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History Uncensored
William Dalrymple: ‘I’d Love To Teach The History of Palestine To Donald Trump’
01:02:41
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- [00:00]
William Dalrymple
Foreign.
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Bianca
William Dalrymple. It is such a pleasure to meet you. I've been very looking forward to this.
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William Dalrymple
My tea with excitement.
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Bianca
Now slurp away. So what tea have you got?
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William Dalrymple
I've got masala chai.
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Bianca
Very nice.
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William Dalrymple
I have a sitting in Delhi. I'm here, too, which is what I would normally have if I wasn't in Delhi. So I'd be very much on the same page.
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Bianca
And now we've been joking about the fact that I've been stalking you. Just.
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William Dalrymple
I'm very flattered to be stalked.
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Bianca
Well, look at this. See, this would be very single white female. Were you not such a popular historian,
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William Dalrymple
but actually, luckily look as if other than Golden Road, you've actually read anything.
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Bianca
I have read all of them, as I will prove to you now. Golden Road is the most. Is the one that I've read most recently. Obviously, I read that about two months ago. The others I'd read previous previously, but I haven't read all of your work, which is a great travesty. Coil Noor.
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William Dalrymple
That's a very good start with those five.
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Bianca
So, to start with, we're going to talk a little bit about your history, the history of the historian. So find out more about where you grew up, where your passion for history came from. And also, I've decided today that I put a rule in the show that if at any point you want to throw a question back to me or, you know, ask me a question, feel free.
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William Dalrymple
So I'm already wanting to do that. How come? The perfect cut glass English and the Kiwi. How can you do that so easily?
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Bianca
So I was born in New Zealand and I had a little New Zealand accent as a child, which sounds a little bit like this.
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William Dalrymple
North or south?
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Bianca
I was born in Auckland, which I
- [01:39]
William Dalrymple
was in about a month ago.
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Bianca
Were you?
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William Dalrymple
I was. I went to Kirri Kerry beach, which is just beautiful. Reminded me very much of my Scottish beaches at home. Even got the little. The little rocks off the coast, like the bass rocks straight off.
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Bianca
Funnily enough, this is an interesting parallel. I was in North Berwick about three months ago because my father was a professional golfer and he still does golf commentary. So I've spent quite a lot of time in Scotland.
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William Dalrymple
And those parts you have admitted to your stalking. I have not admitted to mine. So, yes, I was aware of your father's golfing.
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Bianca
Well, there you go. So I can't surprise you with that. So the New Zealand accent, which I did have once upon a time, that was beaten out of me because I had a really Bad speech impediment as a child. So I did lessons when I moved to the UK and I ended up sounding like this, but to my family background.
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William Dalrymple
I can do Braidscots if you want me to. I can turn. Turn it on.
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Bianca
I've heard this. Yes, I've heard this. So I'm wondering. Yeah, do you want to. Do you want to do it? My producer's keen to.
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William Dalrymple
I'm very happy to do Scots anytime you fancy.
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Bianca
If at any point you had my
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William Dalrymple
Scots, the same thing. It's very much similarly. I went off to boarding school aged eight.
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Bianca
There you go. So I'm quite fascinated by how people's own history impacts how they look at the past and where their interests come from. I can see mine quite clearly because coming from New Zealand, which is obviously a small country, so you're, I think, more cognizant of the rest of the world than you are if you grew up in certain other places immediately. And my father, his family's from the Balkans, in Italy, and my mother from Eastern Europe, and I grew up with Malaysian, Indian and Sri Lankan family as well.
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William Dalrymple
So the WhatsApp Uncles of your Eber.
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Bianca
The WhatsApp Uncles, indeed. So I felt like I didn't really belong anywhere and could kind of blend everywhere, which I always thought was a gift, even though it leaves you feeling a little bit ruddled, but it is a gift and it informed how I approach history. And I think because I had opposing sides of history and my own family background, I was very comfortable with that complexity right from the very beginning. So how does your family background inform how you started looking at the past and your passion for history?
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William Dalrymple
I don't know because I've always been fascinated by history. There is a school exercise book somewhere in Scotland where I wrote at the age of. Can't have been more than five or six. The question at schools, you know what you want, you ought to be when you grow up. And I said, I want to be an author and archaeologist, which is not so far from what I am, whatever it is, 55 years later. And it's always been the thing that really set me alight, History. As a kid, I used to go up to Edinburgh, which is just the nearest big town, at the end of the railway line up from the North Berwick, Choo Choo, which used to be a very sort of. Used to be a very glamorous Edwardian railway station that got shockingly knocked down in my teens. But I used to go up to the. And used to, you know, press my nose against the glass and look at the ancient Egyptian stuff and the, and the Syrian stones and the. All the kind of weird Middle Eastern bits that were left by Scots who, who'd been around the place. And my very first trip to London was begging my parents to take me to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. And so it had always been it's the thing. And then my. All my holidays as teenagers were spent on digging with a trowel. Different sites in Scotland. The Broch in. In Orkney, an extraordinary open air Neolithic mass burial site in Dorset, Hamilton Hill, a Viking charnel house in Repton in the middle of the Midlands. All these places where were quite sort of. Certainly the. The Midlands. Repton was totally suburban, it was a vicar's garden. And yet here were these, these Viking sort of mega warriors, all of them six foot tall with sort of incredibly developed packs and things. There was a like Andrew Bones Jones, as he was known at the time. He used to look at the bones and could tell that these were sort of, you know, the sort of gym going Vikings as opposed to your average Viking.
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Bianca
The old muffle attachments. I used to be into osteoarchaeology as well. I would go with my mum to these courses.
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William Dalrymple
You had exactly the same childhood as me, clearly.
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Bianca
Well, I did, although I often give my dad quite a lot of crap because he was a professional athlete, that I would spend plenty of time with him in my holidays and I'd be desperate to go to museums and libraries and often his friends, when I'd ask for a book, would give me Sports Illustrated. Please. No. So against all odds here, here I am struggling to beat my IQ at a reasonable level. Thank you so much. So you had this early fascination obviously with ancient history, which is so intoxicating. Where did your passion for India and Southeast Asia develop? And did you have that love for its history before you realized your own family being so intertwined with its past?
