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There was a time, still hovering on the limits of living memory, when Britain specialised in the manufacture of William Dalrymples. Eton and Harrow squabbled annually over who had produced the most William Dalrymples; Oxbridge was little more than a William Dalrymple finishing-school, where the ambitious sons of Scots baronets were whipped into shape. A well-oiled conveyor belt flung thousands of William Dalrymples into the East India Company and Imperial Civil Service. A William Dalrymple would distinguish himself in competitive examinations, acclimatise to life on the subcontinent, ride an elephant, shoot a tiger, and perhaps, if he possessed the requisite literary flair, publish a great tome on the land he made his own. The world lay at his feet, and he was happy.

Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.

Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.

“Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast.”

That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”

It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”

In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.

Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.

But Dalrymple’s interpretation of history has always been more sophisticated than bog-standard empire-bashing. In White Mughals, he illustrates and underscores the extent to which a genuine love of, and respect for, India coexisted alongside avarice and exploitation within the East India Company. On one early episode of his podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, he goes out to bat for the great bogeyman of Company Rule, Warren Hastings. Far from prosecuting Hastings in the manner of Edmund Burke, Dalrymple finds something redeeming in him: his learning, his curiosity, his enthusiasm for Indian letters and manners. All this stands in contrast with Robert Clive, the real villain of the piece, whom Dalrymple takes as representing the less urbane, more cynical dimension of British imperialism — the dimension which ultimately, on his telling, came to dominate the stage.

Dalrymple has now moved back in time with his latest book, The Golden Road. Here he tells the grand and gripping story of how India shaped the ancient and medieval world. “Why”, he asks in the introduction, “is the extraordinary diffusion” of Indian influence “not better and more widely known?” “Some might argue that this is a legacy of colonialism,” he answers. This construction anticipates a “but”, but none comes: in any case, Dalrymple, as his appreciation of Hastings makes clear, knows better than anyone that British attitudes to India were always a good deal more complex than regarding it as an “ignorant backwater”.

In The Golden Road, he gives the impression of self-consciously hamming up his Indophilia, perhaps for comic effect. Early on he cites, with a wink, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!” Then, as we progress through his narrative, more and more things turn out to be Indian in origin. The university? Indian! The wealth of the Roman Empire? Indian! Our numbers — and with them “a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come”? Indian!

It may therefore be that the old travel writer hasn’t completely disappeared from his own narrative, and that he’s playing a character that is in some ways an imperial throwback. It is as though he goes into overdrive to undo 1857: this may be said to be his overarching mission, if he has one. In a recent interview, he bristled at being described, in jest, as the “last of the White Mughals”, but perhaps this can be meant as a compliment. White Mughals, Indophiles, and William Dalrymples have been a perennial presence in Britain’s intellectual culture, and we are better for it.

Original article: UnHerd