William Dalrymple joins our Indian Summer tour for an evening at Humayun’s Tomb

The historian will lead a private visit, dinner and talk in Delhi on 10 March 2027, rejoining our lecturer Raaja Bhasin nearly 30 years after they first worked together on camera.

In September 1857, as British troops retook Delhi, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, left the Red Fort and took refuge in the 16th-century tomb of his ancestor Humayun. He surrendered there days later, and the Mughal dynasty ended. The scene closes The Last Mughal, and its author, William Dalrymple, will return to the tomb with our group on the second day of Indian Summer for a private visit, followed by dinner and an after-dinner talk. The 12-day tour, from Delhi to the Himalayan foothills, follows the last decades of the Raj, from the building of New Delhi to Independence and Partition in 1947.

Few writers are as closely identified with a city. Dalrymple moved to Delhi in 1989 to research City of Djinns, and Delhi has been his home and subject for most of the time since. His books include White Mughals, The Last Mughal and The Anarchy. The most recent, The Golden Road, won the 2026 Mark Lynton History Prize. It runs the usual story in the other direction. Where the Raj is the history of Britain in India, The Golden Road is the history of India in the world: Buddhism, mathematics and the numerals we still use, carried out from the subcontinent over more than a thousand years. William also co-presents Empire, the podcast with Anita Anand that has passed 90 million downloads since 2022, and co-founded and co-directs the Jaipur Literature Festival.

The evening also reunites him with Raaja Bhasin, who leads the tour. In 1997 Dalrymple wrote and presented Stones of the Raj, a six-part Channel 4 series on the architecture of British India. Its episode on the hill stations, ‘Surrey in Tibet’, took him to Shimla, where Raaja appeared on camera. Raaja’s Simla: The Summer Capital of British India had appeared five years earlier, and Dalrymple later called it the best modern book on the town.

That book is the foundation of the tour. It begins in Lutyens’ New Delhi, inaugurated in 1931, only 16 years before the British left. It continues to Amritsar, where the Golden Temple stands a short walk from Jallianwala Bagh, and on to Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s capital for a newly independent Punjab. The group then rides the 1903 Kalka–Shimla ‘toy train’ up to Shimla for three nights. There, Raaja, a resident of the town and state Co-convenor of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, interprets Viceregal Lodge, the Mall and the Gaiety Theatre as part of India’s own history rather than relics of empire.

Indian Summer runs from 9 to 20 March 2027, from £6,890 per person. Book your place now.