- [06:53]
William Dalrymple
Not at all. And completely possibly even the opposite. Because my elder brother, who was like your dad, was a sportsman and was a sort of double blue at Oxford and this sort of thing. He went off to India when I was 12 or 13 and this sort of brother I was very proud of turned up again a year later with some dreadlocks and sort of hippie lungi making.
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Bianca
You've gone to a British university. We all know this, we can all imagine it.
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William Dalrymple
And with sort of terrible sort of prints of Hindu gods in the 1970s style on his wall. And I rather held that against India. I blamed India for doing this to my brother. This sort of. This sort of beautiful athlete turned into this sort of bedraggled hippie. And I think my younger self would be very surprised that India was what set me alight ultimately, and where I spent my entire life and where the subject of most of my books. And it was a series of accidents. What I wanted to do was to go and dig in the Middle East. And I had this image of myself as the sort of young Dee Lawrence, as so many British public school boys do, or, you know, Agatha Christie's husband, Max Mallowan, digging in, you know, digging up Assyrian bulls in the Mesopotamian heat. That was the sort of world I was sort of. I rather fancied the idea of one of those sort of Middle Eastern digs in Indiana, Jo, with sort of characters sort of, you know, sitting above trenches as pharaohs, mummies were removed from the soil or whatever. And I actually got a place at the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad during my year off before going up to Cambridge. And I was very pleased with that and got all set up to do that. And then something went wrong. Saddam Hussein, I think, closed down the British School of Archaeology, saying it was a nest of British spies, but for which my life might have been very different. And I could have possibly more interesting, who knows? But instead, my. I had no plans. I had nine months to fill, and my best friend was going to India, where he'd set up a job teaching in a school in the Himalayas. And so with about a week's notice, without any reading, knowing nothing about India, having no particular interest about India, I just bought a flight, an economy ticket at the back of an Air India plane and went with my mate and arrived completely clueless on the 26th of January, 1984, and had imagined sort of arriving in sort of blistering heat with sort of, you know, fans and palms. In fact, it was the Delhi winter, which is what we're in at the moment. I'm talking to you. Well wrapped up, as you can see, because it's. It's actually quite chilly here.
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Bianca
Very becoming, thank you. Fashion situation that you're donning.
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William Dalrymple
It's my. I often do podcasts in my. In my banyan, or my atomsuk is what they call it here. But anyway, there we go. It's cold enough to warrant it. And I remember stepping out of the airport and it was freezing cold, and everyone was swathed in shawls and there was a fog, which was not at all what I was sort of expecting. But India weaved its magic and Cast its spell pretty quickly and within a kind of month, certainly when I started traveling, because we ended up giving up this job because it turned out to be quite a complicated business, we'd taken somebody else's job. And so we ended up resigning and going off just traveling. And this was a kind of moment of complete revelation for me. To be free for a few months on a very low budget, backpacking around as millions of other kids do. It was nothing very special or remarkable about the journey. You just round all the ancient sites of India, but to have that freedom, living on 35 rupees a day, staying in really, really grotty hotels and only be able to afford one meal a day, a couple of bottles of beer a week. And we worked out that in order to get where we wanted to get and still have be able to afford the trip we, I had, we had to spend at least two nights and night buses a week traveling to avoid the cost of a hotel and be able to raise the money for the other nights. But it was the absolute sort of, you know, Damascus moment. And I really have genuinely sort of, you know, fell in love and still living in India in my 60th year.
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Bianca
Is it around this time that you're travel writing adventures began?
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William Dalrymple
Well, initially my travel writing was just writing letters to my parents, like, probably like you, you were doing at the same age. Yeah, I remember writing, making a point of writing quite sort of full descriptions of everything I see, which I still got. I made a series of photograph albums of the trip and they've got these first letters from India stuck into them, little aerograms. Remember those very tatty airmail letters that they used to send with, which were very thin and, and flaky and used to cut them up. Always wouldn't if you didn't open them correctly. Anyway, so it was at this time that I began reading travel writing. It was while I was at college that I first wrote my. Or first planned my first travel book and went. Did this much more ambitious trip following Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu in, in Mongolia, which was the basis of my.
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Bianca
I'm very interested in your thoughts on Marco Polo because my family's from Kortula and I don't know if you know that Kortula claims that Marco Polo was born there because it was part of the Venetian empire.
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William Dalrymple
It was a Venetian colony. Yeah.
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Bianca
And that there's not wonderful evidence other than the fact that there's a Polo family on the, on the island and there's a house which is now filled with extremely unnerving wax figures of Marco Polo and, and his friends. But they are, they're adamant and I think there was quite a lot of anger that a Croatian diplomat opened a Marco Polo museum in Asia not long ago, not an Italian.
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William Dalrymple
So my interest was less Marco Polo than the journey he went on. And again, this was, I mean, along with that first trip in India, that trip, age 21, setting off initially from Jerusalem, you couldn't leave Israel by land, so I went, got a boat to Cyprus, then another one to Syria, then through Turkey, Iran, up the spine of Pakistan and then right through the, the whole breadth of China. That again was one of the other sort of life changing moments. And that became the subject of my first book in Xanadu, which I wrote when I was 22.
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Bianca
When you first started to travel and then subsequently study these places in particular Southeast Asia and India in more depth, did you have assumptions to begin with which your own work would then overturn?
