Main Edition
US
FR
Main Edition
US
FR'An anachronism down to his name.' Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
There was a time, still hovering on the limits of living memory, when Britain specialised in the manufacture of William Dalrymples. Eton and Harrow squabbled annually over who had produced the most William Dalrymples; Oxbridge was little more than a William Dalrymple finishing-school, where the ambitious sons of Scots baronets were whipped into shape. A well-oiled conveyor belt flung thousands of William Dalrymples into the East India Company and Imperial Civil Service. A William Dalrymple would distinguish himself in competitive examinations, acclimatise to life on the subcontinent, ride an elephant, shoot a tiger, and perhaps, if he possessed the requisite literary flair, publish a great tome on the land he made his own. The world lay at his feet, and he was happy.
Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.
Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.
That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”
It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”
In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.
Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeWhile one doesn’t disagree with the author, his last two paragraphs perhaps betray some ignorance about Indian civilization.
India’s ancient civilization did show impressive strides in science, astronomy, medicine – much like ancient China.
If Rubinstein knew about Sir William Jones, Charles Stuart, James Prinsep and a host of other intrepid 18th century and 19th century EIC men who took an interest in these matters of ancient India, he would know that Dalyrmple is merely continuing an old tradition.
Not only did these ” Orientalists” revive the study of India’s antiquity, they deserve credit for painstakingly discovering a lot of lost cultural and socio- religious histories.
This is one of the enduring contributions of the East India company. It deserves remembering.
“India’s ancient civilization did show impressive strides in science, astronomy, medicine”
But it wasn’t science, which requires the experimental method. Accurate observation, and logical reasoning about accurate observations, are not science. That approach encouraged Aristotle (one of the most intelligent people ever to have lived) to believe that flies were generated by rotting meat….thereby confusing correlation with cause. Indian astronomy and mathematics may have enduring value. Indian medicine, however, is largely tradition and superstition…
In mathematics the realisation and formalisation of the quantity ZERO was done by Indian mathematicians. I remember Terry Jones on a BBC program pointing with excitement to the first ever stone carved 0 on a wall near Gwalior. For at least a century before that the zero was shown as a blank space between other numbers.
But the ZERO was not come upon by experimental method or by observation of any kind. Rather, I think, it was derived from a religious world view in which various sects ( Brahmans, Buddhists, Ajidvikas) tried to describe the nature of the world, agreeing that it was made of the four elements (earth, water, wind, fire) and then, in the 6th/5th century BC, adding a fifth element, void or nothingness (no adequate English translation exists) from which the other four elements derived. This, the ‘most subtle’ of the elements has taken mathematical form – 0.
I am not sure that is a correct depiction. Sushruta and Carak, are considered pioneers in medicine, surgery and holistic approaches to health treatment.
We are speaking here of foundational wisdom, not allopathy as it exists today.
Regarding science, it’s the same principle as shown by similar civilizations at the time- ancient China in particular. Comparing it to modern methods would be self defeating.
“…holistic approaches to health treatment…foundational wisdom…”: ayurveda is not science, and surgery in c.800bc was an impressive but practical art.
Until the experimental method was devised – principally in 16thC-17thC England by Francis Bacon – science didn’t exist. What existed before that was a combination of observation, trial and error, and philosophy. It is not “self-defeating” to point this out, rather it clarifies exactly what was achieved by ancient civilisations.
That’s a rather ethno- centric view rooted in Western binarism. Not everyone agrees.
Ayurveda in particular is definitely science, but not as the West finds it.
Jones & Co. did indeed unearth the forgotten history of India. They did it for the entirely practical purpose of trying to find a legal code which the law courts could use, and which would be acceptable to the Indians. They were looking for something that did not exist.
In the end, the British imposed Western-style law in the shape of the Indian Penal Code of 1860. This code was only very recently (last July!) replaced by a new penal code,
Legal solutions could be one of the reasons, but this generation of EIC men were far more empathetic than the next Evangelical – Utilitarian inspired ones. Mere legalism doesn’t express their fascination for the Indian civilizational past. And William Jones was also a polymath who was genuinely interested in the past in India centuries ago.
As was Charles Stuart.
One could say, as Rupert points out below, there was a fascination with the society they saw. Which was different to what they may have had in their own countries, and hence a quest to discover it’s roots.
The Indian Penal Code was an impressive piece of legislation.Its precepts may be rooted in Western ones, but it also contained concessions to local conditions.
I agree on both points: the contribution of India to the general pool of ideas in ancient and early medieval times and the role of the orientalists in rescuing past treasures from before the Muslim invasion. Said’s book may have been resonant when he wrote it but it grossly distorted the motivation of the orientalists. Mostly, they were just fascinated.
It was Jones who founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Though his profession was law, Jones’s passion was linguistics and he had recognised the relationship between Sanskrit and Greek (the Indo European language).
