William Dalrymple Quotes

I am a terrible linguist. It`s a great shame that I have not learnt Urdu and Persian.

Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.

The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.

Actually, when you have been in the country for a long time... whether it’s an Indian kid going to live in California working in a software company or whether its me coming to live here as historian and writer; to a certain extent you become a part of the country, and to a certain extent you remain always the person you were with the set of circumstances, history or personal history. So, I don’t think I can ever totally become Indian, but after twenty years I have certainly taken many of the Indian elements. In fact I am sitting talking to you right now in my cotton pajamas and at lunch time I will probably have dal and rice. In various ways I have taken on the life of Delhi; I think I am in the lucky position, in that I can talk to both worlds.

It is true that the early Nehruvian textbooks were written by Romila Thapar and so on, many of whom were Marxists. Sometimes, those textbooks did sort of emphasise a slightly rose-tinted vision of Hindu-Muslim unity running through the whole of the Delhi Sultanate right through the Mughals, which left room for the right wing to say this isn’t history. But the reality was that all those Nehruvian historians were great historians which the right wing successors were not.

What has gone on in Iraq and Afghanistan has many echoes with what was going in this part of the world in 18th and 19th century - setting up of puppet governments, the lending of troops and the training of local troops in recent Western techniques. Anyone that knows the history of South Asia in 18th century can see million echoes in what has been going in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I alerted Bloomsbury to the growing online controversy over Delhi Riots 2020, as did several other Bloomsbury authors, I did not call for its banning or pulping and have never supported the banning of any book. It is now being published by another press.

I am basically writing for a general audience rather than an academic audience. So, I explain stuff, I don’t assume knowledge of any of this on the part of the reader. In a kind of general sense I suppose I have, when I am deciding how much needs to be explained, in mind my primary audience.

Robert Clive was a vicious asset-stripper. His statue has no place on Whitehall. Honouring the man once known as Lord Vulture is a testament to British ignorance of our imperial past.

In the course of my travels I often came across the assumption that intense spirituality was somehow the preserve of what many call 'the mystic east'... it's a misconception that has always irritated me as I've always regarded our own indigenous British traditions of spirituality as especially rich.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

The current Western puppet Hamid Karzai is from the same sub-tribe as Shah Shuja, who was a British puppet in 1839, It is the same war under slightly different flags.

At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap. Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’. A few Calcutta men were known to have had themselves circumcised to satisfy the hygienic—and presumably religious—requirements of their Indian wives and companions.

I am writing definitely primarily for an audience who don’t know India.