Join renowned writer-historian William Dalrymple as he shares fascinating insights about his latest book, 'The Anarchy'. Explore the riveting narrative that unravels the dramatic history of the East India Company and its impact on India's colonial past. Immerse yourself in this captivating conversation with a master storyteller and deepen your understanding of historical events that shaped our world.
#OutlookBibliofile #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
Follow this story and more: https://www.outlookindia.com/
#OutlookBibliofile #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup
Follow this story and more: https://www.outlookindia.com/
Category
đ
NewsTranscript
00:00 everyone loves a hero, everyone loves a winner. And Shralam was all sorts of things but he
00:04 always lost. And yet he is this dignified, in his youth he's this handsome young prince
00:13 who cuts his way out of Delhi when he's about to be assassinated by this sort of psychotic
00:18 vizier called Imad-ul-Mulk. And he gathers an army and he's just too late because the
00:24 classes just happened, the company's now established in Bengal with its new military
00:29 technology and he's just a year, two years too late.
00:39 Hello and welcome to Bibliophile. Any new book by William Dalrymple is always a major
00:45 event, it creates waves both in literary circles and among his millions of fans. He has this
00:53 unique ability of diving into history, going back in time and coming up with gems which
01:01 people seem to have missed so far. And here we have, thank you very much William Dalrymple
01:05 for joining Bibliophile. We are here to discuss his new book, The Anarchy, which is already
01:11 I think topped almost all charts so far and it's on its way to becoming a bestseller.
01:18 This is his⊠It's number one here, number four in England
01:22 and number nine in the States. Wow, fantastic, there you are. And so this
01:25 is his, you know, that's the amazing part, you know, he makes history so thrilling, you
01:30 know, it's such a nail-biting read actually, that's what makes him so popular.
01:35 I think, I mean, I think people in India always say that it's odd that history is thrilling
01:40 but history usually is thrilling, in a sense the miracle is that many practitioners of
01:45 Indian history manage to make it so dull. You don't have to make anything up, it's
01:51 already a Game of Thrones script most of Indian history, there's fantastic characters, extraordinary
01:56 violence, incredible beauty, amazing storylines and still you manage to get people turned
02:02 off history en masse. That is, I mean, why do the academic part
02:08 of it, why is it always, I mean, why should it be dull?
02:10 Well, I mean, what's odd is if you look at, for example, at Harvard, in the last five
02:15 years at Jaipur we must have had 15 Harvard professors that have run Pulitzer-winning
02:20 books that have been big bestsellers. This year we've got the amazing Stephen Greenblatt
02:24 coming, whose book on Renaissance art history, The Swerve, was number one on the New York
02:29 Times bestselling list for six months. But for some reason, while India produces a disproportionate
02:34 amount of really good fiction, and you know, there's rarely a year when there isn't an
02:38 Indian on the booker shortlist. This year we had Salman Rushdie.
02:42 Yeah. That's more or less, you're surprised if
02:45 one hasn't won it. That's true, it's almost a given, yeah.
02:47 But the same is not true of Indian non-fiction yet. And although there's lots of very bright
02:51 young stars emerging, like Manu Pillai or Raghu Karnad, to this day, the Bailey Gifford,
02:58 which used to be called the Samuel Johnson, which is the non-fiction equivalent of the
03:03 booker, I think only, what's he called, Samir Subramanian writing on Sri Lanka and Ram Guha's
03:10 cricket book were longlisted. Other than that, I think I'm right in saying there hasn't been
03:18 a single Indian author ever made it to the shortlist. Which is extraordinary, because
03:23 this country has a million stories, whether it's in journalism or in history or in biography.
03:29 Absolutely, yes. And the just so far isn't the same literary
03:33 excellence that you get in fiction passing into non-fiction. I don't know why that is.
03:38 I mean, I can't answer that question. I mean, it's a very stark difference between the,
03:43 if India was to field a fiction first eleven, it would be the world-beating team, with Roy,
03:48 Ghosh, Rushdie, Vikram Seth, you know, it could take on any other national team in the
03:53 world. But if you were to, the Indian non-fiction
03:56 first eleven would be a little bit further down.
