‘Finding her Indus’ as a writer
Reading Alice Albinia’s books ‘Empires of the Indus’ and ‘The Britannias’ is like going on an epic adventure – you never know what the turning page will bring. It’s not surprising thus when she tells us that the genesis of a book, like those unexpected paths she takes on her journeys, can be very mysterious, sometimes sudden, sometimes slow.
Working in Delhi, the idea of a book on the Indus river came to her and she still marvels at how it led to such a pure immersion, likening it to diving into the river in all its metaphorical and actual forms.
Alice Albinia. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
After graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature, her two-year stay in the teeming Indian metropolis was a formative period in her life, a re-education – in colonialism, in politics, in feminism and in writing. It was a world of writers, novelists, journalists and historians, and she recalls Arvind Das, the editor of Biblio, the literary magazine she was working for at the time, telling her there would be dire consequences if she ever wrote a book as bad as the one by a British travel writer he had just received. For the young Alice, Das’s certainty that she would be a writer was a validation.
With that idea of a book on the sacred river firmly embedded, she went back to the UK to SOAS (the School of Oriental and Asian Studies) to prepare with a Masters in South Asian history whilst also learning Urdu and Hindi, languages that she would use in her many journeys for the book.
Published in 2008, ‘Empires of the Indus: the Journey of a River’ was an impressive debut. The story of her travels “upstream and back in time, from the sea to the source” across ancient civilizations through 5000 years and 2,000 miles –would win her many major awards including one received while she was still in the process of writing the book, the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award.
She is still nostalgic, talking of it. “It was such a beautiful way to write a book – to write about a river – whatever was happening in the human world, the river was just there being a river… through time, through place.”
Her journeys since have been no less remarkable. We meet her at the Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival last month and just prior to that, she has had the gladdening news that she had been awarded the Michael Jacobs Travel Writing Grant 2026, presented by the Gabo Foundation, the Hay Festival and the Michael Jacobs Foundation for Travel Writing – the unanimous judges’ choice from 390 submissions across 38 countries. This for her new book set in South America, still in the research stage, on the exploitation of natural and human resources in Bolivia, Chile and Peru, specifically the trade in guano and saltpetre by the British colonisers in the 19th century, “a story about extraction, exploitation and also of soil and the earth.”
The eldest in a family of five, growing up in England, there wasn’t much adventurous travel in her childhood, but as a writer, her intrepid journeys have been the intriguing soul of her books. ‘Empires of the Indus’ took her through Pakistan (from Karachi) to Afghanistan, to India and Tibet in search of Senge Khabab – the Lion’s Mouth (believed to be the source of the Indus), braving areas riven by political tension, sometimes shrouded in a burqa and even plastic sheeting, as makeshift protection against ice, hail and snow.
It was often against all practical counsel but she had her rationale. “My general rule was that if somebody local was making that journey, then it was definitely a journey that was safe to make. That was the problem, going to the source of the Indus – nobody local was going to the source at that point… but we managed to piece it together,” she says recounting that desperate last attempt to trace it, just a mossy spring as it turned out.
It was a writer’s obsession, she admits. “I was so determined to write it and it becomes a kind of madness that overcomes you…. when you are in the middle of a project and you’ll do anything to write that book.”
She talks too of the importance of return, as a writer. Some places she revisited many times, brief stays becoming months. Researching extensively in libraries and archives, writing about not only ancient lore even walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the book is as much an account of the people of the Indus –the Sindhis, the Sheedis (descendants of slaves taken from Africa to Sindh), the Mohanas- the Indus boat people, the Kalash, the nomadic Dropka….It was also about treading a delicate line of respect, in terms of the material, the stories people had told her, that she pondered long about including.
The architecture of a book has always fascinated her. How it all comes together. Drawing from a talk she has listened to at CLAF – ‘Cooking like my Nani’, she reflects, it is also about getting the balance right: “The ingredients have to come together and there has to be some alchemy within that combination.”
‘The Britannias and the Islands of Women’ published in 2023, was closer home and yet, it took her a long time to “find my Indus” – that sacred thread. That too, turned out to be many illuminating journeys, wild journeys, by boat, on foot, in a horse-drawn cart, across the islands with poetic names like Orkney, Anglesay, Iona, Thanet, Shetland, Lindisfarne, the Hebrides and more, uncovering buried histories, myths, legends and the stories of people along the way.
But by then she had two young daughters and travel was tempered by the responsibilities of motherhood. She moved to live for over a year in Orkney (her elder daughter’s first school was there), north of Scotland. Revisiting years later and seeing their delight at returning, she says it’s good they know that “we’re all made up of different homes.”
There was a magic in how this book unfolded too. Initially she found her research, the stories she had gathered centred around men and she says at some point she knew she had to address the gender bias that had unwittingly crept in. It took a personal crisis, much rethinking and revisiting, to look afresh and prise out the accounts of women, buried in time. They were there. “All through British history, from as early as the Neolithic, there has been this association of islands with independent women and they have been places of refuge for women – in imagination and in reality. And you see this theme, it slips between languages, it jumps between genre and it goes from place to place – it is there in Welsh poetry, in Shakespearean plays.”
In King Arthur’s ‘patriarchal’ court – the really interesting and powerful figures on the fringes are women…………. It was really an absolute joy to come to this realization, of women’s power and place, she reflects.
Twinning fiction with non-fiction, her first novel set in Delhi, ‘Leela’s Book’ was published after ‘Empires of the Indus’ and ‘Cwen’, her second set in a fictional archipelago off Britain, preceded ‘The Britannias’. Cwen was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Released this March, Alice’s very first children’s book ‘Once Upon an Island: An Atlas of Islands From Around the World’ is about more journeys, and islands beginning in the Global South and going to the Global North – from Chiloe in Chile to Baffin in Canada.
This island too is now on her list. She would love to return to spend more time exploring the forests and ancient monasteries, and go north to Jaffna and the islands there.
Now learning Spanish for her forthcoming book, Alice lights up at the prospect of taking her daughters, now aged 12 and 9, on some of her travels. “I would love to go and live in Peru and Chile, in Sri Lanka and India – I would be a completely nomadic mother if I could.”
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