extends from Constantinople and Central Asia (as evident in his earlier work From the Holy Mountain) to Calcutta, but Delhi is the first place I fell in love with. Sometimes it feels much like the start of school term when I return from London each year, Delhi's where my work is."

Dalrymple insists many Indians still bristle at their view of him as an outsider setting himself up as an authority. Possibly, but he would undoubtedly be frontrunner for the title of everybody's favourite literary Indophile.

Everybody wants five minutes with him and it's a jostle to pin him down for a chat. When people do meet him, the natural instinct, amusingly, is to throw questions at him, like what is the origin of Indian chai, or the Scottish kilt.

To which he will always prefix his response with an "I am not an expert on..." but then proceed to stagger his audience with a spontaneous reproduction of dates, anecdotes and events.

Dalrymple is a storehouse of learning, and if that or the unquestionable dexterity of his prose doesn't win you over, his twinkling baby blues and convivial disposition will. It's very easy to forget how exasperating it has been to try to meet him.