04:00 That's true, yeah. And particularly I think it's true in terms
04:03 of history. I mean, none of the academics here, none of the academics, and I'm trying
04:07 to think of an exception, and can't, frankly, none of the academics write top quality literary
04:14 non-fiction that has made the crossover from academe to, and I think most of them are still
04:20 terribly frightened of being seen as populist. That's one. Why is it considered slightly
04:26 lower? Well, because if you look at the kind of work
04:28 that the greatest historians in the world are doing, you know, sitting in Harvard, sitting
04:33 in Cambridge, there are, you know, every year one wins the Pulitzer.
04:38 Yeah, and they're on the top sellers list. And a big, serious biography of an American
04:44 president will always be a number one item, cover of the New York Times. And it's just,
04:51 it's beginning to happen here. Raghu winning that massive prize he won this year is the
04:56 first time an Indian non-fiction writer, with exception, I tell you the other exception
05:01 is Suketu Mehta. Maximus City was shortlisted for the Pulitzer in non-fiction. But Raghu,
05:08 Suketu, Ram Guha are apart. It's odd, the absence of non-fiction. And frankly, what
05:16 I'm doing with Indian history is no different from what a lot of my British and American
05:22 contemporaries are doing with their history. For example, Simon Siegbert Montefiore's books
05:26 on the Romanovs or Stalin or Jerusalem or Anthony Beaver's books on Stalingrad. Maya
05:33 Jazilov in Harvard, her extraordinary books on the American Revolution and so on. These
05:41 are, you know, books which are up for prizes, which are top of the best sellers list. They're
05:45 incredibly scholarly. They're often the work, the result of 10 or 15 years work. But they're,
05:50 you know, but they're incredible. But for some reason, Indian academics, particularly
05:54 Indian historians, just don't seem to be venturing into that territory. In fact, they have to.
05:58 I mean, there's no rule they have to do. But it's odd that they're not. In fact, that's
06:01 a book like this, for instance, I mean, it's, you know, one feels that it's been attempted
06:06 before. I mean, it's not something new that you are, you know, you've come up with, but
06:10 it's the way it's told. It's the sort of the structure of the book, the architecture, you
06:15 know, the of course, the language and as I said, these gems that, you know, these which
06:20 historians probably don't.
06:22 Yes and no about whether it's been accepted for. Yes, there's been lots of work on the
06:26 East India Company, which is which is really quite well covered, particularly there was
06:31 an older generation of Bengali historians who did incredible work on the company. Kum
06:37 Chatterjee, who's no longer with us, did all the groundbreaking work on how the Indian
06:43 financial classes, particularly the Marwari's, were bankrolling the company. And she did
06:47 really detailed economic work over the 70s and 80s. I mean, long list of names, but alive
06:56 today still and publishing at his peak is Rajat Dutta at JNU. He studied the East India
07:01 Company and particularly the Bengal famine and the rural Bengal economy. There's a lot
07:05 of that. The thing that I think is new in this book and hasn't been done since the 18th
07:09 century is the story of Shalem, who's at the centre of the book. And the last really good
07:14 book on Shalem was written by somebody called Michael Frankding, who worked for the company
07:17 in the 1780s.
07:18 In fact, I would, you know, if you could just briefly, you know, this this most amazing
07:22 character. I mean, it's this if you would like to just talk a little bit about him,
07:25 it's the most fascinating, well, melancholic, all tragic, you know, it's a very interesting
07:32 character. I mean, why has it been? Why has he been? I mean, not not so much the, you
07:36 know, footnotes, but he's not really been he really comes alive here in this book.
07:42 So there's two reasons, I think. Everyone loves a hero. Everyone loves a winner. And
07:46 Shalem was all sorts of things, but he always lost.
07:49 Lost, that's true.
07:51 And yet he is this dignified in his youth. He's this handsome young prince who cuts his
07:58 way out of Delhi when he's about to be assassinated by this sort of psychotic vizier called Imad
08:04 al-Mulk. And he gathers an army and he's just too late because the classes just happened.
