There is a particular quality of light in Delhi on a good February afternoon—warm, golden, forgiving—that makes you forget everything the city has put you through. The pollution, the traffic, the summers that melt your will to live. William Dalrymple knows this light well. He has chased it for four decades.
Sitting on his charpoy, listening to peacocks and parrots compete for airspace above his garden, the sixty-year-old Scottish-born historian sounds like a man who has found exactly the life he was meant to lead. Which is remarkable, because none of it was supposed to happen. Not India. Not the books. Not any of it.
In 1984, a teenager named William Dalrymple had arranged to excavate an Assyrian archaeological site in Iraq. Then Saddam Hussein shut down the British School of Archaeology, and the young man needed a Plan B. He boarded a flight to India instead. He was eighteen. He had no idea he was walking into a love affair that would define the rest of his life.
“India has so very much moulded who I am and what I am,” he said during a wide-ranging conversation on the podcast Expressions. “The world I grew up in feels very distant.” He spent that first year travelling on thirty-five rupees a day—enough for a cheap hotel room, a thali, a packet of glucose biscuits, and a banana. He had his nineteenth birthday sleeping rough in a temple at Hampi, swimming in the Tungabhadra River at dawn. Next month, he turns sixty-one. He is going back to Hampi to celebrate.
Giving India Its Own Mirror
Dalrymple has written about Mughal emperors and East India Company pirates, Sufi mystics and Catholic fundamentalists, the Kohinoor diamond and the fall of Kabul. But it was The Golden Road—his most recent work, a sweeping account of how Indian ideas in mathematics, astronomy, religion, and philosophy radiated outward to shape the ancient world—that struck the deepest chord.
The book sat at number one on Indian bestseller lists for thirty-five consecutive weeks. The reason, Dalrymple believes, is simple: Indians already sensed their civilisation’s greatness but lacked a rigorously researched narrative to anchor that pride. “They knew they wanted to be proud,” he said, “but often they weren’t quite sure what to be proud about. You find old uncles talking about the rishis inventing the internet in the time of the Mahabharata.” The Golden Road replaced mythology with evidence—and people were hungry for it.
“Often writers are the bringers of bad news,” he reflected. “But in this case, it was possible to write a paean of praise to India’s civilisation that made everyone happy.”
The Tragedy Nobody Talks About
Not all of his subjects lend themselves to celebration. Ask most people to name the worst British atrocity in India, Dalrymple says, and they will cite the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. He believes they are wrong. The real horror, he argues, was Delhi in August and September of 1857—a catastrophe in which tens of thousands were killed in a matter of weeks, accompanied by mass assault, abduction, and destruction on a scale that dwarfs Jallianwala Bagh by orders of magnitude.
But 1857 did something worse than kill people. It killed a culture. The absoluteness of the British military victory made Indians—Hindu and Muslim alike—ashamed of their own traditions. The Indian miniature painting tradition collapsed. Courtly arts vanished. People wanted photographs instead, because photographs felt modern and Western. “An awful lot was lost at that period,” Dalrymple said quietly. “A lot of Indian culture just disappears, never to return.”
His own breakthrough came in the National Archives in New Delhi, where he stumbled upon an enormous cache of rebel documents from the Red Fort—some thirty thousand pages that historians had long claimed did not exist. Written in difficult scribal Urdu, they had sat untouched for over a century while scholars repeated the refrain that 1857 could only be understood through British sources. Dalrymple, with colleagues, spent years working through them. It was, he said, “what every historian dreams of finding.”
Ninety Million Downloads and Counting
If books made Dalrymple a respected historian, his Empire podcast has made him a global phenomenon. The numbers are staggering: nearly ninety million downloads in just two years, with two new episodes dropping every week. A successful history book, he noted, might reach 150,000 readers over five or six years. The podcast obliterates that ceiling in a single month.
“It’s totally transformed my life,” he said—not without a hint of exhaustion. The show has no researchers; Dalrymple does the reading himself. Recent episodes explored the Bronze Age Collapse, that mysterious fifty-year period around 2000 BCE when interconnected Mediterranean civilisations fell like dominoes, undone by climate change and fractured supply chains. “There’s absolutely no indication they knew they were on the edge of a major civilisational collapse,” he observed. The parallel to today was left unspoken, but unmistakable.
Into the Fire
Dalrymple sees the modern world through the long lens of empire. India’s rise, he insists, is not an anomaly—it is a correction. For most of human history, India and China together generated roughly eighty per cent of global GDP. The colonial period, beginning in the 1490s, violently disrupted that equilibrium. Seventy-five years after independence, the balance is finally tipping back. “I do not see the rise of India or the rise of China as something strange,” he said. “It seems to me an inevitable truth of the way the world is.”
His next book will not earn him such easy applause. It is a history of the Palestinians—a subject he approaches with the same archival rigour and the full knowledge that it will provoke fury from multiple directions. He traces the roots of the crisis to a single, breathtakingly casual act of imperial arrogance: the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain promised away a land that was ninety-six per cent Muslim and Christian. “Merrily, the British gave away a country that wasn’t theirs to give away,” he said. “The liberation of one people was the damning of another.”
It is, by his own admission, the opposite of The Golden Road’s warmth—a book designed to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. But that, he believes, is the historian’s duty: to alternate between the easy truths and the difficult ones, and to tell both with equal conviction.
Asked who he is when no one is looking, Dalrymple paused for barely a second. “Probably the same person as when people are looking,” he said. “I’ve been lucky enough to do as my work what I would do anyway if I won the lottery and didn’t have to work ever again.” Outside, the Delhi light was fading. The peacocks had gone quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a parrot was still making its case.