But like his literary hero, Bruce Chatwin, who walked out of a well-paid job at Sotheby’s for the uncertain life of a travel writer, Dalrymple was determined to defy the odds. In fact, at the time, writing history books about India looked like a shortcut to penury. Interracial love stories, such as Kirkpatrick’s were part of this and far more common than previously thought.īack in 2003, Dalrymple didn’t know that White Mughals would go on to be picked by the Richard & Judy Book Club, doubling its sales to 200,000, or that Bloomsbury would woo him with oodles of money for a six-book deal. Long before the unbridled racism of the Raj, there was ‘a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas’. The relationship between James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair-un-Nissa, Dalrymple showed, reflected the times they lived in. Not only is it a great story in its own right but it broke new historiographical ground.

White Mughals is the story of the love between an East India Company representative in Hyderabad and a Mughal princess at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning off the nineteenth. It had just won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, and as one of the judges, it fell to me, sitting in the sunny garden of his Queen Anne cottage in Chiswick, to tell him that he could soon expect to be £10,000 richer. India had already a hold on his imagination, but he would never have thought of himself as its historian.Īll that had changed by June 2003, when I met him for the first time to interview him about his book White Mughals.

He was a travel writer, and had been ever since he left Cambridge and headed off in Marco Polo’s footsteps from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan’s Mongolian summer palace for his prize-winning 1989 debut In Xanadu. In the Nineties, no-one thought of him as a historian at all. I’m old enough to remember when that wasn’t the case. The opening sentence of the author’s note at the end of the book – ‘William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians’ – stands unchallenged. Amidst the panegyrics, there’s not a whiff of criticism. The reviews are all in for William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, his history of the rise of the East India Company published last month: I’ve read as many as I can find and they are uniformly excellent. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company ‘Money talks, and in the story of the British conquest of India, it talked louder than almost anything else.’ David Robinson has appreciated William Dalrymple’s writing on India for a long time, and in reading Dalrymple’s latest book, he finds a writer as insightful, probing and as gripping as ever.

William dalrymple the anarchy review