08:10 The company is now established in Bengal with its new military technology. And he's just
08:15 a year, two years too late. If he'd got in there literally five years earlier, he would
08:19 have, you know, recovered the Mughal Empire. But he's too late. And then it goes from bad
08:24 to worse. He's defeated by the company. He's kept as a puppet. He insists on going back
08:28 to Delhi against everyone's advice. And there he's blinded by Ghulam Qadir, his former favourite,
08:33 who straddles him and first pokes out his pupil with a dagger. And the next time, the
08:44 next day, actually gouges out his eyes with his thumbs. I mean, there's a double blinding.
08:49 Unbelievable brutality. And the Persian sources I've been using, very interesting, because
08:53 quite a lot of them were translated in the Victorian period when the sort of thing which
08:58 the historians are putting into Ghulam Qadir's mouth about what he was going to do to the
09:02 Mughal princesses and so on, was not translatable. So I think this is actually the first time
09:09 they've ever been translated in full into English, in the un-Baudelaire-ised full horror
09:13 of it. And it's a terrible horror story. No Tarantino has violence quite as terrible as
09:19 this. And so by the end, Shah Alam, who you meet at the beginning, is this handsome young
09:23 prince full of ideals and aspirations. By the end is this broken old man, blinded, living
09:32 in a ruined palace. The blind emperor of an illusionary empire.
09:38 Yeah. You know, also, this is one. The other most fascinating part is, you know, this little
09:44 company in the dockyards of London, you know, with 30 people, I think, working for it, this
09:50 East India Company, it comes all the way here. I mean, you know, unknown territory. And,
09:56 you know, it takes on the Mughal Empire. And it's, I mean, that part is, you know, you
10:01 may hear it. It's so improbable that if it was a fiction,
10:04 no one would believe it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It seems it's far more.
10:08 So the story is that it's founded, the company's founded in 1599, around the time that Shakespeare
10:13 is writing Hamlet. Hamlet is first performed, I think, two months after the company's founded.
10:19 And initially, it's the world's first big joint stock company. There've been three or
10:27 four other attempts at this before, with the Muscovy Company and some others. But this
10:31 is the first one that really takes off. And a lot of London money goes into it. Not just
10:35 the big ship owners, but the quite modest haberdashers, skinners, vintners, put their
10:41 money into this, hoping to make their fortune. And they do, because the first expedition
10:46 gets to the Indies, comes back, they raid a Portuguese galleon or something, and they
10:58 sell it for one million pounds. So the company gets off to a good start. But it's kicked
11:04 out eventually from the spice trade by the Dutch, who are much more powerful at that
11:08 period than the British. And they choose the second best trade, which is the textile trade
11:15 coming out of India. And this was an incredibly lucky step, because the Mughal Empire is just
11:18 really getting going. Bengal is about to become the world's industrial centre, with one million
11:26 weavers in Bengal producing silks and chintzes and baftawa, these wonderful, very thin dupattas
11:33 and so on, that are wanted everywhere. And the company grows as the shipper of the Mughals.
11:42 The Mughal Empire, and people tend to dismiss it sometimes here today, particularly those
11:46 from the Hindutva right, as these sort of effete emperors who just built tombs. But the
11:51 reality is that the Mughals actually, for the first time in entire Indian history, overtook
11:56 China as the world's leading industrial producers. A lot of this is coming out of Bengal and
12:00 Telangana. That coast is producing these incredible textiles. And the people who are shipping
12:05 it around the world are the company. So they make this incredible fortune. And for 150
12:10 years, the company remains happy to really just be a shipping agency for the Mughal Empire.
12:16 All this incredible stuff. So much is produced, for example, that there's de-industrialisation
12:21 in Mexico, because of the quantity of cheap Indian cotton being picked that far across
12:27 the world. And the people who are moving it around the world are the company. And they're
12:32 taking their cut. And then this strange thing happens. Still this company has just got one
12:38 small office in the city of London. It's got a dockyard at Deptford where it produces a
12:43 few ships each year. The head office is only five windows wide, three storeys high. It's
12:49 not big. I mean, it's no bigger than the Outlook office, frankly. It employs rather fewer people.
12:54 It has about 35... How many people do you employ? Yeah, we have much more than that.