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William Dalrymple
I had a great deal of prejudices and I don't think I had that many assumptions that were in any way educated or, or thought through that first. One of the great dangers of writing a book in your early 20s is it always sits on the shelf reproving you for the rest of your life and you go around sort of, you know, quietly removing it from your friend's bookshelves so they don't open it again. I've actually got re. There was a 25th anniversary edition when in India and I wrote a new forward, completely disowning the book because it's full of ridiculous sort of scenes of sort of public schoolboy with all the, all the, all that, that might imply doing things like teaching reels to unfortunate Turkish passersby on railway stations in the middle of Anatolia. And all these scenes that could have been from a sort of evening book from the 1930s, but transposed unforgivably to the mid-1980s. It's, it's quite a funny book. I. Nice. It's. It's still a book that sells and still very much about this in print and I get nice emails from it but I can't open it without sort of, it's slightly like. See, it's very odd feeling looking reading it and because it's like sort of coming across a particularly sort of boisterous nephew that you disapprove of and want to sort of slap but, but also sort of very fond of. I've got a number of nephews like that and, and it's slightly like, it's very It's a very. I mean, it's. It's sort of mean, yet it's not me. It's a sort of. It's a long, distant version.
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Bianca
Yeah. No, I can imagine. Especially after all of the traveling you've done and decades later, it's odd to have that, such a detailed snapshot. Because now, of course, people's photographs and videos live forever for millennials who have far too many of them at university, but rarely with the depth and insight into how you were actually thinking at the time.
- [16:09]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, it's very embarrassing. Yeah.
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Bianca
So, as we move on to your later works, you'll be pleased to know I'm curious about your writing process. I read that there was once a cockatoo that kept you company. I'd like to understand a bit more about the environment that you wrote in.
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William Dalrymple
The cockatoo and my wife were not friends. In fact, it's the closest thing we've come to a major rift in our marriage. Because the cockatoo. The cockatoos does what?
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Bianca
That would be a really great marriage counseling session. Imagine they wouldn't have heard that before.
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William Dalrymple
The cockatoo. Yes. Yeah, the other. The. The other woman in my life, Albinia. And Albinia was this very beautiful cockatoo who. And we were rather in love, it has to be said. In this case, Albinia was perfect company. She was very boisterous, fun, lively bird. Used to love music, dance, well, everything you really want for a girlfriend and. Well, most things you want from a girlfriend, I should say. And the trouble was that she hated Olivia and. And she had a particular alarm call that she would issue that was this terrible piercing shriek whenever she heard all his footsteps on the floor, on the. On the stairs outside.
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Bianca
I think I've done that to boyfriends before.
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William Dalrymple
You had. You have alarms?
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Bianca
Yeah.
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William Dalrymple
Yeah. Well, this was. This was it. And mysteriously, Albinia was found dead on the floor of her cage when we were away on holiday in Goa. And Olivia had a perfect alibi and it couldn't possibly be her, but the entire family, I think, are convinced that it was definitely a hit job of some sort, after which things I've never been allowed. Another parrot. I've been told it's me or the parrot.
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Bianca
What a devastating conclusion. What is your writing and research environment like now, obviously, with the now now, without the gaping hole that is left by the cockatoo.
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William Dalrymple
The gaping hole without the cocky. So I. I tend to write five year projects, books, projects that normally take five years. The first year normally coincides with the book tour for the last book. So it's reading, you know, the paperbacks on the subject that are sort of vaguely connected, what you're writing about while on book tour. So whilst, you know, going through airports in America or in Australia or indeed in Auckland, your home, I'm sitting between flights beginning the research. And then the nicest bit, which is what I'm in for, my current project at the moment is sort of beginning to. The pieces beginning to fit together, the jigsaw gradually beginning to take shape in front of you and you're beginning to see the wider picture and which leads up, in a sense to the next year. Which is the harder work, which is when you're going to archives.
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Bianca
Can you divulge what you're working on at the moment, or is that classic?
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William Dalrymple
Well, I don't know whether it's going to happen and whether it's going to work, but I want to write a history of the Palestinians which seems to be such an important subject of the moment. There is very little out there, particularly on the early histories. Who are these people who the Israelis claim, you know, factually, completely incorrectly are arrived, you know, with the armies of Islam in the seventh century? The Palestinians, in fact, of course, are the indigenous people, mixture of all sorts of different folk from around the region who came in the various different succession of migrations which came through the region, from Canaanites, Phoenicians, Philistines, Arabs, Umayyads, Turks by Crusaders, Byzantines, right up to the British. And these genes are all there. But there is a fascinating history of the antiquity of the name Palestine. For a start, the name Palestine is first, is far older than almost any place name in Europe, certainly older than the name Britain it's first recorded. I mean, it's as old as literacy itself. The, the, the Thutmose iii in about 1400 BCE records the name of the Peleset, as he calls the. The Sea peoples, These, these invaders who've invaded the Nile delta from, from further north. Then you get the Syrian sources from about 800 AD where they talk about the Palastu. And then as a late comer, the father of History, Herodotus, 400 BCE talks about the Syria Palestina. He divides the eastern coast of Mediterranean into Syria Phoenicia, which is in the north, and Syria Palestina in the south. And so it's so old and it's, you know, it's as old as anything. And it's. So as soon as you dive into this history and you hear Golda Meir saying there's no such thing as the Palestinians. You know, you want to scream, or in my case, want to write a book.
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Bianca
I'm glad to hear that you are, because I'd heard you on a couple of podcasts talk about the necessity of somebody writing a neutral history of the Palestinians. And we'll definitely get into the power of history in the present a little later, because I'd love to talk to you about that. But it brings me on to a thought I was having about whether or not do you think history is a moral act? Not in the sense of we should apply our frameworks and moralize on the past, but the act of being truthful about our past.
