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:
Like some other historians, are you reinventing yourself to cater to the demands of the time?
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.
Whose idea was it to publish ‘The Company Quartet’, considering each of the books has done well separately?
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.
You said once that to begin with, it was not a colonial takeover of India, but that the country was taken over by a corporation.
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.
Is it not incredible that a foreign company comes here and uproots one of the biggest, the richest empires of that time?
It is one of the most bizarre stories. That is why I have given 20 years of my life to study it. In the last 20 years, we have seen the growth of many massive multinationals like Google, Twitter, Facebook, that overarch nations. In many ways, they are more powerful and richer than modern nation-states.
But the East India Company had a very humble origin...
A painting (by Thomas Malton) from the 1800s of East India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company. It was demolished in 1861. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
It is the same story as Amazon starting in a garage. The East India Company started in the office of a Governor. For the first 50 years, the East India Company had doors but no offices. It existed in the Governor’s own house, in much the same way as Amazon existed in the garage of Bezos.
Today, Amazon, Facebook, etc. may not use weapons but they do have our data. They do read our minds. They can interpret our patterns. That is why we get these accurate nudges on social media.
Coming back to the East India Company, wasn’t their task facilitated by the decline of the Mughals?
After Nadir Shah’s invasion, the Mughal empire was shattered. There was no money for governance or to pay the army. The empire fragments from a single unitary state with a million men under control to a situation where every small town was self-governing, say Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Tanjore, Hyderabad... all become independent States. That is what anarchy is, the idea of moving from a centralised state to a decentralised one. This is the world the East India Company managed to take over.
The Battle of Plassey helped the East India Company take control of Bengal and subsequently other parts of the Indian subcontinent. A painting by Francis Hayman, 1762. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
The extraordinary thing is, it managed to do so using Indian troops and Indian money. At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were only 200 white employees in India and 35 in the head office in England. It used the money of Indian bankers like the Jagat Seths. Like how some corporations have enormous influence over the government today, those days, the East India Company was able to set town against town, and using local capital and local manpower, it was able to take over the whole country. It is extraordinary.
How far removed was the East India Company from the British polity?
Well, it had a charter allowing it to operate. It was a completely unsupervised entity with almost complete independence. Initially, there was no government control over it. It changed after 1784.
How do you look at attempts to restudy history in India? Does it stem from bigotry or is it an attempt to correct some Marxist wrongs?
There is nothing wrong in reassessing history, re-examining the past in the light of new-found evidence. But it has to be based on evidence, primary sources. It cannot be an expression of bigotry or political compulsion or religious fervour. It has to be grounded in facts. No historian is completely objective. I am all for assessing history, but it has to be done with facts.
What is your new book about?
It’s called The Golden Road. It will come out in October. It is about the diffusion of Indian civilisation. It is the story of Buddhism travelling to China, of Buddhism and Hinduism taking over South East Asia and the third part is about Indian numbers and astronomy travelling westwards, first to Baghdad and then Europe. I am going to be researching monuments in Kancheepuram and Mamallapuram when I come to Chennai.
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