The Asiatic Society did important work long after Jones’s death translating inscriptions on decaying buildings and monuments across India. It was one of their men who travelled to Vidisha (near Bhopal) to look at an old column in a farmyard that had been dated to the Gupta era, 6th/7th century AD. The inscription, hitherto undeciphered, proved that the monument dated from 140 BC and commemorated the religious conversion of the Greek ambassador to the local state. Heliodorus, a descendant of Alexander’s army stranded in the kingdom of Taxila on the North West frontier of India, had abandoned Buddhism for the cult of Krishna’s father.
An undramatic column far from the cultural metropoles of India. But its story, told by the disciple of Sir William Jones, reveals the depths of world history.
https://www.peepultree.world/livehistoryindia/story/people/old-connections-new-finds
You may like reading this.
I have bookmarked the site and look forward to some interesting hours . Thank you.
One cannot view the Empire without setting it in the context of its time and comparing it to other imperial powers of the era and earlier times. It is frankly a delusion to imagine that India without the British would have been the unsullied, exotic paradise of some writers’ imaginations. If the British had not ruled India, then another power would – without question.
The British weren’t the first, and were very far from the worst, rulers and plunderers of India. The British reputation among Indians (especially Hindus) is, as a result, far less toxic than that of earlier conquerors. Ask most Goans of a certain age and they will lament that their corner of India was colonised by the Portuguese – who were enhusiastic plunderers but lacked the infrastructure and governance building traditions of their British counterparts.
William Dalrymple and other historians of his ilk all talk of Empire in terms of its relation to C21st cultural norms which leads them into taking up fatuous positions that don’t advance the debate one inch.
Much of the current fashion of supposedly “decolonising the curriculum” has in fact narrowed rather than broadened what is taught. It’s decades since any British children were taught that the Empire was a force of unalloyed good for the world, but the pendulum has swung far too far the other way. The current fashion is to teach that it was simply a 300 year carnival of atrocities and depredation. What lessons can be learned from History if it is shorn of all context and nuance?
Thus writers as nominally well-versed in the history of the Raj as Dalrymple now offer a revisionist view that gives viewers and readers a skewed version of the period. He has called for the statue of Robert Clive to be torn down from its plinth outside the foreign office – I readily admit he makes a pretty good case for its removal, and describes Clive as “a vicious asset stripper”. Yet the same writer has written in far less trenchant tones about earlier Indian invaders. Muslim warlord-led armies invaded the sub-continent in waves between the 8th and the 17th centuries. They sacked hundreds of cities and thousands of Hindu, Sikh and Jain temples and completely destroyed Buddhism in its birthplace. Afghanistan was a wholly Buddhist land before their arrival. Almost all of Buddha’s followers, and its monuments there, were obliterated.
Jihad inspired Arabs and Turks enslaved tens of millions of native “infidels” and the death toll – according to Indian historian KS Lal, – stood at “no fewer than 82 million persons”. Will Durant – another less partial historian than many – wrote: “The Muslim conquest of India is probably the bloodiest stay in history, ….. ….. the works of Stalin, Hitler and the Holocaust not excepted.”
There are huge statues eulogising these warlords all over Pakistan and Muslim Central Asia – yet most historians of empire, don’t appear exercised by their existence. Do they hold the white British to a higher standard, or the non-white, non-British to a lower one? The progressive Left refer to such “problematic” ideas as the “soft bigotry of low expectations”
Whatever the bitterness of Indians about the British Raj is as nothing to their bitterness towards the equally foreign and much more appalling Muslim Raj that preceded it. So yes, when discussing our imperial past, of course we should include the very real and terrible crimes of the British in India – but we must also set it in context.
Sathnam Sanghera, in his book Empireworld, criticises those who try to use the balance-sheet approach of whether the empire was a force for good or ill, yet he admits that whilst writing the book he “participated in a micro form of balance-sheet thinking myself”.
But take an honest look at the India of today: The Congress Party was founded by the British and the first democratic elections were held under their aegis. India’s democracy, its parliament, its constitution, its legal system, its army, its civil service, its judiciary, its police, not to mention its vast railway network, are entirely the creation of the British. They also introduced cricket, a pastime of which Indians are more than a little fond.
It is neither incorrect nor trite to recognise that the British did good as well as evil. What did the preceding invaders – the ones Dalrymple and others hold in such regard – do that was good?
The recent (post Edward Said) fashion of contempt for the British Empire has one thing in common with the previous Imperialist attitude.
Self importance. Since we can no longer crow about being the greatest we must brag about recognising that we (or rather our previous generations) were the worst. Superlatives and halos all round!