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William Dalrymple
So history is obviously many things. History is, is just the study of the past and reading about the past and recording the past, it can be at a whole variety of different levels. It can, you know, but yes, I think the act of truthfully telling a story and the Palestinians is a good example of something which has been deliberately manipulated and which has got so politicized that it's hard to immediately, without study, work out what is the truth of the story. And it seems this is exactly the sort of thing that historians should do to delve into contested territory, go back to the original sources and try and work out what actually happened and clarify this. And there seems a crying need at this particular moment, in the middle of the genocide moment in Gaza, to establish these truths. And so I've abandoned the project I was working on and become so upset about this that I just have been diving into this. It may well be a career ending exercise, but I think it's one that is really important and it's fascinating. I have to say I'm having the most wonderful time at the moment. I'm deep in Umayyad history, the early Arab period, and the extraordinary way in which this Greek speaking in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries Christian country slowly goes over well. Very, very first of all to Arabic. Arabic doesn't become the main language administration for 50, 60, 70 years. You still have Greek speakers working generations later in the Umayyad Chancery. And it's really not until the 12th century that Palestine ceases to be majority Christian. It's, there's this huge Christian community which continues right up to the time of the Crusades. And it's the Crusades and the aftermath of the Crusades which leads to it becoming majority Muslim for the first time. So these are all very unexpected areas of history. And, and, and I think, I mean, what's, as a historian you develop that sort of scent for. Of the excitement of finding something which is very different from what people expect it to be. And this feeling that you've uncovered something which people should know but do not know. And this is coming in buckets with this project. There's so much which is surprising, the antiquity, but also the complexity and the moral complexity of this and the nuances of so many of the different issues. And it's complicated history, but really, really fascinating.
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Bianca
Both of those examples as well just underscore how inextricable history is. The act of writing history is from politics in the context of our time. Palestine being a primary example.
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William Dalrymple
Again, an absolutely fascinating moment in history. And to pass away the layers of political accretion and the levels of bigotry and Orientalism, Christian piety and that overlie this story and trying to work out what happened and what people's different ethnicities and religions were at different periods of history. It's a fascinating subject. I'm just hoping that it's going to come together and work. I'm not yet at that moment where I'm sort of completely committed and sure that it's. I haven't. It hasn't completely taken form in front of me, but I'm very excited by the reading.
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Bianca
Well, fingers crossed. I'm sure that the spirit of your cockatoo will be willing you on speaking
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William Dalrymple
of you Albinia memory fluttering over you
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Bianca
dedicate this episode to Albinia. We'll put that at the very beginning.
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William Dalrymple
She was. She was an Australasian. She was, was she?
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Bianca
There you go. I feel. I feel an affinity. Perhaps she is with us, with us now in terms of you detecting a scent for something or a history that hasn't been unearthed or is misrepresented or is far more complex than we think. The Anarchy is one of one of your astonishing books, which essentially is about the fact that India was conquered not by England or Britain, but by a corporation. That must have surprised many people. Was. What was the reaction to the work initially?
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William Dalrymple
Well, it's funny because obviously the rage. This is another subject that's very bliss sized and the whole story of British colonialism in India is one that is told completely differently, obviously in England to how it's received in India. But in both cases in Britain and in India, it's seen basically as a national story. It's seen as a story of the British coming in and in the British version of events, you know, brave Robert Clive, plucky hero against insuperable odds, defeats the massive army of the Mughal governor of Bengal, Surajah Dalla, and establishes the Union Jack and Indian soil. While in India, of course, it's a story of resistance and ultimately the triumph of throwing out the invaders in 1947 and reclaiming an independent country. In reality, the story is a story of corporate greed, because the East India Company is just what it says on the packet. It is a corporation, and it's the world's first great multinational corporation. It's the first time that a business enterprise with shareholders is strong enough to topple nation states, to face down whole rulers of countries. And what I was fascinated by is not only does it obviously defeat the Moguls and the Marathas and Tipu Sultan and the Sikhs and all these other Indian rulers, it also does a great deal to erode the British state from within. By the 1780s, not only are just under a third of MPs returned East India Company officials who've made fortunes and then bought their way into rotten boroughs, you know, in their. In their 40s, they've returned for a second career in politics. Nearly 85% of MPs in parliament have shares in the East India Company and East India Company, as well as all the obvious things of, you know, conquering India and building cities like Madras, Bombay and Calcutta and doing all the stuff that, you know, the textbooks say. It also becomes this extraordinary multinational, sort of with tentacles. And from the Tudor startup equivalent of Jeff Bezos in his garage, starting Amazon on a very small basis, the East India Company expands to first, obviously conquer India, then discovers that it can grow opium in India and sell it very profitably in China. So it reaches out to China, then it buys tea in China, which it sells in India, Britain and America. It is East India Company tea which is poured into Boston harbor at the American Revolution. So by the 1780s, this corporation is the biggest single employer in Britain. And that's just people making sails and masts and sailing ships around the world, as well as, you know, owning India and having the largest modern army in the world. The East India Company shareholders control a mercenary army of 200,000 sepoys, which is exactly double the size of the British army. All of which, you know, when you first hear it just. And put the pieces together, just blew my mind. Rather than being a British national enterprise, this is much more like Elon Musk or, you know, Jeff Bezos.
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Bianca
Again, especially when you actually look at the personalities involved. I was. That was one of the things that really entertained and surprised me. I mean, entertaining because of the characters, obviously, not because of certain devastation which they wrought or didn't mitigate. But these are. I think you described them. You certainly have in your podcast with Anita Anand, as delinquents and people that you don't really know what to do with.
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William Dalrymple
Boys in this story. Exactly.
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Bianca
You touched on something there that I also just find such an interesting historical counterfactual. Without the British being in India, without the East India Company operating there, would one of the key events that precipitated the American Revolution not have happened?
