Historian William Dalrymple: There’s a tendency in Indian history to have everyone as either a demon or an angel

We are seeing a lot of literary non-fiction in and out of academia, inevitably of varied quality and veracity. Even 20 years ago, people here weren’t looking from a narrative or a biographical point of view. The history departments here tended to reflect the Marxist view of history that focuses on wider social and economic forces and minimises the role of individuals. That’s changing now. Recently, there were two biographies of Dara Shikoh, three of Akbar published in one year. About time.

Kaushik Das Gupta: What is it that drew you to transition?

I was fascinated by the 18th century, by what was going on among Mughals, Marathas, Tipu’s Mysore, Hyderabad, and the post-Mughal successor states and the East India Company. And the whole question of a corporation taking over a country and controlling an army. There were unused archives: The entire Mutiny Papers, these extraordinary records in the National Archives, the country’s leading archive, and no one had worked on them or translated them into English. The reason is possibly linguistic; virtually no one here can read scribal Persian anymore. I was very lucky to work, on all four of my East India Company books, with the extraordinary Bruce Wannell, who had this extraordinary linguistic gift of fluently reading late-Mughal Persian and Urdu, and producing exquisite translations. And together, we worked around archive bases such as Tonk, the National Archives and the British Library, and found hundreds of unused and untranslated Mughal biographies and narratives.

Historian William Dalrymple at the Indian Express Noida office. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)

Kaushik Das Gupta: There’s been a concern about the National Archives as it’s being shifted to another building. What are your thoughts?

The archives are open at the moment, it hasn’t been moved yet. In principle, it shouldn’t be an impossible job to move an archive. They moved from Calcutta to here at the time of the building of Lutyens’ Delhi, which is a far bigger move. So it’s not impossible to move an archive. There are concerns that the archive may be pruned and its contents more closely supervised… I’m no fan of this government but the early reports of the whole Central Vista project were far more alarming than the reality has turned out to be. So let’s see.

It’s not a bad thing that history continues to be looked at from the changing perspectives of the present… but it has to be anchored in the facts found in the primary sources and not just be an expression of religious bigotry

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Kaushik Das Gupta: What led to the English East India Company to triumph over the other companies?

The Company was an outgrowth of the emerging capitalist forces in Elizabethan England. The East India Company, although it had a founding charter issued by the Crown, remained, for its first 150 years, as an independent corporate entity. As different from the state as Google or Facebook or Twitter are from the American state… in 20 years, we’ve seen how huge companies can not only have huge annual turnovers — as great as the GDP of entire nations — but they can also dictate terms to nation states. Colonialism and imperialism have now come to be topics of discussion, particularly in Britain where this whole area of study was once virtually ignored.

Kaushik Das Gupta: How important was the East India Company in the written history of Britain?

The Company is not one thing for 250 years, it’s many different things. It’s first of all, a spice trader, then a textile trader, then in the opium and tea business. And it moves from being a libertarian, free-market enterprise to being a public-private partnership. And so in that transformation, the 19th-century British were often embarrassed by the corruption and violence of the 18th-century East India Company. So, in the 19th century you have the Victorian British rewrite their imperial history in India as a national enterprise… And that, in the sense, is not dissimilar to what’s happening with the Mughals in this country, with the Hindu nationalist government and the rise of the RSS, people are reevaluating the Mughals.

As a historian, you have to try and present all the grey areas, not just move from one extreme of ignoring that temples were destroyed to another extreme where it’s mass bloodshed and an inferno for 1,000 years that only ends in 2014

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And while I don’t agree with much of that reassessment, it’s not a bad thing in principle, that history continues to be looked at from the changing perspectives of the present, and relooked at and rethought and discussed. Discussion and debate is legitimate, but it has to be anchored in the facts found in the primary sources and not just be an expression of ultra-nationalistic muscle-flexing or religious bigotry.

Kaushik Das Gupta: Do you see a revisiting of colonialism as a part of English history?

There’s certainly a huge amount of debate, more than there ever was. To give an example of something that was barely reported here but was a major debate in Britain recently. The National Trust controls most of the great country houses and castles of Britain. And among them are many houses built by former East India officers — the so-called Nabobs — who made their fortunes in India. In the last five years, there’s been a move to break the silence on that. And reassess the buildings within a sense, the dodgier colonial and slave past, and to make it clear to visitors through new guidebooks and new literature on, that what you are visiting actually came as a result of the proceeds of the Caribbean slave trade or through East India Company shenanigans. That has been resisted by the Tory party, who have led the attack on what they call “woke historians” who they see as doing Britain down. Then there are groups like History Reclaimed and Restore Trust, who were trying to get elected to the National Trust council to cancel this rewriting which they regarded as lefty wokery.

