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, right… - William Dalrymple

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.

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’.

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.