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William Dalrymple
So this is, if you read most accounts, the American Revolution. India, of course, doesn't appear at all. But actually, I think it's one of the great untold stories of the American Revolution. And there's some great anniversaries, I think 1785 anniversary or so. Anyways. I can't remember whether it's 300th or 250th or whatever it is. I'm actually going to the States next year to lecture on the importance of India, this forgotten story in the American Revolution, because there'd been this massive famine in India in 1772. It's the first time you get East India Company whistleblowers writing letters to the Spectator or the Gentleman's Magazine or Blackwood's Magazine back in London describing the horrors that the East India Company has brought. Because, of course, in those days, there's no war correspondence. There's no one sort of monitoring what the East India Company is up to. So it's only when things really get out of hand that their own personnel, horrified at what they're doing, take it upon themselves to anonymously blow the whistle. And these accounts are read in the east coast of the United States. And in order to mitigate the bankruptcy of the East India Company, which these famines that they precipitated ultimately led to. And then it gets bailed out partially by the British state because it is too big to fail by this stage. In the course of this, the tea laws have changed, and this is when the taxes on tea are imposed on America and you get the beginnings of no taxation without representation. So there's a whole chain of events that start with the East India Company behaving very badly in Bengal and failing to take any responsibility at all for millions dying of famine precipitated by the Company itself and their failure to provide any soup kitchens or do anything to bail out Bengal, which was in this terrible, terrible situation. And. And yes, it does lead very directly to the American Revolution. So it's a whole chapter which has been forgotten. But there's a huge amount of documentation which. Some of which is in the anarchy. But there's a. There's a whole book to be written on this.
- [32:58]
Bianca
In fact, it seems that there are denials and misrepresentations embedded within how people in Britain learn about the history of the British Empire. What would you start correcting today if you could?
- [33:15]
William Dalrymple
Well, I. I would just begin teaching it at all in the first case, because the reality is that most of British imperial history is not taught at all. Not just India. It's not just that India is missed out or Palestine and, and the responsibility of the British for. And the Balfour Declaration for. For the tragedy of the Palestinian people, but, you know, whole massive stories like the extinction of the Caribs or the Tasmanian Aborigines in your part of the world. These are stories which none of us heard at school. They're vital and important pieces of world history. And I'm of a generation that got the Battle of Plassey. My kids didn't. Even the kind of. The heroic moments of imperial history which I learned were not really being taught. And they just heard about Henry VIII and his wives and the Nazis and Florence Nightingale, Gladstone, Disreputable Disraeli endlessly. Exactly all that.
- [34:07]
Bianca
Although that was actually my favorite. My. My favorite early job that I had. I think I was 17. I was a tour guide at Benjamin Disraeli's house. And they paid me by letting me sit in his study after everyone. Because I was a nerd. But, yeah, so that is basically left out of the curriculum. I don't. I don't know since I've left school, but from everything you've said, it seems like that's still an area which is not. Is not dealt with properly. And do you think on a. On a. On a political scale it's harming Britain's position or soft power, the fact that we haven't dealt with it as well as we could have?
- [34:43]
William Dalrymple
I think it's a massive problem Whenever, you know, Brits come out here, they kind of assume that the Indians love the Brits. And there's the kind of assumption, you know, that we gave Eduardo Mountbatten as our parting present and we're all friends now. There's no awareness, just like there's no awareness really, of what we did to the Irish. And, you know, and Brits tend to go to Ireland imagining that Ireland is as fond of Britain as Britain is of Ireland and that, you know, it's all Guinness and Temple Bar and fiddlers in the pubs and this sort of stuff. And no, I see a huge problem in British ignorance of their own imperial history and its many failings. Which is not to say, you know, it's just a negative story. There are many things which accidentally or otherwise come out of it which are positive tales. But there are, you know, the Brits conquer every country in the world. But 22, at some point or other in their history, there is somewhere celebrating freedom from Britain every six days on this planet. It's the most celebrated secular festival in the world. There is nothing which unites the human race more beyond religion than than celebrating freedom from British rule. And the Brits are completely unaware of this. They go on about British values and freedom and dignity and all things the Brits brought. Unaware that of course, like any empire, it was done over a pile of skulls and that. Unaware that, you know, whenever you go around Britain and maybe, you know, in a summer day, go to some National Trust house and have an ice cream tea in Powis or one of these gorgeous castles, the chances are that if it's anywhere on the east coast it's probably East India Company, but if it's anywhere on the west coast it's probably the product of slavery. If it's 18th century, got a pediment and looks like Colin Firth is about to wade through the lake in a, you know, in a pair of tight breeches it almost certain in a fluffy shirt, it's almost certainly East India Company. And we just haven't done the maths here and people there is now even active resistance on the right. It's become really since I finished these books thankfully because they all got quite nice reviews in the right wing press which I'm not sure they would anymore because it's become now political football. And the idea that you can be an unpatriotic historian by writing about this has now been sort of touted at Tory conferences and the Telegraph writes about is no is all constantly attacking David Ola sugar or for woke history on the BBC and so on. So there is now a kind of resistance to this, which is a measure, I suppose of the success of this project in general, of beginning to turn this ship around.
- [37:30]
Bianca
So I'd given this quite a bit of thought as well because when I worked in Parliament the resistance confused me and I thought about a few things. I'd love to know your view on what's holding and this is not just the UK but what's holding countries back from accurately assessing their past. So to me the notion of moral inheritance makes people feel uncomfortable obviously that today we could be in some way guilty for the sins of our forebears. But that point you made about critique or accuracy being read as disloyalty, I think is also a big part of it.
- [38:08]
William Dalrymple
It's increasingly something you see on Twitter when I put up something, you know, that isn't entirely positive about something some Brit has done somewhere, whether it's extinguishing an entire people or taking sort large quantities of diamonds from one part of the world, whatever it is you do, you know, you get this sort of, you know, some character with a Twitter handle with the kind of St. George's Cross on it somewhere saying, you know, you hate Britain or. Yeah, I don't hate Britain. I love Britain. It's my, it's my country. I'm very proud of it. But I, I'm, you know, as a story, I want to tell the truth. And of course, any empire is not built for the benefit of the colonized. The idea that we went out and colonized the world in order to bring civilization or anything else, of course we didn't. We went out to make our fortunes, which we did very successfully, as every empire, you know, wants to do. And I don't. And I don't think that, you know, we should be laboring under massive guilt for what happened in the past, because obviously, personally, you know, it's not our fault. If our, if our ancestors were Mother Teresa, that's no great benefit to us. I mean, no great moral plus for us. And if our ancestors were Genghis Khan, it's not, it's not an enormous moral negative. But it is important to acknowledge these things, to try and tell the truth about history and to not dwell in patriotic myths. I mean, that's the point of education, in a sense, to teach you to think critically and not accept the nonsense you were brought up with anywhere in the world. And any country will have things that it can be very proud of. Any country will have things which often are a source of shame. And, you know, in a sense, you've got to take it on the chin and just get on with it and, and expose it for what it is.
