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Right until the pandemic struck, most Indians’ engagement with history was through anodyne school text books, mostly as a series of distant dates. In other words, history was boring.
One of the unexpected side-effects of the lockdown has been a surge of interest in India’s provenance—enabled by platforms like YouTube and podcasts. These long-form formats have helped historians and scholars breathe life, detail and nuance into stories of India’s past, drawing in millions of viewers and listeners across the country and the world.
Over the past four decades, Delhi-based Scottish historian William Dalrymple, has been one of the chief storytellers of India’s recent history, focused on the Mughals and the British colonial period. His 12th book The Golden Road, published this September, is his first crack at ancient India. Dalrymple’s argument is that ancient India’s influence—religious, economic, scholarly and cultural—has been vastly underplayed and undersold, and that India was in fact the ancient Greece of Asia.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that The Golden Road has become an immediate bestseller. It is a skilfully written and researched national confidence boost. Dalrymple first arrived in Delhi in 1984, and has had a ringside view of the tectonic shifts that have taken place across India and its polity since then. Instinctively ahead of the curve, Dalrymple is energetic, entrepreneurial and skilled at harnessing new technologies to draw in new readers and audiences. This includes the popular Empire podcast that he launched during Covid in 2022 with journalist and writer Anita Anand, which has crossed over 200 episodes and counting. Notably, Dalrymple has 1.2 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), making him the most widely followed British historian in the world. “I’ve just joined Bluesky,” he says to me with pride, referring to the trendy new social microblogging platform that has recently seen a huge spike in popularity. In this sense, historian Dalrymple has always had one eye on the future.
Your quartet of books about the British Raj, as well as the Empire podcast you cohost, has helped unearth details about extremely violent, horrific events from the colonial period. How is your revisiting of this period of Indian history viewed in Britain?
The Brits by now are used to being cast as the bad guys. Yet with the rise of right-wing populism in Britain, history has become far more political. When my Last Mughal was published 20 years ago, it got positive reviews from both the left and right. If that book were released today, it’s likely that someone on the right in Britain would take a crack at me, and deem it to be too “woke”. But this is also a measure of how much we’ve been able to change the narrative. For 50 years after the end of British India, British historians tended to give the Raj a free pass—that it was all about trumpets and glistening uniforms at the viceroy’s house, grand balls in Bombay, and ladies in crinoline dresses gliding through the lawns of the Bangalore Club, while the oppression, violence, famines and horrors of colonialism hardly got discussed. Today these issues are very much part of the discussion.
How were the British viewed by Indians when you first came here in 1984, and how are they viewed today?
The tone has definitely changed. When I first arrived here, there were still people alive who’d been in British prisons—but equally they’d often had British governesses or nannies. So they had a nuance in their understanding of the relationship: They hated imperialism, but they were often quite fond of individual Brits. Many had happy memories of a governess or a school teacher or someone who’d been kind to them at some point in their lives.
These days the perception has become far more politicized, especially in the aftermath of the kind of books that I’ve been writing, and Shashi [Tharoor] has published. As a result, today there’s much more awareness of the horrors of imperialism, that the colonial era was an incredibly dark period of Indian history.
There’s also much less engagement between individual Indians and individual Britons these days. And as Indians have become more self-confident, and as the country has risen to become an economic power, there’s a palpable anger about the colonial past, which perhaps wasn’t there 20 years ago. Back then, colonialism was largely something that had happened, something that took place in the past. Now, particularly, I think there’s understandable anger about this long period of history when India was suppressed and looted.
You mention a more self-confident India. These days we hear senior officials talk about the importance of shipbuilding, growing Indian shipping fleets, and about rediscovering our past maritime strengths, when ships sailed across the Indian Ocean and beyond. What do you think about this renewed maritime focus?
