In Conversation with William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s greatest living historians and leading voices on Indian scholarship. His works are, undoubtedly, essential reading for anyone and everyone interested in the Indian subcontinent. I had the opportunity to speak with him following the talk he gave in St Andrews with Topping & Company Booksellers on 26 September to discuss his latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World and ask him questions pertaining to his research on India.

Upon my asking him if there are any Scottish motifs in his work, Dalrymple responded that “You’ll find lots of reference to Scots and indeed, my own ancestors, in all my books on India. At the very moment in Empire pod, we're doing a whole series on the Scots and Empire. We recorded one on the Scots and India yesterday, Scots in Africa later in the week. And I'm a proud, patriotic Scot, though I'm not a nationalist. I actually had dinner with Humza [Yousaf] last night, but I'm not an SNP supporter, and I voted against independence in the referendum. So I'm, of course, formed by my Scottish background, but I have never written a book of Scottish history, because I haven't lived here, really during my adult life. I've always been a visitor from Delhi, which has been my base.”

I asked Dalrymple how he thinks the historiography of empire plays out in modern British society. “Well, we now have a culture war, which was not necessarily the case as recently as 10 years ago.” He said, “There has been a massive re-examination of our imperial history. Because the reality is that having won the Second World War, we were never forced to do the sort of soul-searching which Germany or Japan had to do, and re-examine our past to look at some of the oppression and violence caused by our forebears.”

“There was an understanding that our empire had somehow been different, better from those of the Belgians or the French or the Germans. And there was a widespread view here that we got on terrifically well with Indians.”

“We have seen these certainties questioned. But then I think something has happened in the last five years, and the Tory Party has woken up, in a sense, to changing attitudes towards Empire. And there's been a great deal of huff and puff from people like Liz Truss attacking those who denigrate ‘our great empire.’ You know, that sort of language. And there's this sensation on the right that woke academia has taken over the history departments that are trying to denigrate, in their words, ‘great Imperial heroes’ like Churchill.” Dalrymple told me to put that in quotes. “So I think there has been in the last five years, a right-wing pushback.”

Among the last questions I asked him was what direction he thought history was taking in popular consciousness in India. “That’s a very long, complicated question,” he responded. “I think there was a problem in Indian history writing whereby Indian historians in academia ceased to address the general public in any way, writing in almost deliberately complex prose, which shut out the ordinary reader in India, leaving a great hunger for how to understand the country’s complex, fascinating history. You had a historical establishment that remained, right up until the 2020s, very left leaning, and which dressed themselves in academic language. This created a complete absence of historical biography.”

“So there grew up in the absence of good history written for the ordinary person, a whole world of mythologised history, where ordinary people sort of took history writing into their own hands, often in an extremely unacademic, inaccurate, and mythologising manner. And the result has been great confusion about history. Add to that the fact that many of India's middle class do not opt for Humanities. But there is an overwhelming push in the Indian diaspora for technical and vocational subjects, meaning that India was, in a sense, very vulnerable to extremely inaccurate and crude propaganda about history which the historical establishment failed to provide any safeguard against.”

“And I think that is now being changed, but there is still a lot of damage. There's very little nuance in the understanding of history in India, and people tend to take a very simple sort of left-right, culture-war approach to it. There's a deep suspicion of establishment historians, and very crude and un-nuanced caricatures of history writing from some on the right in response to that. So it's [...] something that I think that people are now aware of far more. There are now, you know, several new biographies of Akbar Jahangir, as well as many other figures in Indian history. There’s a very good wave of new nonfiction filling that gap. But there is still a great absence — I mean, I shouldn't be complaining about that because I built my career on trying to feed that hunger.”

Dalrymple’s book The Golden Road is now published and available to buy, a must-read for whoever is intrigued by India’s tremendous influence in the ancient world.

Image from Wikimedia Commons