- [39:48]
Bianca
Speaking of exposing and unearthing or recentering histories of the past, I'd love to talk about the Golden Road. I found that. So it's just such a wonderful book and it's, it's fascinating. But one of the main points is to bring India back to its rightful place as this ancient engine of ideas in mathematics, philosophy, foundational elements of all civilizations.
- [40:16]
William Dalrymple
So I had a lot of fun researching this Book, it involved going for very long holidays in Southeast Asia looking at gorgeous places like Angkor Wat, Borobudur and Prambana and all these wonderful ruins. But there is a real point behind it, which is that, yes, we are now, I think, very familiar with the idea that China was a very important provider of civilization to the world, that many of the things we take for granted, like gunpowder or, or porcelain or books or printing came out of China. But there's no comparable understanding of India's civilizational gift to the world. And this idea of the Silk Road, which is such an attractive idea and does so much work, there's two words. The Silk Road immediately conjure up camels passing over sand dunes and all the rest of it. But it's an idea which leaves out India. That though that road, that, that sort of motorway you see on the map of the Silk Road is thousands of miles to the north of India. And, and I was sort of in my reading and, and as I was working through all this stuff in the research of this book was realizing more and more how much certainly the ancient period, India was the number one trading partner of the Roman world because it was very easy to get there. Apart from anything else, the monsoon winds blew you very quickly in less than six weeks from Roman Egypt to Karena. If you look on the map, it's actually pretty close as far as global voyages are concerned. It's certainly a lot easier than crossing over land from, you know, from Venice to, to, to, to Mongolia. And if you look at maps of coin finds, you know, Roman coins are all over the Roman Empire, of course, but they're also all over the coast of India and Sri Lanka. Massive. It's the number one place outside the Roman Empire to find Roman coins is on the south west and southeast coast of India. And in Sri Lanka, there are massive quantities. There are more than any other in the museums of India, Sri Lanka, than any other country in the world outside the Roman Empire itself. And so it's very clear when you see these maps of how incredibly important India was and along these trade routes and then the subsequent trade routes when Rome collapses, India pivots eastwards and starts trading with Southeast Asia. And that's the moment when Buddhism and Hinduism and all these Indian epics begin to sort of take root in Java and Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam. And India has this extraordinary soft power empire, the Indosphere, where Sanskrit is often the language of courtly life, where stories like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the major form of entertainment. Religions like Hinduism And Buddhism spread all over and they spread without empire. They spread through the sophistication of their ideas. Not a sword is unsheathed, not an arrow is fired, not a spear is thrown. And yet, you know, Buddhism gets as far as what it goes right through, up through Afghanistan and Pakistan, through China, through Korea, to Japan, it goes south through Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, as far as the Philippines, and it's still there. It's a permanent change on the map. It's one of the great soft power revolutions. And again, we, you know, we are aware of the spread of Christianity. We're spread, we're aware of the spread of Islam, but we're not really at all aware, I think, of the way that an Indian religion, Buddhism, takes over the whole of Asia and transforms it forever.
- [43:51]
Bianca
Exactly. That was revelatory to me. And I, I am a Buddhist. Well, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a lapse, I'm a bad Buddhist. If there was a Buddhist rehab, that's where I would be. But I thought that I was more aware of the history than I was. And I found that really, like, astounding. I would say, what do you think are the biggest contributions that ancient India made, which we've forgotten about? And why the historic amnesia? Why have we forgotten?
- [44:14]
William Dalrymple
Well, the single and most obviously biggest contribution is 0, which leads in turn to the Indian number system. This extraordinary figure, Aryabhata, who's around about 350 to 400 A.D. in Bihar, modern sort of southeast India, sorry, modern eastern India. He, by this extraordinary early period, comes up with the exact circumference of the earth, the distance of the earth, the moon and the sun. And he comes up with the idea that we live in a heliocentric universe. A thousand years before Galileo, he proves that we're circling around the sun. And then his work is continued by a pupil of his called Brahmagupta, who meditates on this very Buddhist and Hindu concept of Sunya, the void, and comes up with the revelation that zero is not an absence or a placeholder, it's a number. And he comes up with 40 rules. It is, for example, the number you get if you take 40 from a number from itself, 40 from itself, you end up with zero. This leads to the development of the Indian number system, which spreads first to the Arab world and then eventually in the 12th century reaches Europe. Now we call it, because we got it from the Arabs, Arabic numbers, but the Arabs got it from the Indians and they still call it Hindi numbers. So if you go to Egypt, they talk about Hindi numbers, not Arabic numbers, so that it's remembered there. But we've totally forgotten, we've no idea that when we look at our laptop, as you're doing now, and see the numbers in front of you, these are numbers devised by Indians in the 3rd and 4th century AD, and these nine Indian symbols plus zero allow you to express any number up to infinity, which is an extraordinary theoretical leap. And then once you've got zero, you can have binary, you can have algorithm, you can have algebra. And it's in the meeting of these ideas with the Islamic world, which happens in the 9th century, that these numbers begin to spread out of the Indosphere into the Middle East. It's this extraordinary genius, Al Khwarizmi, who translates the work of Aryabhat and Brahmagupta to write a book with a snappy title, the Compendious Book of Hindu Calculations by Completion and Balancing, which is so long and unwieldy that everyone knows it by nickname, which is Algebra, Algebra. And his name, Alcharizmi, becomes our word, algorithm. And then it's Fibonacci that takes it from the Middle east to Italy. And Fibonacci is read by Frederick ii, who's the Holy Roman Emperor. He makes it the standard. Fibonacci's understanding of Indian numbers is made the standard reading for the Italians. That's what gets the Italian banking Renaissance, the Medici. Fibonacci is read by Piero della Francesco in Tuscany, who writes about perspective and works out the mathematics of perspective, reading Fibonacci's understanding of Indian numbers when he's dead. It's carried by Luca Pacioli, a friend of his, to Milan, where he shares it with his flatmate, who's a jobbing painter painting a fresco of the Last Supper in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci. So it's five leaps from Leonardo in the Renaissance back to Piero Fibonacci, Al Khwarizmi, Brahmagupta, Aryabhata. Just five leaps gets you from the idea beginning in 4th century India to Renaissance Italy. It's very neat.