Historian William Dalrymple

Devyani Onial: How is colonial history taught in England?

Most Brits don’t study it at all. We learn about the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire in Peru and the Portuguese in Brazil, but we don’t learn almost anything about our own British Empire. A version of history is taught whereby British history is all about freedom and the struggle for democracy, ignoring the mammoth of imperialism in the room — it’s not just the elephant, it’s bigger. So, when Brits come here, they don’t know about Jallianwala Bagh. When they go to Tasmania, they don’t know about the wiping out of the Tasmanian aborigines. When they go to the Caribbean, they don’t know about what happened to the indigenous Caribs. When they go to Ireland, they don’t know much about the potato famine, but the Irish all know every detail. So, there is a problem here.

Kaushik Das Gupta: Have there been different points of time, different governments, under which there has been more impetus towards including the Empire?

No, it hasn’t become like a sort of Congress-BJP fight over the Mughals, that hasn’t happened yet. Although it could now be, because now we have a Right wing end of the Tory party led, you’ll be surprised to hear, by Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, who are attacking “woke” historians of empire. So, there are moves from the Left to push this into the curriculum and moves to resist that on the Right. But up to now, everyone’s just sort of slept through the whole colonial period.

This country is not a poor country anymore. It’s got the resources. It can build huge statues of politicians, cricket stadiums and new airports… It can spend a little bit more on the ASI and museums

Deeptiman Tiwary: How do you place this political narrative propagated by the RSS and the BJP in a historical context based on your research?

If you look at the history textbooks written in the aftermath of Partition, there was a strong feeling in this country that there had been massive, near genocidal bloodshed in 1947, because of Hindu Muslim disunity, and that generation of historians saw it as their job of nation-building to create a united narrative. So, there was a strong emphasis on the positive aspects of Mughal rule. Any nuanced view of history has to be able to take on, in any period of history, pros and cons, ups and downs, the good and the bad. And you cannot ignore the dark side of history any more than the British should be ignoring it in their imperial story.

As a historian, you have to try and present all the shades, all the grey areas, not just move from one extreme of ignoring that any temples were defaced or destroyed to another extreme where it’s mass rape, mass bloodshed and an inferno for 1000 years that only ends in 2014. Nuance is all. There’s also a tendency in Indian history to have everyone as either a demon or an angel. So, Shivaji is a saint and Tipu is a devil. In reality, both of them were living at a time of great bloodshed and anarchy, when there was much destruction, violence, killings, sieges and innumerable innocent deaths.

Historian William Dalrymple in conversation with Associate Editor Kaushik Das Gupta at the Indian Express Noida office

Udbhav Seth: How do you get across that nuance to the public because the narrative is often controlled by extremes?

The situation is unusual… I haven’t come across another country where there is this urge to create a history peopled only by demons and angels, saints and devils. It’s not impossible to create a nuanced view of human characters, with plus points and remarkable capacities for governance, while also acknowledging that they have major flaws. In The Anarchy, for example, Warren Hastings is someone who hugely admired many aspects of Indian culture, is responsible for the beginning of the Asiatic Society, commissioned the first translation into English of the Bhagavad Gita, also builds a network of granaries to prevent famine, most notably the Golghar in Patna, which survives to this day. But there’s also the understanding that he’s running an extremely extractive organisation, the East India Company, which is annually shipping gold from India to Britain, enriching EIC servants at the expense of the people of India… It’s important to get that kind of balance.

Sudhakar Jagdish: There is this narrative of Hindu khatre mein hain. But, what do you think helped Hinduism survive all these years?

It’s all about trying to understand how these things work. It was enormously profitable for Islamic rulers to have Hindu subjects who could pay jizya (tax for non-Muslims). So, at the time of the Sultanate, there was a strong economic incentive not to organise mass conversions: because you get a higher tax rate from the non-converted. And there is, in fact, only one period in two places where you get the mass conversion of the peasantry and that was during the 18th century in both Bengal and the Punjab, which is why Punjab and Bengal ended up being majority Muslim in 1947. And with that you get Bangladesh and Pakistan.

The Sultans ruled over an overwhelmingly Hindu population, and they encouraged conversion only in exceptional circumstances… There is a misunderstanding about this and a view on the Right that you have a bunch of genocidal maniacs turning up with a sword to convert or massacre people — it simply wasn’t the case.