12:59 This is 35 people a hundred years into its history. And yet the skeleton staff pull off
13:05 this incredibly audacious... I mean, what is, frankly, the greatest corporate takeover
13:11 in world history. They take over the Mughal Empire. And the Mughal Empire at this point...
13:15 England's producing 3% of world manufactures. The Mughal Empire is producing... coming on
13:20 for a third of the world's total manufacturers. And it's this vast and rich empire stretching
13:27 from the Carnatic right up to Kabul. And out of this, incredible textiles are coming. And
13:34 the company's cashing in by shipping it. And then in the 1750s, it all changes gear because
13:40 there's been an industrial... beginning of an industrial, but a military revolution in
13:45 Europe. The Austrian War of Succession, the Spanish War of Succession has happened. And
13:50 amazing new military techniques have been developed, particularly by Frederick the Great
13:54 in Prussia. And the first to bring these to India are the French. And first of all, it's
13:59 French seaport. There's one battle that's forgotten today, the Battle of the Adyar River,
14:03 in southern Madras, when I think 700 French seaports see off 30,000 Mughal cavalry. And
14:10 from that point, for about 30 years, both the French and the English have this technology
14:16 in their military departments, which can basically defeat any army in India, however big, however
14:22 powerful. And the first guy to really feel the heat of this is Siraj Uddana, the Nawab
14:28 of Bengal, who tries to stop the company from fortifying Calcutta. He goes in, takes Calcutta,
14:34 and by incredible bad fortune, the Royal Navy, for the first time in its history, at that
14:38 moment happens to have sent a fleet to India, not to take on Siraj Uddana, but to take on
14:42 the French, who they think are about to invade India. And it's pure bad luck for the Bengalis.
14:48 He could have, you know, he could have taken it at any other time in history. But this
14:52 one particular moment, literally the day that the news arrives in Madras, Clive has docked
14:56 just a little bit further down the coast. And Clive sails north, takes Calcutta back,
15:02 destroys the French headquarters of Chandanagar, and then something crucial happens. The Jagat
15:06 Set, who is the richest banker in the world, and is to 18th century India what the Rothschilds
15:13 would be in 19th century Europe, and able to play politics and rise and fall of dynasties
15:18 and so on. The Jagat Set simply sends a message to Clive, saying, "I'll give you two million
15:24 pounds if you get rid of this psycho." Siraj Udana, rather unwisely, had threatened to
15:29 circumcise the Jagat Set, which didn't go down well with the Marwari establishment. And
15:35 so they simply affected what we would call today regime change.
15:39 In fact, that is an important sort of this role of the Jagat Set in West Bengal and also
15:46 the other bankers down south. I mean, their role in making the company really sort of
15:52 - why did this happen? Why did they ditch their old sort of customers and go on to the
15:58 -
15:59 This, for a modern reader, is the most difficult thing to understand. Because to our eyes,
16:02 you know, these are incoming, they're a different nation, they're a different religion, they're
16:06 a different language. Why on earth would an Indian banker choose to side with a foreigner
16:11 against their own rulers? The answer is that they spoke the same language. And that was
16:17 the language of commerce and finance. That the company may loot, plunder, asset strip,
16:22 but it repaid its debts on time with interest. It's had civil courts where commercial contracts
16:27 could be disputed and upheld. And very early on, the Indian merchant classes recognise
16:37 a partner in the company. The partner borrows money for them, it repays them, they make
16:41 a lot of business out of the company. And frankly, you know, half the production in
16:45 Bengal is for export. And if the company wasn't there, they wouldn't be exporting it.
16:50 - Yes, that's right.
16:51 - So the Jagat Seths, for a long time, see the company as business partners. But when
16:58 they see the power of the new Royal Navy ships, and the new marines who come ashore at Chandanagar,
17:07 just wipe out the French settlement.