- [47:53]
Bianca
It is. And you have this cultural borrowing that you're describing intellectually. And it also occurs in of between religions, in this sphere. You write in the book about how the. The tradition of Kerala Christians who talk about St Thomas going to India in around 52 AD, I think, and I was speaking to somebody not long ago who's an adherent of Ahmada Islam, who they believe that Jesus was a mortal prophet who then survived the crucifixion and ended up in a tomb in Kashmir? I think so. Do you think, based on the sources that you've seen, that Jesus went to India, or how prevalent was this Christian tradition in the early days in India,
- [48:39]
William Dalrymple
I regret to say, is that the idea of Jesus living in Kashmir is a late 19th century idea.
- [48:46]
Bianca
Yes. I didn't want to say that to
- [48:47]
William Dalrymple
this person who doesn't. It doesn't sound to me. I would love it to be true, but. But it's not true. It's bollocks. In short, but it is quite possibly true and certainly was believed to be true very early on, that just as St. Paul went to Rome and just as all the other apostles fan out and take their message around the place that St. Thomas got given the east along with St. Barnabas. And as early as, you know, well, Gregory of Tours tells the story in the 6th century that he met someone who'd come back from India with relics of St. Thomas. So by the 5th century, it's understood in Europe that St. Thomas was the apostle of India, and the Indians have always believed him to be the apostle of India. There's this whole series of different churches in southern India, and particularly Karana, which have this tradition. There's no final proof of it, but it's not at all unlikely when you know that, when you can work out it's just six weeks sailing to Roman Egypt. And recently, in the course of me writing this book, a wonderful Buddha's head has turned up in an Isis temple on the, on the, on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. So we, we know for a fact that Buddhism took root in Roman Egypt. And if that's the case, there's absolutely no reason that Christianity could not have taken root at the same sort of early period in India.
- [50:09]
Bianca
It would be remiss of me to talk about the Golden Road without mentioning one character who really jumped off the page in 3D for me. And I related to, I think, on my, on my worst days. And that would be Wu Zietan, the Chinese female emperor.
- [50:22]
William Dalrymple
I don't know you well enough, Bianca, to know if you're like Wu Zetian or not, but she's a formidable creature.
- [50:28]
Bianca
Formidable creature, but also. Who knows? No, that is true. Yes. Mark my words, people of history uncensored. But we also don't know very. I don't think we have anything from her words directly. So can you tell our audience a little bit about her? And also, I'm curious, out of the characters you've studied from history, would she be somebody that you'd invite to Your dinner party.
- [50:52]
William Dalrymple
I'm terrified she might poison me. She left havoc in all the men who crossed her. Except if you were a very pious monk, when she might have copied out your manuscripts for you. She was very pious and like Buddhist monks like you, maybe you are the Vashna Wuzeti, but we will discover due course anyway, I will become a divine embodiment yet.
- [51:16]
Bianca
We'll see.
- [51:18]
William Dalrymple
You're halfway halfway there with your own podcast. Now. What more propulsion does anyone need in this direction? Anyway, so Wu Zetian is an important figure. She starts off as a concubine. I'm sure there the biographical similarities end immediately. Bianca, at age 15, she starts as a concubine of the emperor Taezong. She gets rid of the other girlfriends. Then she becomes. Then she manages to leap from the bed of the emperor to the crown prince. The death of the emperor is not spends the rest of her life in the nunnery, but manages to become the empress of the next ruler. When the ruler has a stroke, she takes over and becomes regent and eventually becomes the only woman emperor in the whole of Chinese history. And for 50 years she rules with a rod of iron. But the important point, rather than beyond the simple extraordinary thing of being the only woman emperor, is that she basically, I mean, it's a simplification, but she converts China to Buddhism. She makes Buddhism the state religion. Confucianism and Daoism, which the two competing indigenous religions are degraded and removed briefly from court at the beginning of her reign. They're allowed back never to be the equal of Buddhism during her reign. And it's the moment, if you like, of peak Indian influence. This is the same time that in that Indian kingdoms are beginning to really take root also in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Indonesia. And she changes history forever. The fact that there are more Buddhists today in China than any other country in the world is due to Wu Zetia. But yes, she was a formidable creature, as I say, and went through about 50 chief ministers alone in her time. One a year, but they were before they fell on their swords.
- [53:18]
Bianca
Exacting standards. Now I might segue into the lightning round, which we've already said might be more of a sort of light drizzle rather than lightning, because you don't love lightning round questions.
- [53:31]
William Dalrymple
I could never come up with answers to these, but you did warn me of them. So I haven't time to give a little think and have gone through them with my son. So if I pause, that's a measure of how sluggish my brain is on these Things.
- [53:42]
Bianca
I'm sure, I'm sure it is. Let us start with what is the time in history that you would most like to have lived?
- [53:48]
William Dalrymple
Well, that alone had about an hour of dithering.
- [53:53]
Bianca
What was your initial?
