Men of the Year 2024: William Dalrymple – Interpreter of Empire

Just before the pandemic struck, most Indians’ connection with history was through other school textbooks, mostly as a series of distant dates. In other words, history was boring.
One of the unexpected side effects of the lockdown has been the surge in interest in India’s origins through platforms like YouTube and podcasts. These longer formats have helped historians and scholars bring life, detail and nuance to the stories of India’s past, attracting millions of viewers and listeners across the country and the world.

Over the past four decades, Delhi-based Scottish historian William Dalrymple has been one of the leading storytellers of India’s recent history, focusing on the Mughals and the British colonial period. His 12th book, The Golden Road, published this September, is his first exploration of ancient India. Dalrymple’s argument is that the influence of ancient India – religious, economic, scholarly and cultural – has been undervalued and undersold, and that India was actually the ancient Greece of Asia.

So, it’s no surprise that The Golden Road became an instant bestseller. This is an expertly written and researched book to boost national confidence. Dalrymple first came to Delhi in 1984 and has since experienced the tectonic changes that have taken place across India and its politics. Naturally forward-thinking, Dalrymple is energetic, entrepreneurial and adept at using new technologies to attract new readers and audiences. This includes the popular Empire podcast which he launched during Covid in 2022 with journalist and author Anita Anand, which has crossed 200-plus episodes and counting. Notably, Dalrymple has 1.2 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), making him the most followed historian in the world. “I just joined BlueSky,” he tells me with pride, referring to the trendy new social microblogging platform that has recently seen a huge surge in popularity. In this sense, historian Dalrymple has always had an eye on the future.

Your quartet of books about the British Raj, as well as the Empire podcast you co-host, have helped uncover details about the extremely violent, horrific events of the colonial period. How do you view this period of Indian history in Britain?
Britons are by now used to being portrayed as the bad guys. Yet with the rise of right-wing populism in Britain, history has become far more political. When My Last Mogul was published 20 years ago, it received positive reviews from both left and right. If that book were released today, it’s likely that someone on the right in Britain would scoff at me, considering it too “woke”. But it is also a measure of how much we are able to change the narrative. For 50 years after the end of British India, British historians tried to give the Raj a free hand – that it was all about trumpets and glittering uniforms at the Viceroy’s House, grand balls in Bombay and women gliding through the lawns in crinoline dresses. Was in. While at the Bangalore Club, the oppression, violence, famine and horrors of colonialism were hardly discussed. Today these issues are a part of much discussion.