17:08 - So they're backing the winners. I mean, they kind of know who the -
17:11 - Well, they just realise that these guys are powerful enough to get rid of Siraj. And
17:14 Siraj has fallen out with the Marwaris, he's threatened them with circumcision. And they
17:19 say, you know, we don't have to put up with this. And so they just quietly send a note
17:24 saying we want regime change. And poor old Mir Jaffa, who's normally regarded in this
17:29 country as the traitor, you know, the symbol of betrayal. He's also just part of the plot
17:34 of the Jagat Seth. He's also paid by the Jagat Seths to not fight at Plassey, and to replace
17:39 Siraj. And so the real - if you want to look for someone to blame for what happens at Plassey,
17:48 from the Indian perspective, it's not Mir Jaffa, who's merely a puppet. He's a rather
17:53 thick, uneducated Arab general from Najaf in modern Iraq. He's illiterate, he can't
17:59 read. He's no brilliant strategist. The brilliant strategist is the Jagat Seth. And it's not
18:06 the first time they've done this. Siraj Adali's grandfather, Ali Verdi Khan, had been put
18:11 into his job in a coup organised by the Jagat Seths 40 years earlier. This is the second
18:18 time they do it. And then, subsequent to that, you see, you get the company breaking up a
18:26 lot of the old Mughal estates. And these huge Mughal landholdings, these Jagirs, are put
18:33 up for auction. And the people who are bidding are the new Hindu merchant classes. Families
18:39 like the Tagors, the Maliks, the Debs. And these families become, in a sense, absorbed
18:50 into the new company world. They are doing very well, thank you, out of this new regime.
18:56 And it's other people who are being plundered, not them.
18:59 In fact, on the plunder, on the subject of this, there is then soon the famine, where
19:04 I think some one third of the Bengal people are dead.
19:09 One million people. One million. And yeah.
19:11 Minimum. Minimum.
19:12 That's the new revised estimates by Rajat Dutta, who's brought it down from five million,
19:18 which used to be the old figures. Even so, it's a colossal...
19:21 And you say in the book that even that year, the repatriation of the taxes that the company
19:25 sends back, it's still growing.
19:28 The shareholders are so thrilled that, as they see it, their brilliant administration
19:32 in Bengal manages to maintain revenues despite the famine, that the shareholders vote themselves
19:38 an increased dividend from 10 to 12.5% in the middle of the famine. One million dead.
19:44 You know, this didn't shock anybody. I mean, it doesn't, you know, it's very hard to imagine
19:49 that, you know, see, as you said, most of the shareholders are common people, right?
19:53 I mean, they're like, so, I mean, you know, a disaster like this, and yet you're making
19:57 money out of it. How come Britain, nobody revolted against it?
20:01 Well, this is actually the moment when the news breaks, really, that the company's up
20:06 to no good in India, because the first year, the reports haven't come of the real tragedy.
20:12 But over the following couple of years, whistleblowers start sending in accounts to the Spectator.
20:17 As to what exactly is happening.
20:19 Spectator, The Gentleman's Magazine, Blackwoods, all these 18th century journals, The Tatler.
20:27 And these magazines publish long front page stories about the hundreds of thousands of
20:33 corpses lying in the streets of Calcutta, lying in the Ganges, being eaten by dogs and
20:38 vultures. And this creates, I mean, rather, I was, in a sense, one of the big surprises
20:44 of the research. I had no idea there was going to be such revulsion in Britain. Because people
20:49 have seen, it's a long way away, India. They don't know what's going on there. What they
20:53 know is that people are coming back very rich, and buying country houses, and buying parliamentary
20:58 seats. And suddenly, you know, some guy who went out quite hard up has come back with
21:03 huge amounts of money. But it's only in really 1772 that they put two and two together and
21:09 realised that...
21:10 How it's...
21:11 How it's been gathered. And Horace Walpole, for example, writes in his diary, "I fear
21:17 we have outdone the Spanish and the Portuguese in Latin America. They at least had the excuse
21:21 of faith. We have done it merely for profit."
21:24 You think, even in some ways, even now, you know, the colonial rule in present-day Britain
21:31 is kind of papered over, it's not sort of taught in this kind of detail. Britain in
21:38 particular and, you know, the European countries in general.
21:40 Correct. Well, there's two things to be said. First of all, in both countries, the East
21:45 India Company period is kind of forgotten. All the popular fiction, like Kim, or Passage
21:51 to India, or all the movies like Jewel in the Crown, they're all about the Raj, which
21:57 is the bit that follows. It starts in 1858, it ends in 1947, the British government's
22:02 in charge, Queen Victoria's the Empress. But it's only 90 years.
