The Hindu Lit for Life 2023 | Interview with William Dalrymple, author and historian

Attempts to recast history must always come from a place of facts and not political compulsion or religious fervour, says Dalrymple

When William Dalrymple first came to Delhi, the city’s roads were dotted with Maruti cars. He lived in a tiny two-room house near the tomb of Nizamuddin. He was greeted with dust-laden windows, cobwebs in the corners of his bedroom, and an erratic water supply. 

Delhi back then was a city of tombs. It held the graves of many a dynast. It was also a city haunted, every nook had a story and every stone hosted a deity. Dalrymple ended up writing  City of Djinns (1993), a book so irreverent as to be frequently delightful. 

Today, his canvas is bigger. He has written not just about a city but entire dynasties, with about a dozen books to his credit, including the East India Company series:  The Anarchy (which covered the period from 1660 to 1803),  White Mughals (1780-1830),  Return of a King (Afghan war, post-1830), and  The Last Mughal (culminating with the 1857 war of Independence). The four titles were put together and brought out as a single volume,  The Company Quartet, in 2021.

Ahead of his illustrated talk at  The Hindu Lit for Life in Chennai on February 25, Dalrymple discusses his podcast, his upcoming book, and of course, new trends in studying history. Edited excerpts:

I am doing exactly what I have always been doing, right from my first book. My talks have invariably been accompanied with illustrations. Nothing has changed. But yes, I have done a podcast recently. It has been quite an experience. If you do a book and it sells well, then maybe a 100,000 or 200,000 people read it, but with my podcast, there have been a million downloads every week. It is a different feeling. 

My publishers, Bloomsbury, in conjunction with me. I was delighted with the idea because the books do indeed make a perfect quartet. Between them, they tell the story of the East India Company. 

Exactly. That’s the idea behind all four books. The East India Company, certainly in its early days, was a corporation on its own. It is only from 1784 that the British government comes into the picture. Then the Regulatory Act comes, and it becomes like a public-private partnership. From 1858, the government takes over the company completely and it becomes British Raj. That period was of merely 90 years, 1858 to 1947.