Because of its monsoon winds, India has always been a major maritime power. There’s no other place in the world where you have fast winds blowing you in one direction for six months of the year, then fast winds blowing you back the other six months of the year. And yet, I think with one or two notable exceptions, Indian historians have not focused on the maritime. It’s a major part of Indian history, which has been forgotten. And this is what The Golden Road is all about: By using its maritime advantage, India had extraordinary influence in bringing Buddhism not only to Southeast Asia, but to Korea, Japan, Siberia and Mongolia. The whole spread of Hindu kingship into Cambodia, Java, Malaysia and Thailand. And the way that Indian ideas spread into the Arab world is particularly absent from many people’s consciousness. The fact that it was Indian intellectuals who brought the Indian number system, including zero, to the Arab world, as the first stage in its passage to Europe. These are things that are not known outside a small group of scholars, and it’s really important to recover and highlight them. These are major contributions to civilization.
You argue in The Golden Road that customs taxes on trade with India may have generated as much as a third of the entire income of the Roman Empire’s exchequer. Cut to 2025. Where should India be looking now?
India was at its most brilliant and influential when it was open to foreign ideas. Gupta India was an incredibly cosmopolitan place. It wasn’t a closed, hermetically sealed island of Indian-ness. It took in ideas. If you read early Indian history, it’s when India is absorbing ideas from Babylonian mathematics, Persian mathematics, the Yavanasutras (writing of the Greeks, like Euclid) that you get the astonishing advances of Brahmagupta and Aryabhatta. So I hope very much that India, as it prospers, as it will do, and rises in global importance, as it will do, will remain as open as it always has been.
India was renowned for its muslin, silks, embroidery, kalamkari, and textiles. As a historian what advice would you give contemporary Indian designers?
All the exemplars and inspiration designers ever need are in India’s history—not just in the Mughal period, or medieval times, but in the ancient past, which is evident in locations like the Ajanta caves. A generation of Indian designers, of which the great Ritu Kumar is one, saved Indian design from a very near death experience in the 1950s and ’60s. When people like Faith and John Singh founded Anokhi in Jaipur in 1970, they were literally saving the block print, as Rajasthani block printers were being edged out as polyester overwhelmed the market in the ’50s and ’60s. Most people today don’t realize just how close a call it was. There was a real danger that all those skills were going to be lost forever: all the chikankari makers, the kalamkari artisans, the weavers of Kashmiri shawls and so on. A lot of these skills nearly died during the British period, but there was also considerable decline in the decades following independence. It was only in the late ’70s and ’80s, according to Ritu, that an understanding grew that these were extraordinary crafts, which needed to be saved. In that sense, that work has already been done. Yet we’ve just scratched the surface: There’s so much more to learn from India’s design heritage.
It’s been 40 years since you first came to India. Looking back, what is the one thing that’s surprised you the most?
Over this time I’ve been a foreign correspondent, a travel writer, festival organizer, photographer, and historian. There’s no guarantee that someone from the former colonial power will be welcome in a country. It’s potentially a very tricky scenario, a potential minefield. So I’m very grateful and surprised with how I’ve been allowed to prosper here in the way I have—that people will turn up in numbers when I give a lecture or lead a heritage walk. India has been incredibly accommodating to me and my family in a whole variety of ways.
In the famous words of Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it does often rhyme.” It is also often said that those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it. As a student of the “Empire”, do you believe in karma?
Not in the classical sense. But certainly if you do good around you, you sow flowers; and if you mess people around and give them a hard time, then in the words of the Sufi saint Rahman Baba, you sow thorns.
And is that true for nations as well?
It is. I think it is. Apparently there’s a celebration of independence from Britain, somewhere in the world every six days. That’s quite a legacy to have left behind for my country! That said, India has an incredibly positive image abroad. People associate it with Gandhi and yoga. Maybe that’s a rosy and sugar-coated image of a country that we know is complicated and sometimes very violent. But India in general has created an incredibly positive image in the world. Which is not true of all countries, shall we say. [Laughs.]
Hair & Make-up: Anuradha Raman
Entertainment Director: Megha Mehta
Production: Nafromax Production; Shubhra Shukla
Fashion Assistant: Vedica Vora