- [53:54]
William Dalrymple
If you had about 5 or 6 of history. I would like, I mean, basically any of the period of history I've written about, whether it's sort of East India Company, Delhi, Late Mogul Delhi or High Mogul, Agra or Angkor. What? But I would think that in my current mood today, I might opt to go to the University of Nalanda, the first great Buddhist university in Bihar, which had the greatest library in the world, larger than university, the Library of Alexandria. Three libraries, each nine stories tall. Which monks came from Korea and Japan and walked across the length of China to reach. Oh, to be able to kind of look at those manuscripts and read the things that they read on mathematics and logic and grammar and history and magic, all these things.
- [54:40]
Bianca
Is there a time in history that you certainly wouldn't want to go back to?
- [54:43]
William Dalrymple
Yes, I, I thought that anywhere in northern Europe at the time of the Black Death was probably somewhere best sound or equally anywhere, anywhere in the path of either the Huns or the Mongols would probably be best avoided too.
- [54:58]
Bianca
Who is the person that you found most inspiring that you've come across in your research?
- [55:05]
William Dalrymple
God? I don't know. No, let me think. Hang on, I'll come up with someone. I think Mahatma Gandhi was a pretty extraordinary figure. Getting rid of the British Empire through non violence seems to be as, as good an achievement as any.
- [55:22]
Bianca
If you could teach one historical lesson to one world leader today, what would you choose?
- [55:27]
William Dalrymple
The history of Palestine.
- [55:28]
Bianca
To Donald Trump, what's the most significant event in terms of world events in your lifetime?
- [55:35]
William Dalrymple
I think probably Brexit. I think it's properly catastrophic for Britain. That's certainly in British terms. I'd have thought in global terms. The invention of the Internet and most
- [55:45]
Bianca
significant public figure of your lifetime.
- [55:48]
William Dalrymple
I fear Donald Trump. I mean the way that he has begun to undermine the transatlantic alliance which created the prosperity and safety in which my generation and the one before me and the one after me all grew up. That may be over now.
- [56:06]
Bianca
The most overrated empire.
- [56:10]
William Dalrymple
Ooh,
- [56:13]
Bianca
I feel like I'm putting you through emotional and intellectual hell.
- [56:16]
William Dalrymple
Yes. Because I'm dithery with old questions of history at the best of times. I just can't do a one word answer to that. There's underrated. What? Underrated empires. I tell you what, I think the most underrated empire is the Ottomans. I think the Ottoman Empire was utterly extraordinary and it's always envisaged as being sort of permanently in decline. And it's an extraordinary, extraordinary story. Often very brutal. It's not particularly. All empires live to extract and to impose their rule on others. But it's certainly the most underrated because it's normally considered to be just sort of brute force and sort of Turkish bath, really. I mean, with the odd tulip thrown in, I think.
- [57:06]
Bianca
Is there a historical conspiracy that you think could have some validity?
- [57:11]
William Dalrymple
I was thinking, yeah, I think it's very likely that aliens exist. So yes, I think so. Area 51, that whole world. I would. I'd be very open to believing that there's. That there's some story. The American presidents know things that we don't about outer space. I'd be surprised if there hasn't been any contact.
- [57:35]
Bianca
Yeah. So I was actually thinking of doing an episode about this. Like the history of aliens throughout time is in people's understanding of if there was life on other planets. Any reports. Have you seen anything in your studies of how people. People conceived of them before?
- [57:50]
William Dalrymple
In my distant youth. I remember loving those. Do you ever cross across the Eric Von Daniken books, the Chariots of the God?
- [57:58]
Bianca
Yeah.
- [57:58]
William Dalrymple
Which is completely bonker stuff, but for. For a 10 year old was just gripping, whereby you know that all these Aztec masks were actually space helmets and so on. It's lovely stuff. But yes, I think it's quite. If I had to choose one conspiracy theory that's possibly not complete bollocks, I'd say Area 51, sort of aliens in America. Yeah, I'd go for that one.
- [58:19]
Bianca
What is a history book that everyone should read?
- [58:22]
William Dalrymple
My favourite history book is the fall of Constantinople, 1453 by Sir Stephen Runciman.
- [58:29]
Bianca
Has studying history made you more optimistic or pessimistic about the world?
- [58:34]
William Dalrymple
I think studying history is the same as living your life, which is, you know, the different moments. It can be deeply depressing. And there are other moments when you just realize that, you know, love is all around you and there are wonderful things in this extraordinary planet. You can move between those two worlds very quickly in the same hour. But yeah, it's all out there. The human history is rich in its variety.
- [58:59]
Bianca
And to finish up, do you think much about your own legacy and how your work will speak for you once you and I are both distant history?
- [59:09]
William Dalrymple
I'm increasingly aware of how most writers disappear off the shelf completely. There have to be a weird series of freak accidents for your work to survive. And very often the writers who are most read today are not the writers who were most admired in their lifetime, and strange things happen to them. I mean, great writers like Sir Walter Scott, who was considered the great genius of the 19th century, are barely read today, while someone like Conrad, who was a very minor figure in his own lifetime, is regarded as a classic. And that's even more true of historians. Historians go very quickly out of date. They think that they are changing people's perception of history forever. In reality, they're very lucky to be read by anyone 25, 50 years after they've gone.
- [59:58]
Bianca
That's what I tell myself if I ever get lower V's than I want, that it's just a Van Gogh situation. Give it time.
- [60:04]
William Dalrymple
Give it time?
- [60:05]
Bianca
You have to be kidding.
- [60:05]
William Dalrymple
Give it time. It'll happen. History Uncensored will be the only podcast anyone will know about from the early the mid-2020s for posterity.
- [60:15]
Bianca
Once the aliens have taken over clearly and people are trying to understand what came before, this is what they'll find.
- [60:21]
William Dalrymple
You will work your Wu Zetian charm Poison Tom Holland, Dominic Sambrook, and all the other podcasters.
- [60:31]
Bianca
You know I adore them and I love that podcast as well as yours, but I wouldn't put anything past Ask me.
- [60:37]
William Dalrymple
I will remember not to stand in your way.
- [60:40]
Bianca
William Del R, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your answers. I loved our conversation.
- [60:48]
William Dalrymple
Very good. See you in North Berwick one day.