William Dalrymple (historian)

William Dalrymple in 2014

William Dalrymple (born March 20, 1965) is a Scottish historian, and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic. His interests include the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity.

Quotes

• At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap. Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’. A few Calcutta men were known to have had themselves circumcised to satisfy the hygienic—and presumably religious—requirements of their Indian wives and companions.
  • William Dalrymple - White Mughals

• The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.
  • In Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall, 2020, retrieved on 17 May 2022  The Guardian, 11 Jun 2020.
  • In Sen, Amartya (2022). Home in the World: A Memoir (First American edition ed.). Liveright Publishing Corporation. pp. 165. ISBN 978-1-324-09161-5. 

• Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall. Honouring the man once known as Lord Vulture is a testament to British ignorance of our imperial past.
  • In The Guardian, 11 Jun 2020.

• I am basically writing for a general audience rather than an academic audience. So, I explain stuff, I don’t assume knowledge of any of this on the part of the reader. In a kind of general sense I suppose I have, when I am deciding how much needs to be explained, in mind my primary audience.
  • In Amrita Ghosh, Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple, Cerebration.Org.

• I am writing definitely primarily for an audience who don’t know India.
  • In Amrita Ghosh, "Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple".

• Actually, when you have been in the country for a long time... whether it’s an Indian kid going to live in California working in a software company or whether its me coming to live here as historian and writer; to a certain extent you become a part of the country, and to a certain extent you remain always the person you were with the set of circumstances, history or personal history. So, I don’t think I can ever totally become Indian, but after twenty years I have certainly taken many of the Indian elements. In fact I am sitting talking to you right now in my cotton pajamas and at lunch time I will probably have dal and rice. In various ways I have taken on the life of Delhi; I think I am in the lucky position, in that I can talk to both worlds.
  • In Amrita Ghosh, "Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple".

• Everybody has their own India and I think it’s a nonsense construction, “a real India”. The real India might be the India of the villages and certainly there’s a lot to be said of the fact that India’s heart lies in its villages. But I live 5 miles down the road from Gurgaon with kyscrapers and software companies and backoffice projects and call-centers. And that’s a very real India too, so I think “real India” doesn’t make much sense-- anymore than the real US with apple pie and Thanksgiving and family around campfires; is that anymore real than Manhattan?
  • In Amrita Ghosh, "Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple".

• What has gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan has many echoes with what was going in this part of the world in 18th and 19th century - setting up of puppet governments, the lending of troops and the training of local troops in recent Western techniques. Anyone that knows the history of South Asia in 18th century can see million echoes in what has been going in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • As quoted in "William Dalrymple's book on first Anglo-Afghan war out in December", Zeenews, 12 September 2012.

• The current Western puppet Hamid Karzai is from the same sub-tribe as Shah Shuja, who was a British puppet in 1839, It is the same war under slightly different flags.
  • As quoted in "William Dalrymple's book on first Anglo-Afghan war out in December", Zeenews, 12 September 2012.
  • Pointed out that the Afghan tribe which resisted 1839 invasion now make up of the foot soldiers of Taliban.

• I am a terrible linguist. It`s a great shame that I have not learnt Urdu and Persian.
  • As quoted in "William Dalrymple's book on first Anglo-Afghan war out in December", Zeenews, 12 September 2012.

• In the course of my travels I often came across the assumption that intense spirituality was somehow the preserve of what many call 'the mystic east'... it's a misconception that has always irritated me as I've always regarded our own indigenous British traditions of spirituality as especially rich.
  • In The Long Search, BBC, 27 May 2002
  • On his search to discover the roots of spirituality in the British Isles covering the "divine supermarket" of Roman Britain with a plethora of gods - Celtic, Roman, Persian and a new god from Palestine called Jesus.

• It is true that the early Nehruvian textbooks were written by Romila Thapar and so on, many of whom were Marxists. Sometimes, those textbooks did sort of emphasise a slightly rose-tinted vision of Hindu-Muslim unity running through the whole of the Delhi Sultanate right through the Mughals, which left room for the right wing to say this isn’t history. But the reality was that all those Nehruvian historians were great historians which the right wing successors were not.
  • Speaking at the ‘Express Adda’. As quoted in "India is the story of migration…its cultural richness comes from that multiple layering: William Dalrymple", The Indian Express, December 27, 2019. [1]

• I alerted Bloomsbury to the growing online controversy over Delhi Riots 2020, as did several other Bloomsbury authors, I did not call for its banning or pulping and have never supported the banning of any book. It is now being published by another press.
  • About the controversy over the publication of the book Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story. As quoted in "Bloomsbury India pulls Delhi riots book after anti-Muslim controversy", The Guardian, 24 Aug 2020.

The Last Mughal (2006)

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857.

• The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.
  • p. 439

• For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.
  • p. 440

• Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.
  • p. 442.

• Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together.
  • p. 446

About William Dalrymple

• I have been told that Dalrymple is a personable man, and in my own encounters with him I have indeed found him so, but what is of interest in this context is not Dalrymple the man, but Dalrymple the phenomenon. How did a White man, young, irreverent and likeable in his first and by far most readable India book, The City of Djinns, become the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India?
  • Hartosh Singh Bal, "The Literary Raj", OPEN, 29 December, 2010.

• Dalrymple is [also] British—Scottish, to be exact—but his controversial statements are more likely to concern the country's [India’s] Mughal or British past. He is today India's most famous narrative historian.
  • Karan Mahajan, in The Don of Delhi, Bookforum February/March 2011.

• His fluent and moving presentations of big subjects—India's first war of independence in "The Last Mughal (2006)", for example — sometimes irritate native historians who feel they have been scooped by a powerful foreign interest, but this is a little unfair:..Dalrymple's success has shown that there is a market for well-written history in India. This is itself an achievement.
  • Karan Mahajan, in "The Don of Delhi".

• In the past twenty years, he has rigorously pursued fascination for [India], writing one brilliant travel book (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi), two vivid histories (White Mughals and The Last Mughal), and one anthology of acute acute journalism (The Age of Kali) about South Asia. He came to India before it had achieved its status as a frontier boomland for computer programmers and writers alike, and he has lived there, on and off, since 1989... he has become something of a godfather to a generation of writers who are producing nonfiction about the country. The fact that Dalrymple looks like a sunnier version of the actor James Gandolfini and loves to party no doubt helps with this reputation.
  • Karan Mahajan, in "The Don of Delhi".

• The motives of people like Dalrymple, those who wilfully set out to deny the facts of the destruction of the Hindu civilisation of India, are the opposite. Their denial of the large-scale destruction and denigration of Hindu religion and culture by the Muslim raiders, invaders and conquerors of India is motivated by the deep-seated political aim of the Independence movement to brook no divide between Hindu and Muslim.It was for its time and for all time a noble aim. That was one of the things V.S. Naipaul said to the BJP gathering--that the project of Nehru and Gandhi to avoid going into the import of that history was in itself positively motivated. There is never any justification for one community in India to conduct a pogrom against another. Not then, not now. But surely the construction of history should be truthful. Suppression can only exacerbate the anger.
  • Farrukh Dhondy, Does Willy Get It Wilfully Wrong?, Outlook India, [2]