In 1984, an eighteen-year-old Scotsman landed in India with no plan, no contacts, and a budget of thirty-five rupees a day. Saddam Hussein had just shut down the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and the young man's carefully arranged excavation of an Assyrian ruin had evaporated overnight. He caught a flight east instead. That teenager was William Dalrymple.
Forty years and over a dozen acclaimed books later, he is widely regarded as the most important living historian of the Indian subcontinent—a man who found thirty thousand 'Mutiny Papers' hiding in plain sight at the National Archives, whose The Golden Road spent thirty-five weeks at number one in India, and whose Empire podcast has now crossed ninety million downloads.
Speaking from his Delhi home on the Expressions podcast—peacocks calling in the garden, parrots competing for airspace—the sixty-year-old historian delivered what may be one of the most wide-ranging interviews of his career: a conversation that moved from the bloodiest forgotten chapter of colonial India to the Bronze Age Collapse, from the myth poisoning Indian social media to the explosive new book on Palestine that he knows will land him in a firestorm.
1857: The catastrophe we don't talk about
Ask most Indians to name the worst British atrocity on Indian soil, and they will almost certainly say Jallianwala Bagh. Dalrymple believes they are wrong—by orders of magnitude.
The death toll at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 was in the hundreds. The toll in Delhi during August and September 1857, he told Expressions, was very probably in the tens of thousands—accompanied by mass assault, kidnapping, rape, and devastation that has no parallel in the colonial record.
But the killing, Dalrymple argued, was not even the worst of it. What followed was a cultural annihilation. 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 because they seemed modern and Western. An entire civilisational layer simply disappeared, never to return.
"1857 seems to me one of the very great tragedies of Indian history," Dalrymple said. "By far the bloodiest moment in colonial history."
30000 documents hiding in plain sight
The interview revealed one of the more remarkable detective stories in modern Indian historiography. While researching for the White Mughals at the Indian National Archives, Dalrymple stumbled upon a catalogue labelled simply 'Mutiny Papers' on its spine. Inside was an enormous cache of some thirty thousand documents from the rebel camp in the Red Fort—collected by the British as prosecution evidence, then ignored for over a century because they were written in difficult scribal Urdu.
For decades, historians had insisted that 1857 could only be written through British sources. The rebel archive, sitting in the most obvious place one could look, proved otherwise. With colleagues, Dalrymple spent years working through the material. It became the foundation of The Last Mughal and fundamentally altered the scholarly understanding of the uprising. "That is what every historian dreams of finding," he said. "The big archive that will change the way people look at things."
The Golden Road: Why his biggest bestseller worked
Dalrymple's most recent book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, spent thirty-five consecutive weeks at number one in India—his most commercially successful work by a wide margin.
The book traces how Indian ideas in mathematics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, art, and literature radiated outward along ancient trade routes stretching from the Red Sea to the Pacific, creating what Dalrymple calls a vast 'Indosphere' of cultural influence that predates the Silk Road.
The key to its reception, he believes, is that Indians already sensed their civilisation's greatness but lacked a rigorously evidence-based narrative to anchor that intuition. "They knew they wanted to be proud about it, but often they weren't quite sure what to be proud about," he said. "You find old uncles talking about the rishis inventing the internet in the time of the Mahabharata." The Golden Road replaced mythology with scholarship—and the appetite turned out to be enormous.
Ninety million downloads: The podcast that swept the globe
If The Golden Road established Dalrymple's reach within India, the Empire podcast—co-hosted with Anita Anand for Goalhanger Podcasts—has made him a global force. The numbers are staggering: nearly ninety million downloads in approximately two years, with two new episodes dropping every week and over 330 episodes in the archive.
For context, Dalrymple noted that a very successful history book might sell 150,000 copies over five or six years. The podcast surpasses that reach in weeks.
Recent episodes have tackled the Bronze Age Collapse—a period around 1200 BCE when interconnected Mediterranean civilisations fell like dominoes within fifty years, destroyed by climate change and broken supply chains. "There's absolutely no indication that they knew they were on the edge of a major civilisational collapse," Dalrymple observed. He did not draw the parallel to the present day. He did not need to.
India's most dangerous historical myth
Asked to identify the single most damaging myth currently shaping Indian imagination, Dalrymple did not hesitate. It was the belief that Hindu and Muslim communities have been locked in perpetual, unending conflict throughout history, according to him.
He framed it as a pendulum that has swung too far. During the Nehruvian era, Indian historiography tended to minimise communal violence. Today, he argued, the opposite extreme dominates: social media and WhatsApp have created an ecosystem where the only thing anyone seems to know about the medieval and Mughal periods is temple destruction and bloodshed.
Neither version is true. The historical record, Dalrymple insisted, shows centuries of coexistence, shared cultural production, and civilisations built together.
"It's a hugely damaging myth that the two communities have always been at daggers drawn," he said. "History is more complicated than that. And I have to say, I'm more optimistic."
India's rise isn't a miracle—it's a correction
Dalrymple offered a sweeping reframe of India's current economic trajectory. For most of human history, he pointed out, India and China together generated roughly eighty per cent of global GDP. The colonial period—beginning with Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the 1490s—violently disrupted that equilibrium, redirecting wealth flows from East to West for four-and-a-half centuries.
Seventy-five years after independence, that natural balance is reasserting itself. India has overtaken Japan, is poised to pass Germany, and will be among the top three economic powers within the decade.
"I do not see the rise of India as something strange and inexplicable," he said. "It seems to me an inevitable truth of the way the world is, that got put out of joint by the freak of European military development."
The Palestine Book: Into the Fire
Perhaps the most newsworthy revelation of the interview was Dalrymple’s confirmation that his next major project is a history of the Palestinians—a book he is currently researching and one he openly acknowledged will generate enormous controversy. Dalrymple has been an increasingly vocal critic of the crisis in Gaza, has spoken at fundraisers for Medical Aid for Palestinians, signed an open letter calling the Gaza war a genocide, and recently became a patron of the Britain Palestine Project.
He traced the roots of the conflict to what he called one of the most cavalier decisions in imperial history: the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain promised a homeland for the Jewish people in a land that was, by his account, ninety-four to ninety-six per cent Muslim and Christian at the time. "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 design, the polar opposite of The Golden Road's warm reception. "It's good to mix the easy truth-telling with the difficult," he said.
The historian at sixty: Still learning, still restless
Dalrymple turns sixty-one next month and plans to celebrate by returning to Hampi—the same Karnataka temple town where he slept rough on his nineteenth birthday, swimming in the Tungabhadra River at dawn. He has been a teacher, a travel writer, a foreign correspondent, a photographer, a festival director, and a podcaster. India, he said, has accommodated all of it.
Asked who he is when no one is looking, Dalrymple paused for barely a beat. "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."
After four decades, nine books on India, and a podcast that has reached more people than most historians could dream of across an entire career, Dalrymple's restlessness shows no sign of dimming. If anything, the most combustible chapter of his career may be about to begin.
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