Historian William Dalrymple

Suanshu Khuarana: How did you come across the Afghani story for the Kohinoor?

When I was doing Return of a King, I came across this lovely story in the Tarikh-i-Sultani, of when (Timur Shah’s successor) Shah Zaman is arrested and blinded, he hides the Kohinoor and the Timur Ruby. When his brother Shah Shuja comes to power, he sends out search parties and the Timur Ruby is found under a stone, where it’s been hidden and the Kohinoor too, which was being used as a paperweight by a mullah! And that, actually, is the opening page of Return of a King, and that got me interested…

The reason that the Kohinoor was incredibly famous was because it was put in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the British turned it into a symbol of their empire. Now, it’s still a symbol of the empire but instead a symbol of imperial loot, of imperial dispossession and all that’s been lost by the colonised. In actual fact, none of the Mughal descriptions of the Peacock Throne mention the Kohinoor, because the Mughals preferred red stones of light, they liked spinels and rubies, and those are what the Mughal chroniclers describe. Not one of them mentions the Kohinoor.

When you go to the Tower of London, it’s sitting in a case with the Cullinan Diamond. They have now put travelators there and what you see is lots of Indians moon-walking backwards, trying to keep up with it and often shouting ‘chor chor, we want it back’… it’s a comic scene but behind that lies a genuine feeling of loss and dispossession.

Rinku Ghosh: How difficult is it, as a historian, to continue writing about nuances and their acceptability?

History writing, through all periods of history, is deeply political. If you look at the current conflict in Ukraine, it’s over the understanding of Russian and Ukrainian history. Putin is an amateur historian and has very firm views about what Ukraine is and isn’t, in relation to Russia. It’s a similar case in Israel and Palestine. You have two completely different versions of history, that the Israeli textbooks emphasise the claim of the Jewish people to this land from time immemorial. The Palestinian textbooks talk about how their people go back even further, they would say, and they’re dispossessed at the Nakba of 1948, which simply hasn’t been mentioned in Israeli textbooks, and for them it’s just the first War of Independence. So, there’s another example of an area where you have two different people, but with two completely different understandings of history.

I think governments everywhere in the world will tend to polarise the complicated and nuanced reality of history into a simple tale of patriotic right and wrong. It’s the job of the historian not to stand for that. And often, it’s exactly that, that distinguishes a fine historian from a populist who’s creating a simplified view. I would always be suspicious of any historian who tells a black-and-white story of patriotic valour. Human history is usually more complicated than that.

Aditya Vaddepalli: What’s your view on the repatriation claims made by many countries over the artefacts that are in the British Museum?

Many of the greatest artefacts are not in the national collections but in private hands. First of all, there are two legal statutes. One is the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. That deals with looted artefacts and demands the repatriation of stolen goods, but it’s not retrospective. So, it did mean that Jewish art collectors in World War II, who had their stuff stolen by the Nazis, could claim it back but it doesn’t allow you guys to claim the Kohinoor — yet.

Secondly, there’s a UNESCO document dating from 1972. That’s about the theft of objects of cultural importance. For instance, Cambodia has recently got back an awful lot of stuff from various museums in America that were smuggled by Douglas Latchford, who lived in Thailand. His pieces are now back in Phnom Penh, and there’s still ongoing investigations. This means pieces stolen and illegally exported in the Sixties and Seventies can be claimed back.

Finally then, what you have is the moral question. And this is changing. But first of all, the British people need to learn this history and to understand what happened. At the moment there is huge ignorance. That in some sense is the point of why I have been writing all these Company Quartet books… To present different perspectives, to discuss all these issues.

I think that would be lovely to see, with all the claims this government makes about national pride and all this chest beating about India as this great nation, to see some more money put into museums and archaeological sites. Let’s see some world-class museums and galleries here, displaying the incredible cultural artefacts that you have in this country, most of which currently are either tucked away in storage or badly displayed in dusty, outdated galleries with poor lighting.

..This country is not a poor country anymore. This country has got the resources. It can build huge statues of politicians, cricket stadiums and new airports everywhere. It can spend a little bit more on the ASI and museums.

Why William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is a scholar historian who has taken us to one of the most fascinating periods in Indian history, a period of crucial transition in Indian history, when the Mughal Empire was on its last legs and the East India Company was taking over. His Company Quartet books include White Mughals (2002); The Last Mughal (2006) Return Of A King (2012) and The Anarchy (2019). A recipient of numerous awards, he is also a curator of exhibitions on Mughal and Company-style paintings. Dalrymple is co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, the world’s largest writers’ huddle, which now has an international arm.