22:06 Yeah.
22:07 It's only 90 years. The much longer period is the East India Company, which goes from
22:10 1599 to 1858.
22:12 Absolutely, yeah.
22:13 250 years.
22:14 Yeah.
22:15 And what's bizarre, in a sense, is that the East India Company, you know, I could have
22:18 a party game, try and name films about East India Company India. There's Janoon about
22:22 the Great Uprising, Mangalpandi.
22:24 Yeah.
22:25 There is a very bad film by Ismail Merchant called The Deceivers about thugs.
22:29 Oh, OK.
22:30 With Pierce Brosnan as a young company man. But, I mean, that's kind of it. The great
22:35 novels, the great films, as far as any of this at all impinges on public consciousness,
22:41 it's the later period. And people have forgotten the company. But to answer more specifically
22:45 your question about the British and their attitude, you're 100% correct. We've given
22:51 ourselves a sort of completely clean chit about what went on and persuaded ourselves
22:57 that somehow our empire was the one that didn't do anything wrong, that just built hospitals
23:02 and railways.
23:03 And it was just honourable.
23:04 It was just honourable and absolutely fine. It was all for the good of the Indians. And
23:08 of course, that's bullshit. And you realise it most starkly when you study the company
23:13 history, because the company at least didn't pretend to be about anything except for profit.
23:19 More than Goldman Sachs today is about anything except profit. It's there to make a profit.
23:24 That's what it does. The company did it very well. Goldman Sachs does it very well today.
23:28 But the company had no rhetoric about building railways or helping Indians civilise themselves
23:36 or the civilising mission, the mission civilisatrice, as the French called it. Instead, the company
23:50 is completely clear about what it's up to. It's just trying to make money for its shareholders.
23:55 And that's why people join it. And that's why people come out to India. So when you
24:00 look at that, you realise how distorted British views about their own past are. We imagine
24:08 that we were involved in some sort of benign transfer of knowledge from West to East, rather
24:14 than just sucking the lifeblood out of the Indian economy, which is what quite a lot
24:18 of it was actually about. And I mean, the company period and the Raj are different from
24:25 each other. I'm not sure which is better and which is worse. In the company period, there's
24:29 much more overt loot and plunder, particularly in the 1760s, 1770s, 1780s. But there's also
24:37 a collaboration. And the collaboration isn't just the business that we talked about with
24:40 the jug at sets. There's also a lot of people doing business with Indian middlemen, with
24:46 Indian labour. One third of company men are either married to Indian women or leaving
24:57 their goods to Anglo-Indian kids according to the wills, which is the best way of, in
25:03 a sense, peaking into people's bedrooms at that period. And they're living among Indians.
25:11 They're not in civil lines or colonial clubs. They're up in hill stations. They're in the
25:16 centre of Mughal Delhi in Lucknow, cockfighting, playing cards, watching the Norse girls together.
25:24 So that's one period, the company period. Then the Raj is, in a sense, more morally
25:29 upright. It pretends to be there for reasons other than self-enrichment. And it is true
25:39 that in 1947, India probably has the best health system in India, in Asia, the best
25:45 communication system in Asia, certainly the best education system in Asia. So it isn't
25:50 as if the Raj did nothing. But equally, there's no question that the Raj has brought the economy
25:57 down several pegs, while the European economy and British economy particularly have risen.
26:02 And you have this racism of the Raj. The Raj is no dogs and Indians on the streets and
26:08 similar, the clubs which Indians can't join, the civil service which actively discourages
26:15 Indians initially from becoming part of it. And even when that's not overtly happening,
26:21 the British are living in civil lines or cantonments or hill stations apart. And there's very little
26:27 intermarriage. So there's two periods which are really quite different from each other,
26:30 both in their morals and ethics, but also in their degree of collaboration and cohabitation.
26:35 Thank you very much, William. Actually, I mean, I can go on talking, I can go on listening
26:41 to you about this, but not to give away too much from the book also. Thank you very much
26:45 for joining me. Thank you.
26:46 (upbeat music)
26:49 (upbeat music)
26:51 (upbeat music)
26:54 (upbeat music)