I don’t think, Paddy, that many Arabs invaded and sacked India. Arab origin Muslims are concentrated in Kerala where they settled through trade with the spice coast. Earlier still came the Syrian Christians (4th century AD). The first 8th century raids and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanates were done by Afghans (were they Turkic, I don’t know). The Mughals led by Babur came out of central Asia. In most cases the motive of conquest was, as usual, loot, rape and land grab. Jihad, as per normal, is a cover up. Buddhism lost out, perhaps, because its priests had retreated from their villages into monasteries. If Jihad had been successful Hinduism and Jainism (a more non violent creed than even Buddhism) would not have survived. But, by the time of Akbar, Hinduism threatened to absorb Islam as it had swallowed other sects in previous millennia. Muslim writers of that time continually lamented the incipient defeat of Islam in India and formed an intellectual resistance to reinvigorate the faith, a movement that long after took form as the Taliban (the students), emissaries to lukewarm Muslims from the Deoband Madrassa.
There was a rather brutal Arab invasion of Sindh in the late 7th century AD by Muhammad Bin Qasim. It was bloody and resulted in massacres galore of Hindus including of the Hindu king.
Most subsequent invasions from Mahmud Ghazni onwards were by Turkic and Afghan invaders. Jihad was a core motivation as well as loot- the 2 were linked. Ghazni’s invasion was heavily influenced by the desire to smash the idols of the ” infidels”.The sack of the famous temple of Somnath was very religious in its inspiration.
This notion of jihad as a concept being marginal is a pet theory of Marxist Nehruvians. It is quite untrue.
I would go back to the classic Rankean history by Dr RC Mazumder ” Advanced History of India ‘ as a corrective to Marxist propaganda.
I gave a detailed reply which UH strangely curbed.
Please read RC Mazumdar for a more factual history of India. Arabs did invade Sind in the 7th century AD- and loot was less a motive than the religious one.
UH also disappeared for a day my comment to which your reply was curbed. Thank you for your rebuttal. I am not a Marxist; but I am, perhaps too much, a cynic who suspects ideologies (even Jihad) are used as cloaks for the fiercer passions.
As Dalrymple’s Indian critics on X have pointed out, if you read his earlier books, you wouldn’t know he lives in a country with 80% Hindus. In his semi-memoirs, he mentions his pals in Delhi, nary a Hindu! In this he shares much with that other bloviator Rory Stewart, as well as with Englishmen of yore, Lawrence of Arabia etc, with an extreme love of all things Islamic. Thus both their antisemitism and Hindu-phobia is explained. I haven’t read his latest – and belated attempt to cash in on the Indian market, but I betcha it’s all about Buddhism.
lol judging by his podcast episodes I listened to drawn from the book, you scored a bullseye on that one.
William Hamilton-Dalrymple is one of those ubiquitous upper-class Britons who develop a love of the exotic and ‘other’, no doubt still in thrall to Edward Said’s hopelessly inaccurate rant in his over-lauded ‘Orientalism.’
I read ‘In Xanadu’ on recommendation and felt its merits unmatched by its publicity. ‘From The Holy Mountain’ (following the travels of the 6th century monk John Moschos) is very good however, and certainly better than his ‘history’ writing which seems to consist of a long whine about Empire and how beastly everyone has been to those in Central Asia. His politics are laid bare by his inability to engage with the human desire for the capitalist imperative.
An interesting article about an author I haven’t yet read.
I was surprised that, in City of Djinns, Dalrymple describes encountering Anglo-Indians still lamenting the loss of empire. But I discovered the book was published in 1993 and was based on Dalrymple’s six-year stay in India, so I suppose he was describing people he met in the late 1980s. I wonder if there’s still such a group as “Anglo-Indians” in India?
I greatly enjoyed his books on the the East India Company (“The Anarchy”) and the disastrous first British intervention in Afghanistan (“Return of a King”). (Although on Afghanistan I still think I’d read “Flashman” by George McDonald Fraser first). The podcast I find I can only take in small doses as his personal politics and tendency to giggle at everything are a bit overbearing.
” Anglo Indian” could mean those of mixed birth. It could also denote those British people domiciled in India.
Empire, his podcast on the different empires of the ages is brilliant. Looking forward to reading his new book.
If WD is of Scottish origin maybe he could undertake a project on how the Scots changed the modern world, a huge achievement considering its size. It would be a morale boost for the dour Scots, highlighting as WD does in the case of India that all its problems stem from outsiders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Scots_Invented_the_Modern_World
I wouldn’t be so keen to lay claim to inventing the modern world when looking at the state it’s in.
Brian Kneebone, as of today’s podcast it seems your wish is to be granted. As a half Scot I am looking forward to it greatly.
I thought that it was the Greeks that invented everything!
Very last millennium thinking.
Well according to Basil Fawlty they “practically invented” something!
At least you got the joke
Theodore Dalrymple is better.
Well done! Thanks.
More, please.
Err…who?
Don’t betray your ignorance.
Well, I didn’t who he was either.
actually his podcast Empire (free) is worth a quick listen.